A Review: "The Distracted Mind" & Devitalisation
Dr. Adam Gazzaley and the Crises of Cognition
“The cognition crisis reverberates across all the crises we have.”
- Adam Gazzaley
As readers of this substack know, I am, as a fellow addict, highly critical of social media use and its generally overstated importance. While its utility is straightforward to understand, what lurks beneath is less obvious, and often hard for the chronic user to acknowledge.
I am critical because I notice what it does to me. I consider my focus fairly good. As an experienced twice-a-day decades long meditator, I would like to think my powers of focus are relatively good. So when I note the power platforms like this have over me despite cultivation otherwise, I wonder about children or someone with lesser presence of mind. Surely the impacts to attention must be demoralising.
Checking on the TL every now and then, I’m confident of this position, taking in my daily dose of zoomer self-hatred.
It’s important that when we feel the pull of listless novelty, we always try to remember the grand and final truth of life. Life is inarguably the whole of the sum parts of our momentary experience.
Riding on this are the not only the breadth of our achievements, but also our enjoyment of simply what it is to be human. Presence in relationships or our ability to engage fully in meaningful work, creativity and leisures. To the detriment of the message, much literature like this comes of as if distraction were merely interfering with dull productivity. As it turns out, distraction interferes with the intrinsic qualitative nature of all of our experiences and we risk great regret at the end of it all.
On completing this book, we are invited to entertain important decisions about what will define our time on earth. What it takes to make a true impact, and how we have chosen to define our experience. I’m sure when it comes time to pay the ferryman, that’s all there will be and all there is at the end. And experiences fruits are all we will leave behind.
In this way, the use of social media platforms incur a toll that is sadly imperceptible to many. That price is literally our lives.
Yet, in many ways, the glaring detrimental impacts of distraction require no real scientific explanations. It should be self-evident why distraction is damaging and why social media is the distraction maxime of the day. Insight deriving from self-enquiry naturally requires a type of honesty. And in a round-a-bout way this book induces this kind of self-assessment.
This isn’t to say that if twatter, instawhore of facedouche went away that such questions would simply disappear. Something many get wrong. The elderly, like myself, will remember morning and afternoon television as one such ancient source of distraction.
As we will see from this excellent book, there are evolved reasons why humans in all ages are simply hardwired to be distracted, with an iPhone present or not. And we’re all aware of philosophers in the deep past dealing with the same issues.
Nevertheless, social media presents unique and ahistorically powerful dangers for any individual hoping to live his life with presence and leave some legacy. And legacy has always been dependent on the enactment of higher executive goal-oriented functioning. If that is you, then this book is really essential.
I think all midwits like myself voyage through a Stoicism phase - Stoicism being so hot right now. So no doubt you've browsed "On the Shortness of Life" by Lucius Annaeus Seneca. There are many gems with very little coal in this book. It's hard to know which quote to choose, but this feels like a superlative example of the theme at hand:
"You live as if you were destined to live forever; no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last."
-Seneca
I have no doubt that if Seneca was around today he would have been accused of counter-signalling one of the 3 million or so critically important “great political causes” with his penchant for the plain simple truth. And…we all know what end he came to. A warning perhaps.
So, with my general interest in time, our use of it and focus I appreciated Adam Gazzaley's offering of a book explaining the neuro-physiological and evolutionary unpinnings of these forces. Why should it be that such a dynamic tussle within the human being should exist at all? As beings with free will?
I am consistently assured by frens online we are complete beings with true free will, apparently, and if only we could choose to do the right thing all would be well in the world. This strikes me as a kind of lazy utopianism in the face of endless data to the contrary. All we need to right the course are political models, the right set of abstractions, the right imagery, we simply need to convince everyone, or educate them a bit more…right?
If you’re not sold on that as a way forward, then this book is for you.
SCIENCE
Thankfully, neuroscience has come to our rescue. I was happy to see many of my prior held views robustly supported by the latest in cognitive science. Gazzaley showers us with concrete reasons as to why the brain has such difficulty focusing and completing goals and electronic media’s strong role in this. How pixelated electronic flickering feeds our internal novelty monster to the detriment of everything worthwhile in our lives:
"Our cognitive control is really quite limited: we have a restricted ability to distribute, divide, and sustain attention; actively hold detailed information in mind; and concurrently manage or even rapidly switch between competing goals."
The Distracted Mind (p. 9)
"The distracted mind" is a well-written, highly accessible book that goes through the biochemical and cognitive science of distraction and goal completion in great detail. It investigates, in-depth, a broad range of neurological and mental phenomena that have been amplified strongly since the advent of electronic media, and in particular social media.
Gazzaley's central premise is that social media presents a uniquely powerful means of what he defines as distraction and interruption. These labels refer to a specific subset of behaviours that preclude us from completing complex long-term goals.
He describes the human being as possessing impressive technical abilities whilst still subject to the same processing functionality as our ancient ancestors. The conflict arises as our higher executive technical goal setting and planning drives seem to have outgrown our primitive “lower centers” support abilities:
"Goal interference occurs when you reach a decision to accomplish a specific goal (e.g., retrieve something from the refrigerator, complete a work assignment, engage in a conversation, drive your car) and something takes place to hinder the successful completion of that goal. The interference can either be generated internally, presenting as thoughts within your mind, or generated externally, by sensory stimuli such as restaurant chatter, beeps, vibrations, or flashing visual displays (figure 1.1). Goal interference, originating from either your internal or external environments (often both), can occur in two distinct varieties—distractions and interruptions—based on your decision about how you manage the interference."
The Distracted Mind (p. 5).
Gazzaley asserts that the best framework to understand what drives us neuro-physiologically is best modelled in the same way scientists have used to describe animal foraging. Through what is known as Optimal Foraging Theories. We are foraging animals, afterall.
Foraging requires setting relatively complex goals. Our ability to achieve or implement these goals is determined according to our capabilities of attention and memory. This cognitive setting or process maximises the potential for extracting resources from the natural environment. As well as providing sufficient protection from life-threatening elements in the environment. The mind also maximising information intake to expand the ability to account for randomness.
Thus, foraging theory helps explain how we have developed a propensity for task-switching since how we're wired in a primitive context, would favour some degree of distraction and even (what is now known as) "multi-tasking". From this evolutionary framework, the book derives the idea of goal interference. This is noticeable these days more so than ever. When hardwired proclivities start to run awry of their original intentions due to the extreme and ubiquitous features of information available to us in our environments.
As mentioned, he rests his explanation on Optimal Foraging Theories, which state that our dopaminergic systems are heavily involved in food-foraging behaviours, reward processing and other critical survival functions.
Gazzaley provides data for another main component of this thesis - suggesting it's also appropriate to include information gathering as a higher class of foraging activity.
Observation of primates and some other species indicates that even animals with less cognitive capacity than ourselves may behave in ways in which they expend energy in behaviours that yield no apparent survival benefit. And information foraging could be an explanation for this:
"As Thomas Hills…describes, 'Evidence strongly supports the evolution of goal-directed cognition out of mechanisms initially in control of spatial foraging but, through increasing cortical connections, eventually used to forage for information.'
The Distracted Mind (pp. 13-14)
Gazzaley cites many experiments where humans seem to specifically set up their environments to maximise information foraging activities. I don't think we need scientific investigations to see in our own lives how information-seeking behaviours tend to rule the roost. As we excessively scroll Twitter, fighting the good fight of course, message Gran on Facebook, have youtube running in the background on auto, bookshelves…TV's running…Spotify…and the list goes on.
Of course, human beings have always suffered from goal interference. We just quoted Seneca in the introduction. He came from a time in which we would expect humanoids to have bern closer to nature than ourselves, and free of such existential griefs. So it seems to me that humans have suffered from some form of debilitating and diminishing distraction at least for as long as cultivated intelligence and relatively complex civilisation has existed.
I make this distinction because in the right ecology the features of a distracted mind are powerful adaptions.
We act optimally in our evolutionary context to seek information from our external environment since, as Gazzely tells us, we are information-seeking agents involved in the business of survival.
Thus, for a bushman, what turns out to for us to be a significant problem of attention is perfect for his survival. Problems arise when ubiquitous novelty amplifies this evolutionary tendency to feed us endless volumes of information entirely irrelevant to us.
As information-seeking agents, behaviours that amplify information accumulation are vital. And in this way, our strong drives towards information gathering lead to a crippling surplus, and modernity becomes extraordinarily and measurably detrimental to us. They are also built on primitive emotional states, amplifying the often negative features of information flow:
Critically, the current conditions of our modern, high-tech world perpetuate this behaviour by offering us greater accessibility to feed this instinctive drive and also via their influence on internal factors such as boredom and anxiety.
The Distracted Mind (p. 13).
The question is, at what point do you get too much of a good thing?
Further questions came up for me at this point, which the book doesn’t really deal with. How does one determine what is a worthy goal? How does a goal qualify as something that is meaningful and not simply another higher order distraction? All interesting questions that are not necessarily resolved by this book, although we are given great insight into possible answers to these age old questions.
One thing that made sense instantly when going through this book: the wide appeal of activities like hunting, camping, walking in nature and even war, and the purported “restorative benefits” of such activities, that seem to us not entirely pleasurable on the surface.
DISTRACTION AND MULTI-TASKS
In this book distraction refers to external or internal information that is irrelevant to goals and thus interferes with achieving them.
Interruption is the other primary source of goal interference. It results from a decision the we make to engage with more than one task at the same time.
The case here is that such overarching distractions, induced by multitudinous streams of information, have impacted our ability to focus and complete tasks efficiently and qualitatively - if we happen to get a start at all. And this is particularly noticeable in younger generations.
"We have adopted a style of "everyday media multi-tasking"—which is just a generous way of saying that we have lost our awareness of what is necessary and what is simply reflexive responding as though prodded by a sharp stick."
The Distracted Mind (p. 123)
We all know those who will sagely inform us of their supreme multi-tasking abilities. Anecdotally, I can confirm my most deranged newsletters are probably a result of stress, work, scrolling irrelevant nonsense online while writing, and the feverish physiological and scattered mental tone this induces. I look back at them now and cringe, particularly now the culprit is now clear.
We strangely assume that if we somehow divert attention to several different things simultaneously, defying space-time, we will be more efficient. Now it is true in day-to-day life we are sometimes required to perform different tasks in quick succession. This book confirms that regardless of necessity, this modus operandi has measurably negative consequences. It's completely insane, therefore, to do it to yourself if you can avoid it.
When framed this way, it becomes apparent how irrational this commonly-held viewpoint is from the outset. Aside from the obvious implication that time can't be cheated (despite our consistent efforts to do so) and most of us aren't human-octopus hybrids (Cecaelias - I know you're out there, and I will find you), there are also strong biological reasons why multi-tasking is wholly inefficient and detrimental to the quality work and life in the modern world.
Why do we do it, then? Gazzaley notes several experiments where humans report “enjoyment as a factor" in internut based multi-tasking. Undertaking several informational tasks in unison increases enjoyment (self-reportedly). Researchers have also shown that information novelty is an essential element in multi-tasking. Can confirm, while writing this I find myself constantly trying to resist this tendency.
This makes sense, Gazzaley tells us, since novelty seeking would have been a powerful force in our hominid ancestors seeking out new foraging environments and increasing survival advantages. Thus, we have fun switching tasks, expanding the novelty factor and the neurological enjoyment or rewards we derive. So it doesn’t matter so much that life and work suffers because we enjoy the experience of it suffering.
From this foundation, our primitive cerebrum spanks us yet again:
"In addition, the act of receiving an earlier reward is often more highly valued, even if a delayed reward has greater overall associated value."
The Distracted Mind (p. 12).
The truth is as we all know that we either complete a complex task well or we make a dreadful hash out of it. The drive towards multi-tasking is, in an authentic sense, impossible and completely out of line with our current realities. It is now time-wasting. A forlorn feature of a distracted mind. A mind unable to adequately exercise cognitive control and focus on the potentially meaningful or beneficial experiences at hand. We are swept away in a tidal wave of information, failing to seperate the signal from the noise.
Other impacts on health go beyond this article but are coming to light more and more as the research deepens. It is becoming increasingly evident that short and long-term health metrics suffer badly from distraction and the downstream inability to effectively perform goals that we’ve set.
If you use Twitter, watch sportsball on TV, AF cozy streams, or whatever else instead of doing what you need to do, you are apparently killing yourself slowly. It appears according to the data that distraction to the detriment of goal execution will increases the chances that you will live a shorter life. I know right! But the evidence is getting stronger and the noose tightens around our addicted necks.
Under experimental conditions, there are solid and measurable decrements in both the qualitative execution of the task given and the accuracy of the tasks being switched between - and get this - the actual time taken to complete both tasks when compared to just completing once at a time. This probably seems an obvious result, yet very few of us actively control for distraction. I can attest to the fact that in workplaces, management very often seem to push the exact opposite conditions. Many managers relish in imposing distraction on us.
In my own experience particularly since working mostly from home, going into an open plan office is a complete shock. I can’t get anything done at all. It is amazing that in a corporate scenario where efficiency and profitability is apparently everything, boomers and x’er management are completely unable to face the emerging truths about distraction.
Herein lies part of the problem with all this information. When evaluating these truths, we as individuals seem to have a huge amount of trouble changing in the face of the realities of distraction. It’s hard to give it up. Unless you’re a misanthrope, like myself .
So whenever that annoying office girl tells you about how, as a female, she can multi-task because her lineage of female ancestors liked to collect scallops and berries - well, my friend, you will know better. You will understand why you always end up covering for her:
"...understood by neuroscientists that our cognitive control abilities are far from ideal. Each of the components—attention, working memory, and goal management—have deeply embedded functional limitations that result in suboptimal performance as we attempt to accomplish our goals. This is especially true when our goals lead us to engage in interference-inducing behaviors—multi-tasking in distracting settings—which is now commonplace in our high-tech world. A major premise of this book is that our Distracted Minds are generated by a head-on collision between our high-level goals and our intrinsic cognitive control limitations; this conflict generates goal interference that negatively impacts quality of life."
The Distracted Mind (p. 63)
The book goes into great depth on this topic, and for sure, the devil is in the details. There are references a significant number of studies outlining the impossibility of effective multi-tasking with more in-depth scientific analysis. Again, this ties into my general thesis of the primarily negative nature of chronic, or even mild, electronic media use.
In some sense, we're feeding a primitive desire for novel information gathering and not much more. This gives us a sense that something is being done. That something will happen. These platforms were designed with this in mind. Never forget that. And all this time, your primary life goals will suffer in quality. As will your ability to execute them at all.
TOOTHLESS NON-ACTION
In the past, I've approached my criticisms of social media and the various associated online counter-cultures as a form solid access to self-delusion and undeserved specialness.
This is not an absolute position; I get the utility of mockery and humour. The enjoyment of frens and good humour. But as we’ve seen it’s not this straightforward. Not even remotely.
The overwhelming shortcomings must be strongly comprehended. For the reasons stated above, I’ve always suspected that electronic media may in fact strongly inhibit effective responses of political opposition. It could be why things are falling apart at a more rapid rate than ever before. Because we’re addressing any number of easily solvable problems, still addressable by tangible action, by looking at a f$cking screen.
People may disagree with me, but I've made evidence-based solid and reasonable cases for my views. I've never appealed to emotion, like those who promote the opposite.
I built this case initially from a physiological and philosophical perspective. Relying on the truths of Buddhist experiences of presence, and deep regrets of wasting my own time in earlier years. I was always concerned that I was arguably too black-and-white in retrospect, but sometimes rhetoric is necessary to get the point across.
On reading Gazzaley's work, however, I am increasingly convinced that it may be an idea for most people to limit electronic media to a hard almost-nothing. For those who want to be something other than a mico-celebrity pixel-phantom. Most of us have to work for a living, so spending the rest of our time furiously scrolling as a part of some great cause seems like an unforgivable waste of life and capacity.
If you want a result, you can’t really escape that you will need to act. The false virtue of claiming victory for cheap online potshots strikes me as quite a serious delusion, and inarguably so after comprehending the finer points contained in this wonderful book. And because we’re distracted and inherently lazy creatures who are frightened of failure, the temptation to claim that onlining does more than what it does is ever present.
PHYSIOLOGICAL VITAL MARKERS
In my own work, I could not deny that while taking various measurements of people using social media (myself and others), users show severe depression in what I would call vital markers. I took observations of posture and breath-timing, and various metrics of blood flow in the bodies tissues, and EEG brain activity recordings.
Many of us acknowledge that in terms of living a self-directed, conscious life and developing free-space time to operate, a view of us as genuinely biological beings who are driven by forces largely outside of our control is necessary. And that our lower as-yet undisciplined mammalian brain centres are holding us back from what could be.
This is the widely unpopular view of the animal itself as the problem. Not the system. Not the controllers. But we are all victims to varying degrees, dictated now only by chance chance and random genetics, of our deficient “ice-cream scoop” brains.
To me, vitality describes the energetic constitution of a biological being. Its ability to act in space. Vitality or energy stems from vital functions, almost entirely subconscious or outside our purview. Encapsulated well by Klages’ term life-affirming Seele.
Such processes are inarguably depressed by severe chronic media since usage is actively subverting vital actions. Granted, it could be used to inspire critically needed activity, but I believe you would need to be very kind to assume this was happening on any meaningful scale.
To attempt encapsulate the message within the medium that induces the problem itself is true Catch-22 that must be wrangled with:
"Devitalisation leads to boredom, and boredom in turn, to sensationalism. The high stimulus society in which we live is represented through advertising as full of vibrancy and vitality, but as advertisers know only too well, its condition is one of boredom, and the response to boredom."
"Master and His Emissary", Iain Mcgilchrist p400)
Iain is right in the quote above. This statement widely applies to consoomers and anyone engaged with the online culture.
I suggest a strong re-orientation of emphasis. One towards hard work in real space-time above all else; and the cultivation of abilities of focus towards meaningful trans-generational actions and goals. Acknowledgement of the risks of failure for individuals, and the courage to put it out there anyway.
So how does de-vitalisation occur practically?
Seated, unconscious focus on screens is physiologically depressive and is, by definition, utterly listless
Inability to tap into oceanic perspective - right brained consciousness, something I’ve discussed in prior posts. An obsession with irrelevent and silly ‘bits and pieces’ or the actions of riff-raff and other classes of genetic cul-de-sacs.
This unconscious physiological state is induced sometimes by passively looking at a picture of something that represents vitality. If it doesn't connect to something...it's just flickering lights on a screen that the addict consooms before moving compulsively on to the subsequent visual representation of what suits its imagination, or momentary drives of fear or anxiety.
Instead of seeking to master, one preferences to appear as a master by copy-pasta. Plagiarism or making threads for recognition takes the place of hard focused work. Legend in own mind is more accessible and novel than hard work and learner status.
When real things are replaced by digital representations or concepts, they become purely abstract. At best, they hold a deceptive connection with reality. At worst, and most commonly, no connection at all. Many correctly would level this critique at something like Marxism, but rather conveniently, never themselves.
This has to be kryptonite politically. While the "spreading of ideas" is definitely a essential, the truth is the people who could act on those ideas are also wholly disarmed by the rather obvious reality of what social media imposes on biology. The distraction wrought by social media or Twitter cannot be overcome in any way but severe use limitation. I argue the world has never seen anything as distracting as these platforms, they are "super-disarmers".
Due to boredom, distraction, and the human desire for social recognition or conflict, or sensationalism, I see far more infighting and takedowns aimed at one another when potshots at libtards can't fill the novelty quota. It is because it is not really about that most of the time. Most of the time it’s driven by the desire for spectacle, not the outcome indicated. I think most are driven to it by boredom and distraction away from the spiritual paucity of their real lives.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I recommend you get this book and have read. There is much more to explore in the thesis that I can't reproduce here. As well as much convincing data. However, in an existential sense, I'd like to offer further thoughts on how I see all this coalescing.
We are inarguably finite beings. As finite beings with increasingly large ranges of options, whether this be types of work, places to travel, having a family, religions or political causes: the list goes on, we often end up completely distracted and unable to choose anything. Paralysis by analysis.
We at once have too many options and seek to satisfy abstract "end-points". And once achieved, we expect to have the time for the things we value. This mindset is very modern and leads to many ailments facing Western Civ, such as women "waiting for a man they deserve and all to be just right" to have children, only to be left 40 and childless.
People work jobs that make them miserable, retire without a working dick and die shortly thereafter asking ‘what was the point’. That’s what distraction ultimately creates, and what we must avoid.
It's hard to simply choose a few tasks and do them well. Functions within our grasps. We take a look at instawhore and see lives that we would want more but simply aren’t accessible to us. Even if they are, instead of taking risks, we still prefer to imagine an unblemished image of success. Instead of making what we can from what we have, we seek the comfort of our imaginations.
What we face isn't a crisis of options, in so much as it is a crisis of being able to choose not to do something or only to do a few things. We have difficulty deciding what to do because we are distracted by options. And we are distracted by the constant, unceasing novelty of information. And our imaginations run rife, we are unable to centre ourselves for our self-determined own great works.
As Oliver Burkman says in his book "The Anti-Dote", distractions relieve us from accepting the uncertainty of bringing something into reality. Not choosing allows us to live in our imaginations and not have to face the harsh realities of life or our mortality as we inevitably have to when we commit to making something real.
We would rather talk and speculate endlessly than simply sit down and work on something that could potentially fail. Or to live with the unpleasantness of focusing on something that isn't going as well as we'd hoped, and having to work through it nonetheless. We’d rather make the tweet about something, than do it.
At least in young people, the ease of which you can be a legend in your own mind is the most destructive, de-clawing element of online culture. When coupled with distraction away from vital goals, it’s hard not to argue that online culture out of kilter is pure kryptonite for anything far-reaching and non-trivial.
Not only that, but our primitive neural architecture rewards us for what is a form of cowardice in our modern context.
As a new creator, I can vouch for this. You are presented with streams of courses, threads, tweets, petty conflicts, or whatever else - and all this time, you are merely indulging in being distracted from the task ahead and the possibility of failing. Of things not going as well as you'd hoped, imagined or funnier yet - made a thread about.
Without the comforts of inaction and distraction, uncomfortable questions arise about what you tangibly put into the world. For example, in my case:
“Maybe I need to face I'm not a good or engaging writer and need to work on unpleasant things to improve?”
“I may need to face that my content is coal and needs changing.”
“Maybe there won't be any success, ever?”
“Maybe the individual accepting the position of being the prime unit of failure and success is never going to be a popular notion?”
Failure, or failing to achieve the exact success we'd envisioned, is never fun to deal with. We all know this.
In this way, digital media presents the ultimate method of not having to face facts. Facing our limited time and the certainty of our deaths, about our dissatisfaction with our lives. Our lack of ability to choose from a vast myriad of paths.
Thankfully, the ways out of this are relatively simple. More on that next week.
“If you don’t value, and you don’t prioritise, having some quiet moments, some pauses in the stream of information that floods into our brains, it diminishes the chances for a lot of creative thought, for making connections between otherwise non-clearly linked events and ideas.”
- Adam Gazzaley
Hi, came to bomb comments again, hope you don't mind too much.
"Further questions came up for me at this point, which the book doesn’t really deal with. How does one determine what is a worthy goal? How does a goal qualify as something that is meaningful and not simply another higher order distraction?"
There was so little of value in anglican church- so little. So dry! So dull. TV showed me the life I wanted to live, and I ended up doing that too but it was, as you/Gazzaly says, just a distraction. The action people didn't know what they were doing any better than the anglicans.
But there was one line in that dry church which made me think: 'Seek first the Kingdom of God.' If only there had been a clear path. Because once that Kingdom is found, all doubts fritter away. Best state ever.
I agree with the distraction sentiment.. the modern world is designed to stop one from seeing/intuiting/finding the path, which includes books that don't point upwards... 'God-Man' was instructive neuroscience, written back in 1920 I think.
These guys (I like Iain McGilchrist and his poetry habit) are fine in their thinking but it's still left-brain thinking- still investigating the mundane state with a magnifying glass.
"But the evidence is getting stronger and the noose tightens around our addicted necks."
I took 2022 off all social media and maintained one friendship via email. Death is a great teacher... and I now realise, as I was about to quote from my unfinished post on Catholicism, Cathodes etc. that I am distracted, so I bid you farewell. Cheerio.