May I Have My Attention,
Please? Information overload is distracting everyone these days, but those over 50 are most at risk. Here’s how to keep
your thoughts on track By KATY READ
The other day I counted 49 browser tabs open on my computer.
That’s right—I was attempting to look at 49 different Internet
pages, more or less simultaneously.
E-mail. Blogs. You Tube videos. Articles about health, careers, entertainment, personal finance. News and opinion pieces on topics
ranging from North Korea to napping. A Web page (dramabutton
.com) featuring a button that, when clicked, plays the melodramatic old-movie music that signals some shocking development:
Dun-dun-daaahhh!
Welcome to the Attention Crisis—
also known as the “culture of distraction,” “information-fatigue syndrome,”
or simply “modern life.” It’s what
happens when technology’s flashing,
beeping, dun-dun-daaahhhing stimuli
scramble your focus, shred your nerves,
and squander your productivity. Add
an understaffed workplace (or the
stress of job hunting), dealing with kids
at home and aging parents, and other
demands of 21st-century life, and it’s
no wonder your attention strains at the
seams. All Americans are vulnerable
to this problem, but people over 50 are
especially so, because normal brain
changes—including small blockages to
the brain’s blood supply and a drop in
nerve-signaling chemicals—can make
it harder to tune out distractions.
“We’re really facing the limit of human ability to cope with stimuli in our
environment,” says Maggie Jackson,
author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. And
the stimuli keep multiplying. Researchers at the University of California–San
Diego recently found that, on average,
Americans hear, see, or read 34 giga-bytes worth of information a day—about
100,000 words—from TV, the Internet,
books, radio, newspapers, and other
sources. That figure has grown more
than 5 percent annually since 1980.
What’s worse, our coping mechanisms may increase our stress levels.
We multitask frantically, but our to-do
lists only grow. We pay “continuous
partial attention,” according to former
Microsoft executive Linda Stone, who
writes a blog called The Attention Project: we skim furiously, hoping not to
miss anything. We fall into black holes
of time and emerge blinking, hours
