Caleb Cyr

Professor Emerson

ENG 110 H6

27 Oct. 2017

Distractions: How Are They Hurting Young Minds?

For younger minds growing up, distractions are always plentiful. From actual physical distractions in the noisy world of today, to the ever distracting rabbit hole known as the internet, it seems that we just can’t escape them. You are online reading an article, when you see another interesting header and you click it. Before you know it, you are multiple websites away. You have also been taking in the information from distractions on the sides; with advertisements and headlines to links to other pages you didn’t go to pulling on your attention. While doing this you might also be multitasking: watching TV, messaging your friends, listening to your favorite playlist, or even writing your paper for a class that’s due the next day. All of this sounds ideal, right? All of the information you could ever need is at your fingertips, no matter where or what you may happen to be doing. However, the reality is that these distractions and use of “multitasking” are not beneficial to people. Having constant distractions today are harming how young minds develop, causing people to lack attention and efficiency.

Although we are more connected and informed than ever, our brains are not naturally prepared to handle this type of stimulation. Starting as early on as the invention of the telephone technology has made it so “each of us exists simultaneously in not just one here but in several,” as Richard Restak, a neurology professor at George Washington Hospital School of Medicine and Health Sciences referred to it in his piece “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome Of Our Era” (380). In his piece, Restak claims that constant distractions in today’s world are leading us to become a society full of ADHD and ADD, and goes on to explain how this will ultimately harm us as a society. We can be talking to our friend we’re hanging out with at the same instant we’re messaging our friend halfway across the country, or even across the world. During that moment we’re “here” with our friend, as well as being “here” with our friend many miles away. Before technology, we never had the chance to experience this, experiencing the “here” in front of us without having different realities to focus on. However, technology allows young minds who have grown up with it to “reach from one end of the world to another and wipe out differences in time, space, and place” (Restak 381).

Younger people who have grown up in this world of constant distractions have become more used to being distracted than older generations. In her New York Times Magazine article “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” journalist Robin Marantz Henig talks about how “20-somethings” are taking longer and longer to “grow-up,” and how a new life stage called emerging adulthood may help. Henig points out, “Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into their 20s” (204). Since the brain continues to develop into your 20s, young people are often still cognitively developing up until that age while living in today’s distracting world. This has changed how these young minds develop. Nowadays, people are taking longer to “grow-up” and reach the five traditional milestones of becoming an adult, and technology is partially to blame. As Henig says, “Sociologists traditionally define the ‘transition to adulthood’ as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying, and having a child,” (200). While technology can’t be 100% to blame for this, as social expectations have changed, it has contributed to this cycle falling of course. With the internet, younger people don’t have to remember as much, since they can always find the answer within seconds. This is because of “synaptic pruning,” a process by which “the brain eventually settles into a structure that’s most efficient for the owner of that brain,” (Henig 204). The brain does this by cutting off pathways that aren’t used often, while keeping the more trafficked ones. Since we have the internet and don’t need to remember as much information, synaptic pruning gets rid of some information we’ve learned. Although this is a good thing, it has caused these young people to become less independent. They remain stuck to the internet as a constant database, as well as remaining more stuck to their parents as a result of this lost independence.

Older generations didn’t have as much technology distracting them while developing, so they may have trouble adjusting to this new abundance of information. In an experiment to see how talking on the phone while driving may affect the person’s abilities to drive, younger drivers as well as 55-65 year old drivers were asked to answer a call using the touchscreen built into the car’s dashboard. While doing this, they had to drive normally as well as come to a stop. “While the distracting ring had only a slight effect on the stopping distance of younger drivers (0.61 seconds rather than 0.5 seconds), it had a profound effect on the stopping distance of drivers between 55 and 65 years of age: 0.82 seconds rather than 0.61 seconds, according to researchers” (Restak 382). This could explain why younger people tend to be more efficient when multitasking than their older counterparts.

Even though many young people claim to multitask all the time, multitasking is essentially a myth. When you are “multitasking” your brain is really just switching back and forth between the different tasks you’re attending to. While doing multiple different activities, your brain cannot truly focus on either activity individual, instead focusing on both. This can cause the different activities to distract you from the other ones you’re performing simultaneously. For example, Restak gives an example where a very stressed mother is getting her kids ready. The child that’s eating a grilled cheese starts complaining, and the mother just tells her to eat it since she doesn’t have time to make anything else or to argue with her daughter. However, the daughter replies with, “I can’t eat it, Mom. You left the plastic on the cheese” (Restak 383). This example brings up another problem with today’s distracting world: how parents are able to manage distractions as well as still be good parents.

Constantly, these parents are forced to manage their busy worlds outside of the home as well as their world at home. This juggling-act forces them to constantly think about both worlds, leaving them with no time to listen. Restak gives an example of this as well, talking about one of his patients who experienced a traumatic experience while at work. “The hardest part… was that no one would give her more than a few minutes to tell her story. They either interrupted her or, in her words, ‘gradually zoned out’” (Restak 378). If parents start taking on this “no time to listen” mindset, where does that leave their kids? Distractions on the parent’s end can result in equally harmful effects on their child’s young mind, exposing them from very early on that it’s okay to be distracted and inefficient.

When trying to multitask, you complete the multiple activities with less efficiency than if you were to just do them seperate. In his article “In Defense of Distraction,” New York Magazine journalist Sam Anderson writes an explanation for this saying that, “the brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate ‘channels’ – a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel, and so on – each of which can process only one stream of information at a time. If you overburden a channel, the brain becomes inefficient and mistake-prone” (Anderson 4). If performing multiple tasks that use separate channels of the brain it can be helpful, as long as the smaller activities doesn’t interrupt the main activity. Restak talks about how listening to music can help people who work with their hands, specifically surgeons, perform their jobs more effectively. One surgeon he interviewed referred to the music as not a distraction, but “a way of blocking out all of the other distractions” (Restak 384). Since the two activities, performing surgery and listening to music, require different parts of the brain to activate, they can happen at the same time without having to “compete” for your attention. Similarly Restak points out how if a surgeon were to listen to an audiobook instead of music, there would probably be some issues. Sometimes, activities that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with each other can still be affected when performed at the same time.

Young adult are at an even high risk to make mistakes when they try to perform two tasks that use the same neurological pathways. In this case, the results can be dangerous or even fatal. Restak gives an example of this, talking about a scenario where someone on the talking to their friend on the phone is having trouble focusing on driving in deteriorating conditions as well. Although talking and listening to their friend are auditory tasks, as Anderson describes it in his piece, “If the person on the other end of the phone is describing a visual scene … that conversation can actually occupy your visual channel enough to impair your ability to see what’s around you on the road” (4). With that being said, it’s easy to see how being distracted by multitasking can be not so efficient.

While younger people are better at multitasking than people who are older, it does come with its own price. Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have become very common today, with characteristics of the two now being considered ordinary behavior. Is this constant demand for our attention to blame for the increase of ADD and ADHD? Although both disorders can be passed down genetically, it’s not always so. “Typically, the parents of a child diagnosed with the disorder will be found upon interview to exhibit many of the criteria for adult ADD/ADHD. But many cases of ADD/ADHD in both children and adults occur without any hereditary disposition, suggesting the probability of culturally induced ADD/ADHD” (Restak 376). The constant input of information from today’s world causes our brains to shift back and forth within a few tenths of a second. With many critics commenting on how our society is becoming a society with ADHD and ADD, it makes you wonder if the increase in demands on our attention are to blame.

Many people feel the need to add elements of these disorders to be successful in the workplace. People need to constantly keep up with the bustle of the modern workplace, where distractions are constantly being thrown at them. This sensory overload causes our brains to keep up with the increase of information within shorter time spans. Many young people turn to neuroenhancers to help them focus on the job, despite them being illegal. College students in specific are known for relying on these drugs, with “up to 25 percent of students … taking them” on some campuses (Anderson 5). Neuroenhancers are drugs, such as Ritalin and Adderall for example, designed to treat mental disorders that cause users without these disorder to gain greater attention. Anderson gives an example about a guy named Joshua Foer, who after taking neuroenhancers “beat his unbeatable brother at Ping-Pong, solved anagrams, devoured dense books. ‘The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my in-box apparently shut down,’ he wrote” (Anderson 8). “How are these neuroenhancers a bad thing?” you may be asking. Some people even push for legalization, saying that they’re just a tool to help people think. However Anderson gives a good point, saying that they are known to decrease the creativity of people. I remember once my friend told me that her boyfriend, who has pretty noticeable ADHD, told her chooses not to take his medication because it makes him feel like a zombie and not like himself. Despite harmful effects, young people still continue to use these drugs.

The world around us is becoming evermore distracting, with technology allowing us to do and see things previously impossible. The constant input of information we need to be able to process is always expanding, which can only lead to greater sensory overload. Over time, this constant sensory overload is likely causing us to become a culture of ADD/ADHD. We currently embrace elements of these disorders as lifestyle choices because we have no other option besides falling behind in today’s fast paced world. How may we instead combat growing fog of distraction from continuing to creep in? Many people choose to just drug themselves into focus, but is that really beneficial? Or is it just covering their problem of being distracted by another problem? It might be difficult for society to fix this, and with technology continuously developing, distractions can only become more of a problem.

 

Works Cited

Anderson, Sam. “In Defense of Distraction.” New York, NYMag.com, 17 May 2009, nymag.com/news/features/56793/.

Henig, Robin Henig. “What Is It about 20-Somethings?” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin, 2016, pp 198-213.

Restak, Richard. “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era.” Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin, 2016, pp 373-385.