Maine: I am visiting my niece, her husband, and their toddler.  We are enjoying typical Sunday-morning activities—chatting, reading The Times, playing games.  Which is to say: niece is reading The Times online; husband is playing online backgammon; toddler is watching Sesame Street on Dad’s Mac; I’m gchatting with a distant friend. 

Back at Choice: I have logged on to my various electronic tools and am browsing The Times online and simultaneously managing buckets of weekend e-mails.  I glimpse a link on the The Times’ landing page to Matt Richtel’s “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price” (June 6, 2010).  Intrigued, I click through.  Zounds!  There we all are, niece, husband, toddler, me—two gen Xers, one “post-millennial,” one boomer!  Richtel wasn’t really talking about us—his starting point was a new-Internet-venture guy with several monitors (in split-screen mode) making million-dollar deals—but close enough to make me ponder my patterns: two laptops, constantly checking gmail, constantly Googling.  And that’s just weekends.  Weekdays I sit at my pc and have open e-mail, Choice’s internal database, Choice Reviews Online, OCLC, three other browser windows, a couple of Word docs, maybe an Excel doc.  In terms of Richtel’s piece, this is kindergarten-level connection.

As Richtel points out, research done in the mid-20th century revealed that the human brain cannot simultaneously make decisions about two streams of information; my brain is simultaneous reaching out to some dozen streams.  Think what Richtel’s Web start-up man is dealing with.  Richtel goes on to observe that throughout the life span, the human brain (no matter the age of its owner) continues to adapt—rewire itself—to demands put on it.  Accordingly, multitaskers (i.e., anyone—young or old—knowledgeable about things electronic) are rewiring their brains to manage the information load.  This involves putting aside the present task—say, writing an editorial—to deal with newer information (ah, here’s an Outlook pop-up notifying me of an incoming e-mail—I’ll just deal with that).  There’s an evolutionary rationale for this—think nearby hungry lion; but likely my incoming e-mail isn’t announcing a carnivore at my door.

Where am I heading?  Hmm.  What was I saying?  Oh, yes, distraction.  Distraction is one name of the new game  Guilty as charged.  All day I charge around the electronic universe, pursuing my tasks and e-mailing colleagues in adjacent offices—and my brain (which isn’t all that young) is all the while rewiring itself to accommodate shallower (my word) thinking, at the expense of deep, contemplative, sustained concentration.  But Richtel’s talking not about me but about those born into the electronic world, all busily texting, blogging, tweeting, in addition to plain old surfing—all busily rewiring their brains.  Who are these distractible, increasingly antisocial people?  They are me and mine, they are net-savvy entrepreneurs—and they are the students at every academic institution in North America.

But I am reforming: writing this editorial I haven’t turned to any other task and have ignored several tempting alerts from Outlook.  And just as soon as I put down my virtual pen, I’m going to disable that pop-up alert.—RAB