The Mind, Explained

"Perhaps the most difficult thing

that a human being is called upon to face

is long, concentrated thinking."

Those words were written in 1925 by Hugo Gernsback.

He was a prolific inventor

and one of the pioneers of science fiction.

And distractions lurked everywhere he looked.

Street noises filtering through the window,

a door slamming somewhere,

a telephone ring or a doorbell.

So Gernsback invented "the isolator."

A wooden helmet that eliminated 95% of the noise from the outside world,

fitted with two tiny glass windows for the eyes

and an easily attachable oxygen tube in case you ever struggled to breathe.

It was an imperfect solution

to a very real problem.

How to focus in the busy modern world.

A hundred years later and the problem's only gotten worse.

Isolation helmets have given way to noise-canceling headphones,

digital trackers and blockers,

and a cottage industry of productivity gurus,

who claim you can hack your way to optimum mental performance.

But distractions have gotten more sophisticated too.

And with each passing day, resistance feels ever more futile.

So what are we supposed to do?

How do we focus?

There's Jack giving the teacher his best attention.

She knows that her accuracy, her patience,

and her attention to small detail

are invaluable.

It'll only take... a few minutes.

Because of the Internet and so many, I wouldn't call them distractions,

but options, their attention span is a lot shorter.

If you look closely enough,

the spirit of craftsmanship has not disappeared.

Ambition is the spark plug of the human engine,

the force that makes things happen.

Do you need a new spark plug?

How well can you focus?

Here's a quick test.

Your task is to ignore the people in the foreground

and count as precisely as you can

how many times the guy in the back jumps on the trampoline.

Ready?

Go.

How many jumps did you count?

If you answered 11,

congratulations, that's correct.

But ...

... did you see the gorilla

who delicately tiptoed into the frame and tiptoed out?

The first version of this study was done in the '90s with a way bigger gorilla,

and around half the people totally missed it.

Which means that if you are super focused,

you won't notice what's going on around you.

We often tell ourselves this story

that we're observing the whole world around us.

But really the world around us is shaped by what we're paying attention to and we...

You might think that you can watch this episode

while texting a friend and cooking dinner,

but you can't.

We're not wired to multitask.

Writing an article while talking on the phone,

while looking at an email inbox, that is impossible.

The term multitasking comes from the computer world,

coined in the 1960s

to describe machines that could simultaneously process two or more jobs.

But most computers can't even do this.

Let's say you have fouror five differentprograms running.

It's not literally running those programs at the same time.

It's quickly switching back and forth between 'em.

But it can do the switch really quickly.

Usually.

And that's also true for our brains.

All the things we want to focus on are like different programs,

including things in our own minds, like your to-do list for tomorrow.

You might think you're running these programs simultaneously,

but really, you're switching between them,

and we aren't as good at it as computers.

It takes our mind a while to really quit something.

And in that time, we can't fully focus on anything else.

So the key to focus is to keep one program, and only one program,

running as long as possible.

Sustained attention, especially on abstract concepts,

is not something that necessarily comes very naturally to humans.

Research suggests we can do it for about 90 minutes at a time.

Human progress, in many ways, is a story of chasing those brief windows.

To design things and then build them.

To develop medicines and theories, and write great novels.

In the 1980s, IBM pushed the message

that technology could help us do all kinds of work more efficiently

so we didn't have to work as much.

IBM never stops searching for new ways

to make difficult jobs easier,

so people can do more important things, like go home for dinner.

Daddy!

I used to eat lunch at my desk at least once a week.

No more .

Naturally, IBM was one of the first companies

to adopt email.

Instead of wasting time with phone tag and faxes,

IBM employees could just fire off a message

which would be received in an instant.

It was a miracle.

Sort of.

Within three or four days, they melted down the server.

We weren't just replacing the fax machine with email.

We were doing the communication equivalent

of now suddenly sending hundreds or thousands of faxes a week.

And once people could reach each other instantaneously,

we came to expect an instantaneous response ,

setting off a kind of revolution in how people worked together.

To rapid, back-and-forth, unscheduled messages.

That pileup.

The little red reminders that you're more and more behind.

An email thread so long,

following the conversation is like a trigonometry quiz.

A quiz that is always due immediately.

No one actually thought this was a good idea.

No one actually planned to do this.

This type of hyper communication seemed to just arise naturally.

Some of those time management apps

have a pretty intimate window into the problem,

because they're tracking how tens of thousands of people

actually spend their time online.

RescueTime reported that their average user

checks their email or an instant messenger like Slack every six minutes.

More than a third do it every three minutes or less.

The issue is we are checking our inbox all the time

not because of a personal failing of will,

not because of some bad habit, not because we're addicted.

We check our inbox because our companies have made it necessary.

And we're social animals.

We're hardwired to live and work in tribes,

and we'll go to great lengths to avoid letting them down.

I always think of an email inbox as what a mad scientist would cook up

if his plot for taking over the world

required him to distract people as much as possible.

Because what do you see when you open up an email inbox?

Here's a ambiguous question from your boss that's gonna be hard to answer.

Here's a scheduling request. You don't really know what time is gonna work.

Here is an angry colleague. Or it looks like they're angry based on the text.

You see issue after issue that you cannot resolve in the moment.

We know it's fine if we reply later

in our rational minds.

But the deeper part of our mind says,

"No. There's people who need us and we are ignoring them."

Facebook discovered the power of this back in the late 2000s.

Engineers noticed that a lot of people's comments were versions of, "I like this."

So in 2009, they turned that into a button

and an unexpected thing happened.

People started spending way more time on Facebook.

By making it so easy to react to a post,

people's posts got more reactions.

Similar buttons exploded on other social media platforms.

"If I just tap that icon, I will get that feedback."

That is almost impossible for the human brain to ignore.

So if I'm a mad scientist again trying to create the distraction doomsday device,

email and Slack would be my first idea,

and something like Twitter and Facebook would be my second.

But online, there are also a lot of productivity gurus fighting back

with techniques that often sound pretty complicated.

- I'm gonna talk about the 80-20 rule. - The Pomodoro Technique.

The block schedule system. It's gonna blow your mind.

- Insert friction points. - Eat that frog.

But behind that jargon,

most of the tips boil down to just a few simple ideas.

like creating structure around your day

so you can spend less time thinking about what you should be doing

and more time just doing,

taking regular breaks to renew your energy,

and what gurus call...

- Batching. - Batch.

Batch email.

Which just means checking your email a couple of times a day

instead of every couple of minutes.

And while studies show this can make people a bit more productive,

if you're a more neurotic person, it can actually make you more stressed.

These tips haven't magically solved the problems we have with staying focused.

The problem is deeper than that.

And according to some news reports,

the real issue is that our attention spans are now fundamentally damaged.

Humans now have a shorter attention span than goldfish.

The attention span of about a goldfish.

Which have a nine-second attention span. We have eight.

We're going the wrong way.

But if you actually look for the source of that claim,

you'd be hard-pressed to find any research that backs that up.

And we've heard versions of this panic before.

When TV took off, people worried it would rot our brains.

Decades earlier, similar things were said about the radio.

And centuries before that,

there was an outcry over books pumped out by newfangled printing presses,

only to distract and abuse the weaker judgments of scholars.

We may be more distracted now, but that's a hard thing to measure.

Researchers consider working memory capacity one proxy for attention,

and that's been stable since the '90s, long before smartphones.