by Matt Richtel
Through the nineteenth century, technology quickly evolved. In 1837, across the ocean, Samuel Morse unveiled his first telegraph device, and five years later “Morse convinced Congress to provide $30,000 in support of his plan to ‘wire’ the United States,” according to a history compiled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It notes that in May of 1844, Morse gave a public demonstration, sending a message from Washington to a train depot in Baltimore. The message read: What hath God wrought?
There were twenty-three thousand miles of telegraph wire in operation by 1854, MIT reported (Western Union was founded in 1851). In 1866, a cable link connected the United States and Europe. Thanks to machines, data was moving much faster than humans could ever transport it.
In Europe, another innovator, Charles Babbage, born the son of a banker in 1791, was developing an early calculating machine at the time that Morse was refining and evangelizing the telegraph. Babbage designed schematics for a programmable computer, something that could process mathematical equations in place of the human mind. He was celebrated at the time for these marvelous concepts—and then much later as one of the computer’s great pioneers.
As the technology evolved, it had almost competing roles. It was simultaneously leading to tools that would make humans so much more powerful, and at the same time, it was making humans seem less powerful, certainly slower, than they’d ever been.
A boy from the same hometown as modern-art master Vincent van Gogh was about to show just how slow.
TILBURG IS A MANUFACTURING town in North Brabant in the Netherlands, known today as the place Van Gogh did his childhood schooling. But in 1818, more than two decades earlier, Tilburg saw the birth of Francis Cornelius Donders. F. C. Donders learned early in his life to pay attention; he had eight older sisters. He would later study attention with unprecedented precision.
Like Helmholtz, he developed into a scientist with many interests, though he was known early in his career for ophthalmology and for establishing the first eye hospital in the Netherlands in 1858. In the middle of the 1860s, Donders turned his attention to human reaction time. He came up with an experiment that involved sitting two people in front of a “phonautograph.” It was an early recording device, patented in 1857 by a Frenchman, that captured sound and then, through a mechanical arm, transcribed it onto a piece of paper. In Donders’s experiment, one participant uttered a syllable, then the other repeated it as quickly as possible. Using the phonautograph, Donders was beginning to measure what he called “the timing of the mind” and “mental action.”
He set about trying to determine what circumstances led to shorter and longer reaction times. To do so, he employed three simple tests. In one, a person sat in front of a panel of lightbulbs and pressed a button when a light went on; in a second, the person faced a slightly more complex task of hitting a specific button corresponding to a specific light; in the third, the person was required to hit a button when one of the lights went on, though this time if the person failed to do so in a timely manner, the other light would go on.
There is a seemingly obvious quality to his conclusions: Simple tasks take shorter time and that time grows with the complexity and type of process involved. For instance, the reaction time grows if the person must make a choice, or engage a particular motor skill, like pressing a specific button.
Donders expanded the experiments. He introduced a range of different demands and stimuli, asking lab participants to respond with the left hand, or the right, and to discern among and between colors, words, sounds. He discovered that more complex tasks not only took more time, they introduced a new wrinkle: more error.
How quickly could the brain work, and how much information could it take in and at what speed? Donders built instruments to try to measure what he called “the time required for simple mental processes.”
“He was measuring,” Dr. Posner explains, “the time it takes to have a thought.
“As you go into the history of the study of attention, the really epic discovery was the speed of mental processing.”
Donders’s writing at the time shows an ebullient quality, such as when he describes the challenges of quantifying mental processing. “But will all qualitative treatment of mental processes be out of the question then? By no means!”
There was also an ominous note to his findings, published in 1868. He wrote: “Distraction during the appearance of the stimulus is always punished with the prolongation of the process,” notes a biography published by the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour in the Netherlands.
Meantime, computer technology, such as it was, was getting more sophisticated. The cutting-edge computer of the period would hardly have been seen as distracting, unless by virtue of its sheer size people couldn’t take their eyes off of it. Take, for instance, the Hollerith tabulator. It looked sort of like an upright piano, and used punch cards. Thanks to use of the device in 1890, the calculation of census data at the time fell to three years, down from seven, according to the Computer History Museum. At the time, a publication called the Electrical Engineer remarked that the tabulator bested even divine speeds. “This apparatus works unerringly as the mills of the gods, but beats them hollow as to speed,” the Electrical Engineer read, according to a history published by Columbia University.
The Hollerith tabulator was the work of Herman Hollerith, who incorporated the Tabulating Machine Company at the end of the nineteenth century. Later, in 1911, it became the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which in turn was renamed in 1924 as International Business Machines, or IBM. Modern computing was in its infancy, still used only by corporations and the military, or other huge government operations. But in those circles, its power was becoming apparent.
On a mostly separate track, there were also major advances in communications technology. Alexander Graham Bell, working on development of a talking telegraph, got essential patents toward his efforts in 1876 and 1877, the year he and partners started the Bell Telephone Company. By 1904, there were 3.3 million telephones in the United States, according to a corporate history published by AT&T. Then, by 1927, transatlantic telephone calls were available using two-way radio technology, with a call costing $75 for three minutes.
As the twentieth century progressed, developments in computing and interpersonal communications technology, which had been evolving somewhat independently, began to converge. It is a powerful union whose significance cannot be understated. The marriage of computers and communications brought so much utility. It also set the stage for a formidable, arguably unprecedented, challenge to the human brain, one that was often unseen and widely underestimated. Put another way, technology was evolving by the day, but the human brain was more or less staying put.
BY TEN P.M., THE Gazzloft is hopping. The host, enjoying pats on the back and gifts of booze from newcomers, slides through the crowd and sidles up to his girlfriend, who in turn is talking to a man with a three-day growth, a friendly grin, and a gray fedora. Dan Vickrey is the guitarist for Counting Crows and cowriter of some of the band’s big hits. He’s just back from tour, his face ruddy from the effects of days on the road. These days, he says, bands make their money from touring, not from putting out music, even hits. That’s because the Internet has shattered traditional business models and fractured the attention of the audience. So many entertainment options, so little time.
While on this latest tour, he explains, he had a cool experience related to technology. In the front row at one of the concerts sat a cherubic man with a white beard. Dan didn’t recognize Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple Computer. But he was wowed when, later, after the concert, Woz came backstage and asked Dan if he wanted to have dinner sometime, just to hobnob and hang out. “How cool is that!” Dan says.
“Look!” Dr. Gazzaley exclaims.
His girlfriend and Dan follow the neuroscientist’s gaze to a group of three people standing nearby in the middle of the packed room. One of the three clearly commands the group’s
focus. He’s tall with hair that is both short and unkempt. On his nose sits a pair of odd-looking glasses. They look sort of like the slimmed-down opaque wraparound shades worn by cyclists.
“Google glasses. One of ten pairs in the world!”
The glasses are not used to help show a person the outside world but, rather, a flow of information. When a wearer glances to a spot in the corner of a lens, he or she can scan a data feed to, say, check incoming email. In this case, they are mere prototype, a grand curiosity being worn by another local celeb, Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life.
After the Google Glass sighting, Gazzaley, his girlfriend, and Dan the guitarist, each pull out their cell phones. Dr. Gazzaley looks up to see the others lost in their own space. “That’s funny. That’s a moment,” he observes. He surmises: Each of us was probably going to tweet about it or post the moment on Facebook.
Dr. Gazzaley says various media outlets have been calling him to ask about the new Google glasses and how they might impact attention.
“They’re distracting! I keep telling them.” But, he says, “They don’t want to hear it. They have an agenda, and they’re going to print whatever they want.”
THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT moment. Here, amid the digerati, the elite of the Valley, the definition of attention seems to broaden. It is not merely about the cocktail party effect, which demonstrates the power and limitations of our ability to focus. In this setting, amid a cacophony of face-to-face and virtual communications, another key piece falls into place. It has to do with our desires and efforts to capture other people’s attention.
After all, all the tweets and Facebook status updates, the emails, YouTube videos, and texts are not creating themselves. We are creating them. They are enabled by technology, sure. But they are driven by the humans pressing the buttons, asking for a tiny piece of the fractured spotlight. In modern life, as at this cocktail party, the noise is not incidental, not a laboratory exercise. It is everywhere, and it is created by someone, or many, each with their needs.
In fact, the ability for individuals to create and broadcast media explains a key difference between the nature and amount of information people consume today than in past eras. In 2008, people consumed three times the amount of information they did in 1960, according to researchers at the University of California at San Diego. And now, the researchers say, one-third of the information we consume is interactive (as opposed to passive media like television or radio).
In the spring of 2013, a few months after this First Friday party took place, Twitter announced that users were sending 400 million tweets per day. That’s up from 340 million per day a year earlier, a 17.6 percent increase. That’s a mere drop in the bucket, compared to the number of texts sent—six billion in the United States each day. Email adds another 144 billion globally on a daily basis. And don’t neglect Facebook, which reported in the summer of 2012 that users were daily posting 2.5 billion pieces of content (status updates, photos, videos, comments, etc.).
The cascade also spills over into the work world. A typical office worker was getting interrupted by various media stimulation every three minutes in 2004, according to research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California at Irvine. That was before the spread of instant messaging and Facebook. By 2013, the interruptions were every two minutes; such intrusions came either from a person responding to a new stimulus—like an incoming email—or from an internal urge to change tasks, say, to write a new email.
Dr. Gazzaley sees another side effect in that there were so many medical journals popping up online that it was getting hard to keep up with all the new developments and to figure out which were valid and which were not.
“More journals are coming into existence. It’s hard to keep pace with the articles hitting journals. It’s almost impossible, there’s so much of it,” he says. He’s a full participant, publishing articles, speaking, doing media appearances. Broadly, the challenge of keeping up is “a problem of oversaturation.” At the Gazzloft, Dr. Gazzaley attracts the attention of the old-fashioned variety: A beautiful woman with long black hair, dressed in a tight skirt, gives him an adoring eye. Before he peels away to hobnob, he says he has a thought about another way to illustrate the way attention works, and how easily it can be fractured in the modern world. He wants to show me the power of distraction.
Through Mickey Hart, he explains, he’s met a man named Patrick Martin. Patrick is a magician. “He’s done magic for heads of state,” in addition to Muhammad Ali and Princess Di.
Dr. Gazzaley says the magician is a master of manipulating attention. In a room in which he is exposed to an audience all around him—360 degrees—he manages to steer the attention of everyone exactly where he wants it, and away from the thing they think they are trying to focus on: the sleight of hand.
Of late, the magician has Dr. Gazzaley thinking about distraction. It’s not exactly the opposite of attention. But it is an antagonist to attention. As such, Dr. Gazzaley thinks the concept of distraction provides a powerful lens through which to view the science of attention. He invites me to join him and the magician for dinner, so I can see for myself.
“Distraction,” Dr. Gazzaley says, “is a powerful weapon.”
CHAPTER 8
TERRYL
ONE NIGHT, WHEN TERRYL Danielson was in the tenth grade, the door swung open in her bedroom. It was midnight, The cusp of another scary and vivid childhood memory. Her dad stood in the doorway again, this time armed with a saxophone.
He blew into it, his red cheeks filling it with breath and spittle, creating screeching noises, nothing approximating music. He was beyond drunk, blitzed, filled with fury.
“Stop it. We’re trying to sleep!” she yelled.
“You shut your mouth!”
He began to parade around the house. Terryl shut her door and put on the record player to shut out the noise.
It was a new chapter with a similar theme and a more intense antagonist. At this point, Terryl recalls, Danny had started drinking earlier in the day, every day. He would wait until everyone was asleep, then take out Michael’s gold saxophone, and start blowing, sometimes for hours.
Terryl would hide the saxophone. In the bathtub, a cupboard, her bedroom. Danny would wake her, demand it, berate her, threaten her. Her beatings for the most part had stopped. This was the new psychological warfare. Sometimes he’d find the sax. Sometimes she’d get the sleep her body craved, that she knew she needed, even though she wasn’t trying to stand out at school, just survive it. Somehow she got A’s and B’s.
IN HER DIARY, SHE graded her days. Most were D’s and F’s. But there wasn’t much to be done about it. Terryl remembers Danny making the stakes clear: If Kathie left, he’d take Mitchell. “The threat of him kidnapping Mitchell was constantly held over our heads,” Terryl says. The cops were no help. Sometimes Terryl would call them, or a neighbor did, but she felt hopeless, and, like Danny, had it covered: He told the officers that it was a family matter.
Terryl also felt that Kathie was accusing her of being an instigator. Terryl thought she followed most of the rules: Don’t mess up the house, stay outside, and don’t answer the phone. She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t supposed to pick up the phone, but that was the rule.
Terryl felt like her mother blamed her for antagonizing Danny, and making things worse.
And there was the threat of gunplay. Her dad sometimes flashed his Magnum. Terryl remembers him also carrying a brown bag filled with painkillers, which he washed down with vodka.
Sometimes, when Danny was wasted, he would tell Terryl and Michael that he wasn’t their real father. In the morning, Terryl would ask her mother about it and Kathie would tell her that Danny was drunk and to ignore him.
Terryl knew better than to invite any friends over to the house. But once, she invited the daughter of the bishop at her local church to visit her when Terryl was visiting her maternal grandparents. It was a sleepover, interrupted. In the middle of the night, Danny sho
wed up hammered, and threatened to take Mitchell. Same old, same old, at least for Terryl. But she looked over and saw the bishop’s daughter, Julie, tucked between the edge of the wall and the piano, sobbing. They took her home the next morning, a day earlier than they’d planned, and the girl never spoke to Terryl again.
TERRYL’S FIRST ESCAPE HATCH had been books. She took a more concrete step when she was sixteen. She went to a local youth employment program in Downey and got a referral to a mom-and-pop accounting business.
It was in a small office plaza in Downey, in a nondescript two-story office building owned by Mark and Millie Mandel. They were an older couple, both CPAs, on their second marriages. They had eight children between them—all grown, all college grads. Terryl earned $2.25 an hour answering phones and filing papers. She bought Mitchell a new pair of sneakers, sometimes a toy. She purchased a dirt-cheap, used red Ford Pinto with fake-wood paneling.
At the firm, she worked quietly, trying to be friendly but invisible, just like at Warren High School, where she tried not to fall asleep conspicuously. She reminisces that she managed a 3.2 GPA at Warren but that she felt like the “trashiest girl in school.”
In her senior year, Terryl tried out for the cheerleading squad. One night, she went over to the house of Nanci Smith and her husband, Rich, the family’s close friends from way back, and showed off the cheers she was working on. Terryl was so excited. Then Danny came over and was drunk, or on the pills, and just started ripping into Terryl, telling her she was nothing. “He slammed her verbally, up one side and down the other,” Nanci remembers. “He crushed her like a little bug.”
Nanci thought that maybe this big drunk went after Terryl because, in his own way, he was intimidated by her. “She could outthink him. She was smarter than him, always two steps ahead of him,” Nanci recalls. It frustrated Danny that “she wouldn’t cave in. He couldn’t destroy her with words.”