The Problem

II: The Problem
I found this quote in a Times article by Brian Appleyard: “I had become the embodiment of T.S. Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: ‘Distracted from distraction by distraction.’” He’s convinced that distraction is literally killing us. And in some ways, it is. Car accidents caused in part by texting or talking on a cell phone while driving are getting increasingly common. State legislatures keep trying to pass laws against it, but failing. Nobody wants to stop.

It seems these traffic fatalities are a price we’re willing to pay for the privelege of 24/7 connectedness. I admit I’m no different. I try to be careful about texting while driving—partly because I’m bad at it and recognize this—but I have absolutely no qualms with chatting while driving. Like me, most people shrug off the risks. But this isn’t the only problem linked to our growing distraction. There’s also the horrifying but utterly understandable trend, given how harried people are these days, of parents forgetting their babies or toddlers in the back seat in the heat of summer. A 2009 Washington Post article put the number of deaths each year in America at 15 to 25—a figure that’s jumped sharply in the past 20 years, and one that’s not likely to drop any time soon.

Oooooooh, cigarette smoke wafting in. Gak! Ack! I hate that shit. Ugh. Do I just pause and wait it out? Or push through? I’m going to try for pushing through. It’s pretty mellow, coming from somewhere outside. But still, that stuff makes me feel tainted deep in my soul. Igh.

Study after study shows that people are not only impaired while distracted, but also tend to underestimate the degree to which they’re impaired. Everyone, it seems, thinks they’re better at multitasking than anybody actually is. Neurologists point out that the brain is simply not wired to do two things at once. The same neural networks that decipher spoken language also decipher road signs. One has to take precedence over the other. You switch back and forth between tasks, very quickly, processing only one information stream at a time. If you don’t make the choice, your brain will. Even tasks that don’t seem to require the same “channels” (your brain has a visual channel, for example, and an auditory channel) like driving and talking on the phone, actually have overlapping channel requirements: Both have visual, manual, and auditory elements. The inefficiency and potential for overload here creates a perfect setup for mistakes to be made. And that can be deadly.

Still, I’m not the apocalyptic sort. I know this puts me at odds with the majority of Americans, but I firmly believe that the world is not going to end any time soon. I am, as a rule, skeptical of doomsday proselytizing of any kind. So I don’t really buy Appleyard’s prediction that distraction will be the death of us. But what I do buy (and maybe this isn’t really so different) is that it’s already killing him. Apocalyptic visions, in describing a future death for ourselves, often are simply metaphors for deaths we’re already experiencing, right now. Quoting psychology professor David Meyer, Appleyard points out that long-term, chronic distraction can cause stress-related illnesses, or even, he says, brain damage.

What does this mean for us? The question is a gripping one, hanging in our minds as we read these articles about teenagers who damage their thumbs sending hundreds of texts a day, and as we check our Facebook profile for the 18th time. It’s even made its way into dystopian literature, like the Young Adult novel The Knife of Never Letting Go. Set in the future, its characters’ thoughts are broadcast, by an epidemic virus (clever), into the minds of everyone around them. There’s no privacy, but also, it’s loud: The characters call this phenomenon “Noise,” and it’s described in a New Yorker critique by Laura Miller as “a cacophony of impressions and ideas, rendered at one point as a web of overlapping scrawls.” Try concentrating with that going on. Oh wait, you already do.

This is Appleyard’s own life—one intruded on, on the day he chose to count, by 72 legitimate emails, 38 junk emails, the noise of others on his commuter train, numerous phone calls, and 400 news alerts on his iPhone (his own fault, this last one). But still, this guy’s a writer, not a party planner. And the damage, he says, “is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work.” He’s mourning his own death, here—the death of his idea of what his life was going to look like, and of his hopes for a kind of satisfying depth that should be inherent in the writer’s existence but now seems beyond his reach, blasted away like a thought formed in “Harrison Bergeron.”