'It explains why our ability to focus has gone to hell'

'It explains why our ability to focus has gone to hell': Screens are assaulting our Stone Age brains with more information than we can handle
Modern technology has fundamentally changed how our ancient minds work.

We often joke that our attention spans have dropped significantly in recent years with the rise of digital technologies and screen-centric entertainment, but there is sound science to back up this observation. In fact, a shorter attention span is simply one side effect of a recent explosion of screen distractions, as neurologist and author Richard E. Cytowic argues in his new book, "Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload" (MIT Press, 2024).

In his book, Cytowic discusses how the human brain has not changed significantly since the Stone Age, which leaves us poorly equipped to handle the influence and allure of modern technologies — particularly those propagated by big tech companies. In this excerpt, Cytowic highlights how our brains struggle to keep up with the lightning-fast pace at which modern technology, culture and society are changing.

From an engineering perspective, the brain has fixed energy limits that dictate how much work it can handle at a given time. Feeling overloaded leads to stress. Stress leads to distraction. Distraction then leads to error. The obvious solutions are either to staunch the incoming stream or alleviate the stress. Hans Selye, the Hungarian endocrinologist who developed the concept of stress, said that stress "is not what happens to you, but how you react to it." The trait that allows us to handle stress successfully is resilience. Resilience is a welcome trait to have because all demands that pull you away from homeostasis (the biological tendency in all organisms to maintain a stable internal milieu) lead to stress.

Screen distractions are a prime candidate for disturbing homeostatic equilibrium. Long before the advent of personal computers and the internet, Alvin Toffler popularized the term “information overload” in his 1970 bestseller, Future Shock. He promoted the bleak idea of eventual human dependence on technology. By 2011, before most people had smartphones, Americans took in five times as much information on a typical day as they had twenty-five years earlier. And now even today’s digital natives complain how stressed their constantly present tech is making them.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/it-explains-why-our-ability-to-focus-has-gone-to-hell-screens-are-assaulting-our-stone-age-brains-with-more-information-than-we-can-handle


We've always been told we only use a small fraction of our brains, (some less than others,) but my understanding is that its immaterial if you can't process data very fast.