The Attention Deficit

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Gloria Mark: Most people speed up the playback when they listen to podcasts. You can capture the gist, but people aren’t spending the time to deeply process. So if you really want to retain information, you have to be an active listener.

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and I’m joined by my co host Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network.

And this is our weekly long form podcast, What Could Go Right?, where we, yes, look at what could go right. We’re all seemingly always asking the question of what could go wrong, and we are often focused on what could go wrong, but the conceit, and we are sticking with it, of The Progress Network is that there’s a whole lot that’s going on in the world that is going right, that we don’t pay enough attention to it.

And one thing we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast, and that Emma has highlighted in our newsletter, also called What Could Go Right?, is the effects, the kind of tectonic effects of the digital media, digital universe that we all find ourselves living in. That we are all, particularly in a knowledge worker world, increasingly drawn into screens in our daily work, in our daily entertainment, our daily lives, to a degree that is astonishing in that it didn’t really exist 20 years ago and it barely existed to the degree that it does 15 years ago and yet now we find ourselves screen oriented content, inundated information, overloaded.

So what do we do about that? How is that affecting us cognitively? How is it affecting us experientially? These are questions that we are all beginning to grapple with and need to continue to grapple with, and we are going to spend some time today talking to someone who has been spending a considerable amount of time grappling with exactly that.

So who are we going to talk to today, Emma?

Emma Varvaloucas: Today, we’re going to talk to Gloria Mark. She’s trained as a psychologist and is now a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. And generally speaking, she studies the way that digital media is impacting our lives. Today, we’re going to focus in on her book, which is called Attention Span.

And if you’re more of an articles, guy or gal, then you can check out her substack, which is called The Future of Attention, which is also a topic that we’re going to talk about today. So let’s see if we can focus long enough to get through this podcast conversation, Zachary.

Zachary Karabell: Let’s see if we can. Let’s talk about the attention deficit and all of its challenges.

You ready?

Emma Varvaloucas: All right. I am ready.

Zachary Karabell: Gloria Mark, pleasure to have this conversation with you today. We have on this podcast talked about some of the effects of contemporary internet, social media, media culture on a whole variety of our lives, whether it has changed things fundamentally, whether it hasn’t, whether it’s aggravated, emphasized, you name it, in many ways, your book Attention Span and some of your work over the past 20 years is kind of in that general world of like, what’s the net effect of information technologies on human behavior and basically our lives?

You have a PhD in psychology; I also went to Columbia, but I was an undergrad. You did some work with Microsoft, I believe. And I wonder how much of your, of the current work was framed not just by the academic background, but also by the, like, experience with actual companies and looking under the hood of what they’re doing. So maybe share some of that with us.

Gloria Mark: Very closely intertwined. So when I started academia, I immediately started looking at people in the workplace. And I looked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, I looked at the Boeing company, I looked at financial institutions, I looked at a lot of different companies because I was really interested to understand how tech was affecting people in their actual work.

So my relationship with Microsoft was actually Microsoft Research, which is the research wing of the company, and I spent nearly 10 years there in summers working at Microsoft Research and conducted just a whole lot of different studies at the company.

Zachary Karabell: Why was Microsoft supporting it?

Gloria Mark: Well, because Microsoft supports basic research and you know, they’re, they’re hoping that basic research is, is going to lead to some kind of product.

And, and indeed, some of the research done on attention while at Microsoft Research went into the Windows 8 operating system. It’s called Focus Assist. Microsoft has developed a number of products that came out of basic research, and it’s also a great opportunity for researchers because it’s just a wonderful place, wonderful atmosphere to work in.

Emma Varvaloucas: Gloria, maybe you can talk about one of the studies, I’m not sure if it occurred at Microsoft, I can’t remember now from the book, but we all talk about these days, like our attention span is deteriorating, like we can’t focus on anything any longer than X number of minutes. I would love to hear what the actual hard data says about that because it’s actually even worse than I was expecting when I read your book.

And I’m also really curious to hear you kind of explain like whether you see that as a problem or not. I feel like when people talk about it sometimes it’s almost like they expect that because people’s attention span is really all over the place at work or on TikTok that like suddenly we won’t be able to like focus on the road anymore, like read a book anymore.

I’m not sure if that’s true or not, so. Yeah, thoughts about all that.

Gloria Mark: Let me start off by talking about the data. So one study was done at Microsoft Research. The other studies were done at other places. So the very first time we’ve looked at people’s attention on screens was back in 2004. And we didn’t have software where we could log people’s computer activity to look at where they were paying attention. So, in those days, we followed people around with stopwatches. And we clicked every time they switched their attention. It was very, very labor intensive, but we, we got really good data. 20 years ago, we found that people’s attention averaged about two and a half minutes on a screen before switching. In 2012, we did another big study at another organization, and we found attention to be about 75 seconds on average in 2012. And then continuing on from roughly 2016 through 2020, we found attention to average about 47 seconds on a screen. This is using software that logs, that can detect when people’s attention is shifting to, to different windows.

This was also replicated by others as well, but all of these different studies found the range to be roughly from 44 seconds to 50 seconds. And the average is 47 seconds on a screen before switching.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s lower than I would have hoped for, I think.

Gloria Mark: Yeah, so your, your next question is, what is the effect on us? Well, the effect is that fast attention shifting is associated with stress.

We see that over and over again, we’ve measured stress objectively using heart rate monitors, using wearables, and we use a measure that’s called heart rate variability. And heart rate variability is basically the, the distance between heart beats happens to be a very good measure of stress. And when attention, the frequency of attention shifting goes up, we also find that stress goes up.

Does this affect us beyond computers? And I think you probably are thinking, what’s the future have in store for us? We don’t know. Right, we don’t know if there will be course correction, maybe people’s attention spans won’t get any shorter. Maybe people will do interventions, hopefully, and have better attention spans, maybe spend less time on devices.

Will it translate into other activities? That’s still yet to be determined.

Zachary Karabell: And did you do any work on the, not just the stress hormones going up, but the dopamine effect of new content need for it?

Gloria Mark: We’ve not done neuroscience measures. But, you know, keep in mind that dopamine is associated with the anticipation of a reward.

It’s that after you get the reward. So people anticipate getting a reward from being on TikTok or Instagram. The dopamine surge is going to come with that anticipation.

Zachary Karabell: You know, it is clear, obviously, that the effect of a lot of the social media tools and screens, not just social media, but. technology writ large, to create an expectation of immediacy.

So that, you know, whether it’s, it’s click through or download speeds, or how quickly content loads on a web page, or our expectation of that where the arc is only up, right? It’s never back. So I might have been able to 15 years ago, when streaming first reared, its either beautiful or ugly head, depending on on the eye of the beholder, wait 10 minutes for a system to buffer and something to download. You’re like, eh, you know, whatever, I’ll get a cup of coffee, I’ll get a drink. We’ll just wait for it to load and we’ll do it. Which is clearly unacceptable now, right? You can’t make me wait 10 minutes for anything. 10 seconds may be too long.

I went to a regional version of Burning Man in South Africa, and there was no, no cell, no nothing for six days. So, no screens, no cell, no nothing. And I was surprised at how easy it was to go from the expectation of all that immediacy, content and screens, to having none of it. Now maybe that’s like any, like different people have different relationships to addiction, right?

Some people can drink and then stop drinking, some people can smoke and then stop smoking, some people get more hooked. So I’m sure there’s a huge variety of, of human behaviors. But I wonder if some of your work, the fact that we are now having shorter and shorter attention spans because we have greater and greater expectations of change and immediacy, whether that’s creating neural change or just -behavioral expectation that could easily go the other way if we let it, want it, desire it.

Gloria Mark: We don’t know yet if, if the brain changes. There actually are some studies that suggest that the brain has rewired as a result of using technology. And actually one of the strongest pieces of evidence comes from using GPS. So when people use navigation devices, the size of the hippocampus has actually shrunk.

But in terms of this idea of impatience, that’s behavioral, and it’s, it’s very widespread. It turns out that many, if not most people, speed up the, the playback time when they listen to podcasts, audiobooks, usually to 1. 5 to double the speed. That’s, that’s an indicator of impatience. It’s also, to me, in my view, it’s an indicator that there’s so much information to consume, and we’re inundated with information, that the faster we can consume information, the more we’ll be able to consume.

So it’s kind of like we, we find ourselves on a treadmill wanting to take in more and take in more faster. And as a result, we, we become impatient when things are played at normal speed because it hinders our ability to take in as much as we can. And we crave the information because there’s so much out there.

Emma Varvaloucas: So Gloria, I know that you’re an academic, neutral for all intents and purposes, but I am curious, I mean, just as a, as a person, are you agnostic about the kind of humans that you think that this is creating or do you have a certain opinion about whether this is a positive or a negative development?

Gloria Mark: My opinion is that it’s negative, right? I love technology. I’m very excited about technology. I am not a Luddite. I do not think we should give up technology. I think we need to learn how to live better with it and how to be smart with using technology. But I think the idea of us having short attention spans, the idea that we’re on tech so much of the day, I mean, I’ve seen various statistics.

One statistic, not sure I can believe it, but suggests that we spend 13 hours a day on some kind of media. Doesn’t have to be smartphones or computers, could be television, radio, but we’re on media a lot and that poses an opportunity cost. And the reason why I’m not happy about what’s going on, is because this opportunity cost takes us away from doing things that I think make us more human, like interacting with other people or experiencing nature. Of course, you can listen to podcasts and go jogging, but it’s very different to go jogging or to go for a walk without your attention being on a podcast, but just looking at the environment around you.

In the workplace, we know that attention shifting is associated with stress and exhaustion, and that’s not a good thing. People are doing too much juggling, too many things, and they’re just not giving themselves space to breathe, to catch up.

Zachary Karabell: I was, by the way, struck by the, Emma’s phrasing of the question as an academic being neutral. I’m not sure academics are neutral per se, I mean, I think they may cloak themselves in a aura of neutrality.

Gloria Mark: I don’t think there is true objectivity. I think in, on some level, we’re, we’re all subjective. Even when we have objective data, right, we, we have to interpret it in some way.

Zachary Karabell: I do wonder about this, the screen time question. So it is clear to the increasingly large portions of our lives are lived digitally, certainly for kind of knowledge economy workers, people with four year college degrees.

I mean, there’s also, as we saw during the pandemic, a whole series of human needs and, and requirements and jobs that. are not digitizable in current technology, right? Plumbers, uh, delivery, you know, you name it. I mean, that all may be done by drones and robots at some point in the 21st century, but for the present, they’re not, they’re not screenable or they’re not digitizable in the same way, but a lot of our lives are.

I certainly wonder about, is the quality of reading a Kindle or a screen different than the quality of reading a book? It feels cognitively different to me in terms of attention span. I’ve sort of noted, and I don’t think this is unique to me in any way, that locating information or, or anchoring information digitally is much more difficult for the brain than anchoring information physically.

So you can remember like where something is if you read it on a page or in a newspaper, but you can’t remember where something is digitally. You kind of lose the context in a way that you don’t in a book. I don’t know if that’s just because a lot of us are of a generation where we’ve been at the inflection point, so maybe, maybe a future generation, which is largely digital, will have a different cognitive anchoring experience. I think that remains to be seen. But then I also wonder whether that matters per se, like, is it just the medium as opposed to the Marshall McLuhan? Is the medium indeed the message? Or are we just dealing with a screen is not a screen is not a screen?

Like there’s a difference between reading a research paper that you might write, Gloria, on, on my iPhone or on my screen versus a hard journal at a library and watching Spongebob and, you know, watching Pornhub and watching CNN and watching, you know, and reading People, right? I mean, they’re all, they’re all screens, but they’re very different iterations of screens.

Gloria Mark: When we’re reading a book on a screen, there is the lure of all this other information that we can access, right? So think about the context. If you’re reading a book, you might be sitting in a chair. And, for you to access other information involves a bit of effort. Might have to get up, you might have to walk over and get another book, but when you’re on a screen, then within milliseconds, you can check news or social media or email.

So the temptation to switch your attention to look at something else is great. It’s in the background, right? And we, we know it’s there. So there’s always this tension that occurs. You’re, you know, you want to consume this book or this article, but then there’s also all this other potential information that’s pulling at your attention and screaming at you, look at me, check the news, you know, or, or check your email. So we’re, we’re always faced with that. So the context is really important, the context in which we’re reading information. And of course, you know, with smartphones, they’re ubiquitous. So you can check information anywhere.

Whereas, you know, it’s true to some extent with a, with a book, it’s a little bit more effort to maybe carry it around. But smartphones, when you’re waiting for an elevator, you can open it and read a few things. So the context in which the information is presented is very different.

Emma Varvaloucas: The context is the message, Zachary. That’s the update.

News Clip: While Will still uses a smartphone for the business, Daisy has completely done away with hers and uses a dumb phone model which only does calls, texts, podcasts, and has a map for directions.

I thought that I would miss more from my smartphone. Um, I thought that I might even find myself switching back from time to time.

Um, I don’t really miss anything because I was so sick of it that I, I wanted to do something drastic and I wanted to just, uh, put it behind me.

Emma Varvaloucas: So, Gloria, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about optimal states of attention. You talk about this in your book and I was really, really glad to read this somewhere because you do see like all over social media, like you should be in a, state of flow. You should always aim for a state of flow. And I have a thought, like, I just don’t, sure, if I’m running an article, like, you kind of get into a flow state, sure. But I think this is the case for most knowledge workers or like computer based workers or whatever you want to call them. Like, most of the job is like, it’s not possible to get into a state of flow.

Like, if you’re in a meeting or writing an email, like, it’s just not conducive to that, right? So what if you were in a job like that? Like, what is optimal?

Gloria Mark: So, we found that there are different kinds of attention. So, you know, people generally think of attention as being in two states, you’re focused or you’re not focused.

And when you’re focused, you know, the idea is you’re fully engaged in the material. That’s not necessarily flow. Flow is a state of immersion in something where you’re, you’re so deeply engaged with it that you’re completely unaware of the passage of time. Now, you’re right, knowledge workers, it’s pretty rare to, to get into flow.

We can get into flow sometimes. I, I’m a knowledge worker and it’s great. Sometimes if I’m brainstorming in a group, we can get into a kind of flow, or if I’m writing, or if I’m doing analyses, but most of the time, not. Now, I started out as an artist, and I could get into flow regularly as an artist. So people who are in the arts, people in music, people in sports, people who have a hobby that they’re passionate about, it’s very easy to get into a flow state, right?

I see focus as a precursor. You first have to start focusing on something, then you can just really get drawn into this activity. But let me, let me go back to this idea of what’s typically thought of as two states of attention, you’re focused or not focused. In, in studying this, it occurred to me that not all focus is the same, because yes, there’s flow, but sometimes you can be focused on something and it’s, it’s mentally challenging, right?

So if I’m reading an article or if I’m doing an analysis, it requires a bit of effort. Other times, I can be engaged with something, like playing solitaire. I don’t play solitaire, but there are other games that, that are consuming. And it’s very little effort. Social media doesn’t involve much effort. And so, challenge, mental challenge, is a really important factor to look at when you’re thinking about attention. And so we found that there are four types of attention. When you’re engaged in something and challenged, we call that a state of focus. And, but if you’re engaged in something and not at all challenged, like, playing solitaire, we call that rote attention, and it’s just a label. That’s just the label we, we thought was the, the best one to use.

And if you’re not challenged and not engaged, we call that boredom. It’s a state of boredom. And if you’re challenged, but you’re just not engaged, we call that frustration, again, a label. And an example is when I have a tech problem, I am challenged, and I’m just not engaged, and I have to solve it, and I just can’t bring myself to get engaged with it.

So we find throughout the day that people vary in the kinds of attention that they have, and we also find that it’s just not good to be in a state of focus throughout the day. And again, you hear a lot people pushing us. We should be focused for the entire day. We can’t. We have a tank of limited attentional resources. And things we do throughout the day drain those resources, and being focused, right, intently focused on something also drains those resources.

So it’s important to step back and you could do something simple and engaging and rote. Sometimes people are bored during the workday, but it gives our minds a chance to settle down and calm them and, and then we can come back a little bit more refreshed.

Zachary Karabell: Has any of your work looked at, I mean, this is, I think, related to the brain chemistry change, but you know, it could be more of a Lamarckian rather than a Darwinian change. Meaning, if you start reading a book and you’re slow. You know, people often find that the more they read, the more quickly and fastly they read, or the more adept they become at reading, just like any physical exercise, right?

You start running, and it’s hard, and it’s difficult, and you run regularly, and it becomes easier. I wonder if there’s any indication that in this absolute surfeit and firehose of information and content that kind of digital world provides, whether the flip side of attention spans decreasing is that the ability to process and retain more information is, is increasing.

We certainly know that visual information imprints more quickly and to some degree more substantively, giving some underpinnings to the old cliche of, you know, a picture being worth a thousand words, that there’s a degree of digital. I mean, I noticed this in my sons growing up in this age. And when I, we pushed back a little bit against Jonathan Haidt when we had these conversations, that there is an ability to ingest an awful lot of information digitally where people do become educated about things.

You know, it’s not just mindless distracting content. There’s a lot of substance that’s conveyed. I wonder if there’s any clarity about like the brain capacity to digest more, literally, in the face of more, rather than the equal possibility that we’re kind of shutting down and, and not taking it.

Gloria Mark: Yeah. So for, for us to really thoroughly capture information in our minds, we, we have to process it deeply.

And deep processing takes time, right? Some things you can grasp very quickly, right, so I talked about people speeding up podcasts and audio books. Yes, you can capture the gist of things. You might capture a summary, you might capture facts, but people aren’t spending the time to deeply process the material.

You need time to ask questions, right? So if you really want to retain information, you have to be an active listener, an active reader. And you do this by asking questions, being skeptical about what you’re reading. And if you’re just running through material very quickly, we’re not giving ourselves a chance to, to ask those questions that we should be asking, to make those connections with the knowledge that we already have stored in our minds. And that takes time to be able to do that.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about, you know, as, as Zachary is saying about our, you know, update to the, the medium is the message, like how different the medium is now meaning like, yes, you could watch on TV footage from war, you know, starting from the 80s, let’s say when CNN became a 24 seven channel. But I think what’s really different to me about social media is that you go on, let’s say I’m on my own TikTok, there might be like, here’s how you like do your hair in this nice ponytail.

And you’re like, Oh, okay. And then you scroll and the next thing is like Gaza bombing, right? And it’s just like, to me, like, there just must be a effect from that. Like, it’s just such different kinds of content. I wonder if you could talk a little about that, because your book was the first place that I read about this like emotional residue that might be left on you after you go on to social media and see something like that.

So I’d love to hear more.

Gloria Mark: Yeah, on sites like TikTok, there is fast content switching. Right? And most TikTok videos are 15 to 30 seconds. And so you’re then abruptly switching content, right? And so that’s, it’s a kind of multitasking, right? Attention shifting and acclimating to different types of content and contexts.

So you brought up this idea of attention residue and that’s, that happens when you’re reading something, paying attention to something, and then you switch to your attention to something else. And if that thing that you were just looking at is very salient, if it’s emotionally salient to you, it stays in your mind.

And it interferes with your current task at hand. So this happens if people are in the workplace. So knowledge workers might decide they want to check the news really quickly or check something on social media and they see or read something horrific and then they try to get back to work. That residue stays with them and it makes them, makes it harder for them to reorient to the current task at hand.

And so that’s why there is a production loss when people are attention shifting because it, it takes time to reorient back and, and to get that residue out of our minds. It’s like, I, I like to use the metaphor of having an internal whiteboard in our minds. So for every task we do, we need to summon up the information we need to be able to do that task. So if I’m writing, I need to have the information in my mind. What am I writing about? What’s the topic? What’s the goal? And so on. And then I suddenly switch and check email. It’s like you’re erasing that whiteboard in your mind and you’re writing up the new content. What, what’s the information I need to read email, right?

There’s a certain, what’s called a script that, you know, of, of the way that you carry out a task like email. So I write that information for that email script in the whiteboard of my mind, and then suddenly I switch back and do something else, and I’m constantly erasing and writing and erasing and rewriting on my mind’s mental whiteboard. And the residue is that this is also a good metaphor because sometimes with a real whiteboard, we can’t erase the, what’s on that whiteboard completely. And you see kind of the, the, the signs of what had been there before. And that’s just like what happens in our minds. And it, it makes it harder for us to pay attention to what’s in front of us.

Zachary Karabell: Some of the phenomenon we’re discussing now. If you think it’s not a positive thing, it is likely to get worse in the face of a variety of artificial intelligence tools, in that most of what AI is extremely good at is replacing the meticulous methodical, slower work, whether that’s writing code, whether that’s an engineer doing a calculation about what this material, what load it can bear or how much propellant a rocket needs.

I mean, all the things that require at a knowledge worker level, intensive, meticulous, careful work, right? AI is really good at doing that really quickly and really well. And in that sense, it’s going to free up a lot of people’s time to be even more distracted by a lot of other things. I think the utopian version of it is it will free up a lot of mind share to be more creative and more visionary and more thoughtful rather than that mind share being taken up with arduous calculations, right?

I wonder whether you, where you come out on that equation or that question.

Gloria Mark: Yeah, so I’ve, I’ve had these conversations before. It’s not clear that our time will be freed up because there might be more work created, because keep in mind that the volume of information will increase. So if we relegate things like writing reports to AI, it will produce more reports and more work, analyses, and you know, AI is very good, like you said, in doing calculations.

It’s not so good at interpreting, it’s not good at dealing with the ambiguity, but humans are. And so, this is, this is going to be extra work for humans to be able to have to deal with that larger volume of information that’s being produced. But the thing that I worry about with AI is that we will become overly reliant on it.

And so when it’s so easy to do tasks, and we relegate it to AI, like writing, or, you know, looking up information, well, sure, that’s very helpful, but we can develop blind trust. And sure, maybe in five years, the problem of hallucinations will be solved. But today, there, there are still quite a few hallucinations.

A study that I saw that came out in March showed that the best performing AI tool was CHAT GPT 4, and it still had 14 percent hallucinations. That, that’s quite a lot. That might get solved in, in another five years, but we have to be vigilant with the use of AI. We can’t just blindly trust it to produce things.

And I, I worry about the quality of things. With writing, for example, AI can produce writing that looks very robotic. And so, you know, I think we need to give a lot of careful thought about keeping the human in the loop and thinking about what’s the right way to collaborate with AI, because it should be a collaboration.

It should not just be, you know, handing material and problems to AI to solve, but we have to keep the human in the loop.

Emma Varvaloucas: For your writing point, it does seem that, like, so far, the news sites, like, you know, the sports, what happened with Sports Illustrated, like, when people found out that they were using AI without disclosing it, there was a massive backlash.

So, I have retained some faith in humanity over that.

I did want to ask you, definitely before we end, I feel like we can’t get through a conversation, essentially telling people like all your screen switching is causing you stress and your attention span really is getting a lot shorter for the last 15 years, without giving you at least some guidance for how people are supposed to manage this world, right?

Like how to just get through the day without I’m giving yourself a very severe like, I will not look at my phone or I will not get distracted during work, which obviously is not realistic. So what do you recommend?

Gloria Mark: Well, first of all, let me start with saying that there are things that society can do. And one of those is to enact what’s called right to disconnect policy.

And some, some countries have this. France has this already, the El Khomri law, Ontario, Canada has this, Ireland and some other countries are looking into this. This protects employees from not being penalized when they don’t answer electronic communications after work hours. That gives them a chance to psychologically detach from work, to rebuild back our mental resources so that we can psychologically reattach to work the next day. So, you know, we can be refreshed. So there’s that. And of course, organizations should also, uh. There are better ways to manage pushing out email. You don’t have to push it out continually. We see people average checking email 77 times a day in the workplace. That’s too much. If email comes out three times a day, you know you’re only going to check it three times during the day.

But there are, there are things as individuals. that we can do. So one of them is to understand the reasons for why we’re switching our attention. It turns out that half the time we self interrupt, there is this, misperception that we’re always interrupted by notifications and chimes on our texts and phone calls and we are, but that’s only half the time. Half the time, and we found this in our research, people self interrupt. You have an urge to check emails, social media, news. We can probe ourselves to recognize that urge and to recognize those times when that notification comes and you’re just about to click on it and to pause and try and understand what’s the reason for it.

So it’s about taking these automatic actions because so many things we do are automatic. It’s an automatic response and it’s becoming more conscious, conscious of that automatic reaction. I’ve discovered for myself that I self interrupt because I’m bored, or because I’m procrastinating.

So there, there are reasons why I do it. And when we become more conscious. of our actions, we can form a plan, we can be more intentional. And you know, so I might say, okay, I’m going to read to the end of this chapter. And then I’m going to check the news. So that that’s one thing. Another thing we can do is to practice forethought.

And forethought is about imagining our future selves. And what makes the most sense to me is our future selves at the end of the day. So if I have an urge to check the news, and I know I’m going to go down a rabbit hole because I’m going to get so involved in the news, I summon up a visualization of myself at the end of the day.

Where do I want to be? What do I want to be doing? How do I want to feel? I want to be relaxed. I want to feel fulfilled. I want to be doing something like reading a book or being with friends. That visualization is very powerful, and that’s enough to stop you in your tracks.

So, the, the other thing is the importance of taking breaks. Because when our mind gets fatigued, we become much more susceptible to distraction. And so the key is to keep our mind fresh and alert and keep that tank of attentional resources full so that we can really devote it to things that we ought to be doing. And to do that, it’s important to take breaks, to step back.

The best break of all is to go outside. And a 20 minute walk in nature has been shown to de-stress people. We’ve done research and found that people’s divergent thinking increases with a 20 minute walk in nature. Divergent thinking is brainstorming. People become more creative. Their minds work better. I understand not everyone can get out in nature, so you can move around, but breaks are certainly very, very important.

Zachary Karabell: I want to thank you for ending on that note of tools that people can incorporate into their own daily lives. I think one of the things that Emma’s written a lot about and we, you know, we’ve thought about and your work points to is a feeling that we are the subject of these forces. And that we have no agency in shaping them or shaping our experience of them.

That they shape us, we don’t shape them. And I think some of what you’ve pointed to at the end is that, you know, we do retain a degree of individual agency in how we choose to interact or not. that we can lose sight of, you know, in many ways, we’re so drawn into these digital media that you can somewhat lose sight of the ability to opt out.

And at times, I guess the necessity of at least taking breaks, whether that’s just like hanging out with friends and having dinner, or just, as you said, taking a walk. Obvious stuff, right? And yet, Sometimes it’s the obvious stuff that we lose sight of the most quickly. So I want to thank you for your work and for the conversation. Keep at it.

I’m sure you will, regardless of my expectations to do so, but we appreciate what you’re doing. Everyone should check out a large corpus of Gloria Mark’s work online. All you have to do is Google her digitally and get sucked into a different attention span, this time paying attention to Gloria instead of something else, but you know, that will do you some good.

So thanks very much for joining us today.

Gloria Mark: It was my pleasure.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Thank you, Gloria.

So yeah, I’m really glad, as you said, that we got at the end there to, uh, tools and resources for people because I think there’s an element of guilt to this too, right? That like, as you’re saying, people feel not in control of their own behavior a lot when it comes to, you know, just distractions of the modern world, social media and all of that.

And there can become a way that instead of finding healthy ways to deal with it, it just becomes another tool to like, self flagellate ourselves. Sometimes the obvious is the best. I went through a Jesus moment myself around walks and leaving the apartment. Even if you’re in the city, it does help. You don’t need necessarily be in your trees, I would say, just from personal experience that even that, even that gives you a little kick in the old mind energy rear.

Zachary Karabell: And these right to unplug laws are important because it’s certainly true that for an awful lot of professions, the fact that employers know that everyone is reachable can lead to an expectation that you’re just ubiquitously on the clock. So if you get an email at 10 o’clock at night, you’re supposed to somehow respond to that, even though in an earlier time where that wasn’t an option, it would never have occurred to anyone in case it was a complete emergency, like to call someone at home, if you call someone at home at 10 o’clock at night, you know, even if you’re a lawyer at some very high pressure on demand job 30 years ago, it had better be because there was a literal fire somewhere or, or like, I don’t know, some crisis that literally couldn’t wait. And now we just, someone sends an email at 10 o’clock saying, Oh yeah, you know, about that meeting earlier, could you, could you check that Excel spreadsheet or whatever the, whatever the it is.

I do wonder about this. You know, we’ve had this conversation now, we talked about The Loneliest Generation, we’ve talked to Jonathan Haidt, we’ve had a number of these conversations over the past couple of years about what the net effect is of this kind of information tsunami of the digital age. And I do think it’s important that we all have the caveat of we’re all trying to come up with answers about what all this means, kind of in the middle of it all happening.

And the perspective about questions like the ones we’re asking, like what’s the cognitive effect, and how’s that changing human nature, and how’s it changing behavior, is it changing behavior, are usually much more clear over time in retrospect with distance than they are in the immediacy of the moment, you know, that there’s a degree of which someone joked to me once, I think I’ve, I mentioned this on the podcast once before, this wonderful writer named Andrew Harvey, and I’d gone to India for the first time, and I was complaining that I had been unable to to adequately journal about my experience being in India while I was there.

And he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, well, dear boy, of course you can’t write about India when you’re there. It’s like writing about a dream while you’re having it. And I thought, you know, there’s a degree to which that, like, we’re trying to do that about all these things. It’s a little like trying to figure out the dream while you’re having it.

And I do think we should all, I mean, this was my pushback to Haidt as well. Give it a little time for us to make absolute conclusions about what we think we know about what we don’t.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I think there’s also an element to this of, like, people are very concerned about making sure that the dream doesn’t turn into a nightmare, right?

Zachary Karabell: Right.

Emma Varvaloucas: That if we can figure this out now, we can prevent some kind of serious outcome. I am sympathetic to that because I think that we’ve, those of us who have been alive long enough, and I feel like I’m probably the last generation to have lived in a time before the smartphone, before the internet, it does change you.

Like I remember very well, like how I functioned pre smartphone and how I functioned after the smartphone.

Zachary Karabell: It changes me. I mean, I, I clearly have a harder time reading books. Or the attention span of sitting down and reading a book as a thing.

Emma Varvaloucas: Really? That’s interesting.

Zachary Karabell: By the way, the fact that I might be less interested in reading books should in no way preclude people from reading my books.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I was like, you really kicked yourself, uh.

Zachary Karabell: Just, just, just so we’re clear. Although I am struck by the fact that the most recent book, the fastest and most consistently selling version of my recent book is the audiobook.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think people really like the audio versions of stuff because they can listen to it in the car or they can, it doesn’t require as much effort.

Zachary Karabell: Thank you all for listening to this episode of What Could Go Right? Send us your comments, your ideas, your questions to theprogressnetwork. org. Emma will do her best to integrate every single thing you send into our conversations, at least subliminally. We do appreciate the feedback, if you’ve got it, including negative feedback, expressed respectfully, but passionately.

All that’s good, and I want to thank you all for your time, which is finite, and therefore, we appreciate you dedicating some of it to What Could Go Right?, and thank you, Emma, for co hosting, as always. And to the team at Podglomerate for producing and to our team at The Progress Network for facilitating.

Emma Varvaloucas: Don’t email me after work hours because I’m not going to be checking the inbox. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Zachary, as always.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right is produced by the Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by the Podglomerate. To find out more about What Could Go Right, the Progress Network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. Thanks for listening.