The Zen of Useful Distractions

Infor­ma­tion is empow­er­ing, but too much can it can also be debil­i­tat­ing.  Infor­ma­tion Over­load costs the U.S. econ­omy $900 bil­lion per year. In this inter­est­ing video a few of the world’s lead­ing man­agers dis­cuss the prob­lem.  In Defense of Dis­trac­tion dis­cusses how our brains are adapt­ing to make the most of the new information-rich envi­ron­ments we live in:

More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on expe­ri­ence, a fea­ture called neu­ro­plas­tic­ity. Lon­don taxi dri­vers, for instance, have enlarged hip­pocampi (the brain region for mem­ory and spa­tial processing)—a neural reward for pay­ing atten­tion to the tan­gle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flit­ting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more effi­ciently with more infor­ma­tion. The neu­ro­sci­en­tist Gary Small spec­u­lates that the human brain might be chang­ing faster today than it has since the pre­his­toric dis­cov­ery of tools. Research sug­gests we’re already pick­ing up new skills: bet­ter periph­eral vision, the abil­ity to sift infor­ma­tion rapidly.

How­ever, for those of us still strug­gling to keep up, the arti­cle sug­gests meditation:

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Bud­dhists, whose atten­tional dis­ci­pline can appar­ently con­fer all kinds of ben­e­fits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psy­chol­o­gists pre­dict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “sec­u­lar atten­tional work­outs.”) … atten­tion is a lim­ited resource…  our moment-by-moment choice of atten­tional tar­gets deter­mines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives. Rapt’s epi­graph comes from the psy­chol­o­gist and philoso­pher William James: “My expe­ri­ence is what I agree to attend to.”