Name: How Smartphones Sabotage Your Brain's Ability to Focus | WSJ
Uploaded: 2019-10-19T06:00:35.000Z
Duration: 5 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Attention, much like your daily allowance

We live in an age of constant distractions

With my smartphone in hand I bring my work

with me everywhere but our devices make us less attentive.

Having spent 10 years doing research in neurobiology,

I wondered what technology does to our brains.

I set out to understand the science of distractions

We receive over 90 emails and write about 40 of them.

On average we switch tasks every three minutes.

When we face distractions two areas of the brain,

the parietal cortex and the frontal cortex are

Some research suggests that the parietal cortex responds

to distractions, the frontal cortex which is involved

in cognitively demanding tasks helps us maintain focus.

of the parietal cortex gets through to the frontal cortex.

If the frontal cortex can keep the parietal in check,

The brain is deciding what's important and what's not

and you're not actually doing hard cognitive work,

you kinda actually are, because there's all

requires a little bit more of cognitive effort

What we found was that checking email more frequently

with feeling more stressed and overwhelmed.

In the study, one group of people were asked

to check their email whenever they wanted throughout the day

while the other group had to do it in batches.

We found that people who batched their emails three

to five times a day felt less stressed and less overwhelmed.

Why are these tasks that seem really menial,

why are they so stressful and anxiety inducing?

You're basically doing something that other people need.

Let's imagine that attention is this calm lake

and then each notification is a little drop in that lake.

We can think of the reflectiveness as you know the ability

to actually focus on what's going on around us

but when we have all these drops all the time,

now you get a reflecting pool disturbed and frazzled.

- [Daniela] If email is like rain, notifications seem

like a storm to our productivity and our ability to focus.

The higher the cognitive load the more susceptible we are

Notifications on our phones draw our attention away

by a notification you have to switch your attention

and switch it back, the switching in and of

itself actually requires cognitive effort

and so you end up more depleted at the end of the day.

- So what do we do as cellphone users to mitigate that?

is I do have scheduled do not disturb times

when you know basically no notifications come in.

In general, I do keep my phone on silent.

I actually am like most people a little addicted

so I do actually open those apps frequently enough

- [Daniela] So to take new technologies we may first need

to reconsider how and when we rely on them.

to find a building either with their phones

on their phones got to the building faster

but these same students actually felt less connected

to their community and so it's not a question

These social bonds that hold society together I think

are getting more and more chipped away from us.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Smartphones Sabotage Your Brain's Ability to Focus | WSJ

ultimately

anxiety

cognitive

essentially