Recently I am challenged to distill the most important aspects of my mind and persona, to detail what my assets are as a human being. At this turning point in my life and career I must ask what I can give to the world, for on this I can base a long successful career not dependent on the regular career paths of accelerated ascension through meaningless hierarchy. If I have arrived at any conclusion it is because I rarely notice one particular characteristic in many I meet. The ability to focus. The ability to think deeply.

Focus has developed over many years, through sitting alone in a quiet place, thinking along a specific thread or simply allowing my mind to show me whatever it holds within. Over time this has lead to a particular quiescence of mind. A valuable goal but not the final destination, just the first aspect of life-long development. The goal is not to destroy the ego but to transcend it. An ability analyze and store the multiple inputs of important and unimportant pieces of information is one of the first abilities gained from this practice. To recall and to distill is a spectacular skill to have, to make balanced decisions is another result. Why do others seem to lack these abilities? Of the few things the individual can control, attention is the most apparent. Forfeiting that ability throughout our day limits the ability to think in an all-encompassing manner.

The greatest qualm I have with the modern office environment and subsequently the role of technology in our lives is the ubiquity of distraction. Sam Anderson from NY Mag summarizes the new face of attention through, In Defense of Distraction. From Sam’s interview with psychologist David Meyer,

“I  think it’s going to get a lot worse than people expect.” He [David Meyer] sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. He compares it, in fact, to smoking. “People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes,” he says, “in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.”

The ability to focus on any particular task and to give it our full attention, is becoming extinct. In the corporate world that now controls most of society’s assets, executives have little time to actually think about their decisions. Bombarded by emails via blackberry and continual downloads of information our workplaces are a plethora of distractions. Once again from Sam Anderson’s piece,

American office workers don’t stick with any single task for more than a few minutes at a time; if left uninterrupted, they will most likely interrupt themselves. Since every interruption costs around 25 minutes of productivity, we spend nearly a third of our day recovering from them. We keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds.

We are losing the ability to read. Not only reading online, but in books as well,

When we read online, we hardly even read at all—our eyes run down the page in an F pattern, scanning for keywords. When you add up all the leaks from these constant little switches, soon you’re hemorrhaging a dangerous amount of mental power. People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana.

Besides the obvious consequences of information overload, the most recent episode of Lorenzo’s Psychedelic Salon podcast features Bruce Damer who reveals even more troubling ramifications of technological control over our attention. Bruce presents the implications of Antonio Damasio’s work on the speed of thinking demonstrating that our brain has a cognitive aspect and an emotive aspect which operate at completely different speeds. Unfortunately the cognitive aspect dominates when we are bombarded by information, removing our ability to factor in emotions. Take the time to listen to the podcast embedded below, but I have a few key excerpts from Damer’s talk,

“What Damasio is showing is that people who, in the lab, get a huge amount of cognitive stimulus all the time start to have no access to the emotional part [of themselves] at all. They can’t store to it, and they can’t retrieve from it. They become what he calls emotionally neutral… so if ANY crisis arises you have the wrong people [in charge], probably, because the things that put them there, and the constituencies that wanted them there, create a person who is incapable of handling a real crisis.”

Becoming emotionally neutral causes us to suffer in our lives, preventing us from truly interfacing with those around us. I have driven home from an office job in times past realizing that there is a haze separating me from the actual world. I am dulled mentally, but specifically in my emotional capacities. One of the most tragic examples in my life came a few summers ago, when I worked at an engineering firm. Returning home from a day of staring at a screen, sitting in a cube, my girlfriend called me for solace after her grandfather had passed away. I was completely unable to provide the empathy she deserved because my emotional center was shot. I had become completely dominated by the cognitive mind, unable to access any of the emotional intelligence I could provide. We all have examples of these experiences, whether we are conscious of them or not. And so does our entire society.

One of the reasons this happens, as Damer continues to describe in the podcast, is because our office environment consists of rapid eye movement across a screen. Jumping from email to email, from notification popup to excel table. This is equivalent to the rapid eye movement characteristics of stress inducing situations, like our ancestors cornered by predatory animals. The brain responds by secreting adrenaline and because our body isn’t moving this energy stagnates. Around the middle of the day we are hit with exhaustion, our adrenal glands are fatigued. After years of this behavior we face severe mental exhaustion, our sleep becomes less refreshing, we feel tired all the time. How the human species will respond to this problem en masse is unknown. This is a vast experiment, unlike any other in human history.

Perhaps the survival of the fittest will ensure that our ancestors have larger heads (adapted to the cognative), bigger eyes (to absorb more of the screens we must view) and thin bodies adapted to little sunlight (adapting to modern American nutrition, all those subject to obesity will slowly disappear). I don’t think we’ll ever reach that point but if I were to sketch it out, the future incarnation of humanity would probably look something like the picture below,

the future look of humanity? oddly familiar...

During the last few years as an undergraduate student, I was continually shocked at the inability for classmates and peers to focus. I witnessed how Adderall became a panacea for exam time. And as with most technological solutions the drug works like a charm… providing unintended consequences. Returning to Sam Anderson’s article linked above, the real problem here is that we are trying to exceed our natural abilities. Outsourcing our attention to drugs like Ritalin and Adderal turns us into robots,

Adderall users frequently complain that the drug stifles their creativity—that it’s best for doing ultrarational, structured tasks. (As Foer put it, “I had a nagging suspicion that I was thinking with blinders on.”) One risk the scientists do acknowledge is the fascinating, horrifying prospect of “raising cognitive abilities beyond their species-typical upper bound.” Ultimately, one might argue, neuroenhancers spring from the same source as the problem they’re designed to correct: our lust for achievement in defiance of natural constraints.

I don’t see a quick solution to these issues other than individuals who can take notice of the problem and can begin to practice silent meditation. David Meyer added,

there’s a subset of Buddhists who believe that the most advanced monks become essentially “world-class multitaskers”—that all those years of meditation might actually speed up their mental processes enough to handle the kind of information overload the rest of us find crippling.

The Earth’s first society built on information overload has recently been hit hard, brought its knees because the people responsible for our assets have made emotionally questionable decisions. I doubt that a thoughtful person could ever succeed in the cutthroat political or corporate world, leaving me little hope for the political will of America. Yet, I have tremendous faith in our species while we propagate methods of reflection and deep thought. We can have hope for the future of the emotional psyche.

this image has nothing to do with the text above