Attention Span by Gloria Mark

Attention Span by Gloria Mark

Author:Gloria Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2022-11-04T14:03:49+00:00


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The body as well as the mind can respond to distractions. We discovered in this study that self-distraction habits in the digital world can be so ingrained in people that muscle memory takes over. Andrew, a study participant with low self-regulation, reported that even though he used the blocking software, he noticed his fingers would habitually start to type Facebook.com before he was even aware that he had the intention to go on Facebook. This implicit sensorimotor skill happens without conscious deliberation, similar to how a pianist might sit down at the piano and instinctively start to play a well-learned piece. The idea of a schema can explain this. If you recall, a schema is an internal representation in our minds of a pattern of behavior, and in this case, the schema is the routine action of going to Facebook. When the fingers start to type the beginning of Facebook.com, the muscle movement activates a schema that we have stored in our minds. This illustrates how the unconscious mind can influence distractions.

At the end of the week, only two people continued to use the software (it was free). We asked the others what they thought. Twenty people said they would use it, but it needed to have modifications, like giving them more information to help them learn to self-adjust on their own. Some people reported they would never use it as they felt too controlled by it.

Blocking software might seem like a solution for some, but is there a consequence of off-loading our self-regulation onto technology? Later I will discuss the downside of deferring the work of developing our own agency onto software. I will argue how it is critical to develop our own skills to self-regulate.

Self-regulation and poor sleep

Insufficient sleep affects people globally, in all nations, age groups and genders, and has been referred to as a public health epidemic.31 You may not be aware, though, of why the poor sleep you got last night affects your ability to focus today. Self-regulation is affected when our cognitive resources are depleted, and when we are sleep-deprived, our resources are low. It thus seems to follow that our poor sleep habits (or insomnia) would affect our attention focus in the digital world. We know that when people don’t get enough sleep, they have trouble paying attention the next day. But exactly how poor sleep affects our attention on our devices needed to be tested. College students are notorious for poor sleep habits, and to test how it affected their attentiveness, there was a population at hand to study—at my university. With my graduate students Yiran Wang and Melissa Niiya, we logged the computer activity of seventy-six undergraduate college students for seven days at the University of California Irvine and asked them to keep sleep diaries. This study was done before we could rely on wearables to accurately track sleep, and at the time, sleep diaries were the gold standard for measuring sleep used in clinical studies. The computer logging enabled us to see how long their attention span was on their computer and smartphone screens.



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