[acb-hsp] Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Price

[peter altschul]

New York Times
  June 6, 2010
  Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price
  By MATT RICHTEL
  SAN FRANCISCO -- When one of the most important e-mail messages 
of his life
landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked 
it.
  Not just for a day or two, but 12 days.  He finally saw it 
while sifting through
old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.
  "I stood up from my desk and said, `Oh my God, oh my God, oh my 
God,`" Mr.
  Campbell said.  "It's kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, 
but I did."
  The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two 
computer screens
alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser 
and the
computer code he was writing.
  While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after 
apologizing to his
suitor, Mr.  Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of 
the deluge of
data.  Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets 
from his
electronic gadgets.  He forgets things like dinner plans, and he 
has trouble
focusing on his family.
  His wife, Brenda, complains, "It seems like he can no longer be 
fully in the
moment."
  This is your brain on computers.
  Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming 
information can
change how people think and behave.  They say our ability to 
focus is being
undermined by bursts of information.
  These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate 
opportunities and
threats.  The stimulation provokes excitement -- a dopamine 
squirt -- that
researchers say can be addictive.  In its absence, people feel 
bored.
  The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as 
when
cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks.  And 
for millions of
people like Mr.  Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts 
on creativity
and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.
  While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, 
research shows
otherwise.  Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble 
focusing and shutting
out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience 
more stress.
  And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking 
ends, fractured
thinking and lack of focus persist.  In other words, this is also 
your brain off
computers.
  "The technology is rewiring our brains," said Nora Volkow, 
director of the
National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world's leading 
brain
scientists.  She and other researchers compare the lure of 
digital stimulation
less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are 
essential but
counterproductive in excess.
  Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers 
say.  Imaging
studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient 
at finding
information.  And players of some video games develop better 
visual acuity.
  More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life.  
They let people
escape their cubicles and work anywhere.  They shrink distances 
and handle
countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting 
pursuits.
  For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as 
e-mail and TV, has
exploded.  In 2008, people consumed three times as much 
information each day as
they did in 1960.  And they are constantly shifting their 
attention.  Computer
users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs 
nearly 37 times
an hour, new research shows.
  The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts 
ever in the
human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the 
University of
California, San Francisco.
  "We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them 
to do things we
weren't necessarily evolved to do," he said.  "We know already 
there are
consequences."
  Mr.  Campbell, 43, came of age with the personal computer, and 
he is a heavier
user of technology than most.  But researchers say the habits and 
struggles of
Mr.  Campbell and his family typify what many experience -- and 
what many more
will, if trends continue.
  For him, the tensions feel increasingly acute, and the effects 
harder to shake.
  The Campbells recently moved to California from Oklahoma to 
start a software
venture.  Mr.  Campbell's life revolves around computers.
  He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when 
he wakes, he
goes online.  He and Mrs.  Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen 
in their
four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San 
Francisco,
where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the 
corner of the
computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check 
his e-mail.
  Major spats have arisen because Mr.  Campbell escapes into 
video games during
tough emotional stretches.  On family vacations, he has trouble 
putting down his
devices.  When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he 
will be offline
221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel.
  Their 16-year-old son, Connor, tall and polite like his father, 
recently
received his first Cbs, which his family blames on distraction 
from his gadgets.
  Their 8-year-old daughter, Lily, like her mother, playfully 
tells her father
that he favors technology over family.
  "I would love for him to totally unplug, to be totally 
engaged," says Mrs.
Campbell, who adds that he becomes bcrotchety until he gets his 
fix." But she
would not try to force a change.
  "He loves it.  Technology is part of the fabric of who he is," 
she says.  "If I
hated technology, I'd be hating him, and a part of who my son is 
too."
  Always On
Mr.  Campbell, whose given name is Thomas, had an early start 
with technology in
Oklahoma City.  When he was in third grade, his parents bought 
him Pong, a video
game.  Then came a string of game consoles and PC's, which he 
learned to program.
  In high school, he balanced computers, basketball and a romance 
with Brenda, a
cheerleader with a gorgeous singing voice.  He studied too, with 
focus,
uninterrupted by e-mail.  "I did my homework because I needed to 
get it done," he
said.  "I didn't have anything else to do."
  He left college to help with a family business, then set up a 
lawn mowing
service.  At night he would read, play video games, hang out with 
Brenda and, as
she remembers it, "talk a lot more."
  In 1996, he started a successful Internet provider.  Then he 
built the start-up
that he sold for $1.3 million in 2003 to LookSmart, a search 
engine.
  Mr.  Campbell loves the rush of modern life and keeping up with 
the latest
information.  "I want to be the first to hear when the aliens 
land," he said,
laughing.  But other times, he fantasizes about living in pioneer 
days when
things moved more slowly: "I can't keep everything in my head."
  No wonder.  As he came of age, so did a new era of data and 
communication.
  At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, 
when an hour spent
with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two 
hours.  That compares
with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of 
California, San
Diego.  Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, 
according to
research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools.
  As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the 
human brain.  Until 15
years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after 
childhood.  Now
they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, 
influenced by
things like learning skills.
  So not long after Eyal Ophir arrived at Stanford in 2004, he 
wondered whether
heavy multitasking might be leading to changes in a 
characteristic of the brain
long thought immutable: that humans can process only a single 
stream of
information at a time.
  Going back a half-century, tests had shown that the brain could 
barely process
two streams, and could not simultaneously make decisions about 
them.  But Mr.
  Ophir, a student-turned-researcher, thought multitaskers might 
be rewiring
themselves to handle the load.
  His passion was personal.  He had spent seven years in Israeli 
intelligence after
being weeded out of the air force -- partly, he felt, because he 
was not a good
multitasker.  Could his brain be retrained?
  Mr.  Ophir, like others around the country studying how 
technology bent the
brain, was startled by what he discovered.
  The Myth of Multitasking
The test subjects were divided into two groups: those classified 
as heavy
multitaskers based on their answers to questions about how they 
used technology,
and those who were not.
  In a test created by Mr.  Ophir and his colleagues, subjects at 
a computer were
briefly shown an image of red rectangles.  Then they saw a 
similar image and were
asked whether any of the rectangles had moved.  It was a simple 
task until the
addition of a twist: blue rectangles were added, and the subjects 
were told to
ignore them.  (Play a game testing how well you filter out 
distractions.)
The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the 
non-multitaskers at
recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position.  In 
other words, they
had trouble filtering out the blue ones -- the irrelevant 
information.
  So, too, the multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to 
switch among
tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd 
from even
numbers.  The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at 
juggling problems.
  (Play a game testing how well you switch between tasks.)
Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this 
fast-growing
field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information 
rather than
accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to 
work.
  Researchers say these findings point to an interesting dynamic: 
multitaskers
seem more sensitive than non-multitaskers to incoming 
information.
  The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, 
one that
technology may be intensifying.  A portion of the brain acts as a 
control tower,
helping a person focus and set priorities.  More primitive parts 
of the brain,
like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay 
attention to new
information, bombarding the control tower when they are 
stimulated.
  Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the 
pressure this barrage
puts on the brain.  The lower-brain functions alert humans to 
danger, like a
nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut.  In the modern 
world, the
chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a 
business plan or
playing catch with the children.
  "Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get 
everyone's brain
thinking," said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at 
Stanford.  "But
we've got a large and growing group of people who think the 
slightest hint that
something interesting might be going on is like catnip.  They 
can't ignore it."
  Mr.  Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they 
show
multitasking's lingering effects: "The scary part for guys like 
Kord is, they
can't shut off their multitasking tendencies when they're not 
multitasking."
  Melina Uncapher, a neurobiologist on the Stanford team, said 
she and other
researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were 
simply prone to
distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era.  But 
she added that
the idea that information overload causes distraction was 
supported by more and
more research.
  A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that 
people interrupted
by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with 
those left to
focus.  Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term 
memory, said Gary
Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los 
Angeles.
  Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle 
multiple
information streams.  These "supertaskers" represent less than 3 
percent of the
population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.
  Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages.  
In imaging
studies, Dr.  Small observed that Internet users showed greater 
brain activity
than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural 
circuitry.
  At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players 
of some
fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more 
objects on a
screen than nonplayers.  They say the games can improve reaction 
and the ability
to pick out details amid clutter.
  "In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative 
and educational
power," said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working 
with others in
the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like 
safer driving.
  There is a vibrant debate among scientists over whether 
technology's influence
on behavior and the brain is good or bad, and how significant it 
is.
  "The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt," said Steven 
Yantis, a
professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.  
"There's no question
that rewiring goes on all the time," he added.  But he said it 
was too early to
say whether the changes caused by technology were materially 
different from
others in the past.
  Mr.  Ophir is loath to call the cognitive changes bad or good, 
though the impact
on analysis and creativity worries him.
  He is not just worried about other people.  Shortly after he 
came to Stanford, a
professor thanked him for being the one student in class paying 
full attention
and not using a computer or phone.  But he recently began using 
an iPhone and
noticed a change; he felt its pull, even when playing with his 
daughter.
  "The media is changing me," he said.  "I hear this internal 
ping that says: check
e-mail and voice mail." "I have to work to suppress it."
Kord Campbell does not bother to suppress it, or no longer can.
  Interrupted by a Corpse
It is a Wednesday in April, and in 10 minutes, Mr.  Campbell has 
an online
conference call that could determine the fate of his new venture, 
called Loggly.
  It makes software that helps companies understand the clicking 
and buying
patterns of their online customers.
  Mr.  Campbell and his colleagues, each working from a home 
office, are
frantically trying to set up a program that will let them share 
images with
executives at their prospective partner.
  But at the moment when Mr.  Campbell most needs to focus on 
that urgent task,
something else competes for his attention: "Man Found Dead Inside 
His Business."
  That is the tweet that appears on the left-most of Mr.  
Campbell's array of
monitors, which he has expanded to three screens, at times adding 
a laptop and
an iPad.
  On the left screen, Mr.  Campbell follows the tweets of 1,100 
people, along with
instant messages and group chats.  The middle monitor displays a 
dark field
filled with computer code, along with Skype, a service that 
allows Mr.  Campbell
to talk to his colleagues, sometimes using video.  The monitor on 
the right keeps
e-mail, a calendar, a Web browser and a music player.
  Even with the meeting fast approaching, Mr.  Campbell cannot 
resist the tweet
about the corpse.  He clicks on the link in it, glances at the 
article and
dismisses it.  "It's some article about something somewhere," he 
says, annoyed by
the ads for jeans popping up.
  The program gets fixed, and the meeting turns out to be 
fruitful: the partners
>every ready to do business.  A colleague says via instant 
message: "YES."
  Other times, Mr.  Campbell's information juggling has taken a 
more serious toll.
  A few weeks earlier, he once again overlooked an e-mail message 
from a
prospective investor.  Another time, Mr.  Campbell signed the 
company up for the
wrong type of business account on Amazonddcom, costing $300 a 
month for six
months before he got around to correcting it.  He has burned 
hamburgers on the
grill, forgotten to pick up the children and lingered in the 
bathroom playing
video games on an iPhone.
  Mr.  Campbell can be unaware of his own habits.  In a 
two-and-a-half hour stretch
one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and 
several other
programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his 
computer use
with his permission.  But when asked later what he was doing in 
that period, Mr.
  Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and "may have 
pulled up an
e-mail or two."
  The kind of disconnection Mr.  Campbell experiences is not an 
entirely new
problem, of course.  As they did in earlier eras, people can 
become so lost in
work, hobbies or TV that they fail to pay attention to family.
  Mr.  Campbell concedes that, even without technology, he may 
work or play
obsessively, just as his father immersed himself in crossword 
puzzles.  But he
says this era is different because he can multitask anyplace, 
anytime.
  "Itbs a mixed blessing," he said.  "If you're not careful, your 
marriage can fall
apart or your kids can be ready to play and you'll get 
distracted."
  The Toll on Children
Father and son sit in armchairs.  Controllers in hand, they 
engage in a fierce
video game battle, displayed on the nearby flat-panel TV, as Lily 
watches.
  They are playing Super Smash Bros.  Brawl, a cartoonish 
animated fight between
characters that battle using anvils, explosives and other 
weapons.
  "Kill him, Dad," Lily screams.  To no avail.  Connor regularly 
beats his father,
prompting expletives and, once, a thrown pillow.  But there is 
bonding and mutual
respect.
  "He's a lot more tactical," says Connor.  "But I'm really good 
at quick
reflexes."
  Screens big and small are central to the Campbell family's 
leisure time.  Connor
and his mother relax while watching TV shows like "Heroes." Lily 
has an iPod
Touch, a portable DVD player and her own laptop, which she uses 
to watch videos,
listen to music and play games.
  Lily, a second-grader, is allowed only an hour a day of 
unstructured time, which
she often spends with her devices.  The laptop can consume her.
  "When she's on it, you can holler her name all day and she 
won't hear," Mrs.
  Campbell said.
  Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this 
creates attention
problems for children with brains that are still developing, who 
already
struggle to set priorities and resist impulses.
  Connor's troubles started late last year.  He could not focus 
on homework.  No
wonder, perhaps.  On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with 
his music
collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news 
links that he
and his father love.  His iPhone availed him to relentless 
texting with his
girlfriend.
  When he studied, "a little voice would be saying, `Look upb at 
the computer, and
I'd look up," Connor said.  "Normally, I'd say I want to only 
read for a few
minutes, but I'd search every corner of Reddit and then check 
Facebook."
His Web browsing informs him.  "He's a fact hound," Mr.  Campbell 
brags.  "Connor
is, other than programming, extremely technical.  He's 100 
percent Internet
savvy."
  But the parents worry too.  "Connor is obsessed," his mother 
said.  "Kord says we
have to teach him balance."
  So in January, they held a family meeting.  Study time now 
takes place in a group
setting at the dinner table after everyone has finished eating.  
It feels, Mr.
  Campbell says, like togetherness.
  No Vacations
For spring break, the family rented a cottage in Carmel, Calif.  
Mrs.  Campbell
hoped everyone would unplug.
  But the day before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and 
Mr.  Campbell
snapped one up.  The next night, their first on vacation, "We 
didn't go out to
dinner," Mrs.  Campbell mourned.  "We just sat there on our 
devices."
  She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium.  Her 
husband joined them for
a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone.
  Later she found him playing video games.
  The trip came as Mr.  Campbell was trying to raise several 
million dollars for
his new venture, a goal that he achieved.  Brenda said she 
understood that his
pursuit required intensity but was less understanding of the 
accompanying surge
in video game.
  His behavior brought about a discussion between them.  Mrs.  
Campbell said he told
her that he was capable of logging off, citing a trip to Hawaii 
several years
ago that they called their second honeymoon.
  "What trip are you thinking about?" she said she asked him.  
She recalled that he
had spent two hours a day online in the hotel's business center.
  On Thursday, their fourth day in Carmel, Mr.  Campbell spent 
the day at the beach
with his family.  They flew a kite and played whiffle ball.
  Connor unplugged too.  "It changes the mood of everything when 
everybody is
present," Mrs.  Campbell said.
  The next day, the family drove home, and Mr.  Campbell 
disappeared into his
office.
  Technology use is growing for Mrs.  Campbell as well.  She 
divides her time
between keeping the books of her husband's company, homemaking 
and working at
the school library.  She checks e-mail 25 times a day, sends 
texts and uses
Facebook.
  Recently, she was baking peanut butter cookies for Teacher 
Appreciation Day when
her phone chimed in the living room.  She answered a text, then 
became lost in
Facebook, forgot about the cookies and burned them.  She started 
a new batch, but
heard the phone again, got lost in messaging, and burned those 
too.  Out of
ingredients and shamed, she bought cookies at the store.
  She feels less focused and has trouble completing projects.  
Some days, she
promises herself she will ignore her device.  "It's like a diet 
-- you have good
intentions in the morning and then you're like, `There went 
that,`" she said.
  Mr.  Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy 
technology use is that it
diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one 
another, even in
the same room.
  "The way we become more human is by paying attention to each 
other," he said.
  "It shows how much you care."
  That empathy, Mr.  Nass said, is essential to the human 
condition.  "We are at an
inflection point," he said.  "A significant fraction of people's 
experiences are
  now fragmented."