Modern Wisdom - #584 - Dr Gloria Mark - How To Take Control Of Your Attention

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Dr Gloria Mark is the Chancellor's professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California and an author whose research focuses on human-computer interaction. Not being able to focus and suffering with distracted attention is one of the most common complaints amongst people in the modern world. The ability to stay focussed on a single task for a long period of time is hugely beneficial and yet has never been more difficult to achieve. Expect to learn what attention actually is and how it works, the average amount of time that people spend on a single task in the modern world, why attention is so easy to distract, whether multitasking is actually a thing, how to take back control from your distractions, how to deal with guilt around being distracted, the best way to design your daily routine for maximum focus and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get $100 off plus an extra 15% discount on Qualia Mind at https://neurohacker.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 10% discount on all Optimal Carnivore’s products at www.amazon.com/optimalcarnivore (use code: WISDOMSAVE10) Extra Stuff: Buy Attention Span - https://amzn.to/3HzL1ZC  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Gloria Mark. She's the Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California and an author whose research focuses on human computer interaction. Not being able to focus and suffering with distracted attention is one of the most common complaints amongst people in the modern world. The ability to stay focused on a single task for a long period of time is hugely beneficial, and yet has never been more difficult to achieve. Expect to learn what

attention actually is and how it works, the average amount of time that people spend on a single task in the modern world, why attention is so easy to distract, whether multitasking is actually a thing, how to take back control from your distractions, how to deal with guilt around being distracted, the best way to design your daily routine for maximum focus, and much more. Really, really cool episode. Here very much needed by pretty much everybody, myself included and Dr. Gloria Mark is one of the leaders in this research field. So yeah, very, very happy to have had her on the show today.

If you are new here or if you're a long time listener, please make sure that you've hit the subscribe button. It really does support the show. It helps me get even bigger and better guests, and it makes me very happy indeed. So go and press it. Ah, thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr Gloria Mark. I would guess that managing my attention and the associated trials and tribulations that I go through trying to achieve that is probably the most common challenge that I face on a daily basis. And I also think that it's one that a lot of other people will resonate with as well.

They don't need to be a podcaster, but just attention is something that feels to me to be slipping through my fingers on a second-by-second basis. Yeah, and that's what our research shows. I've been studying this for a very long time for about two decades. You are not alone. There are many, many people who share your concern. Given that you've been studying it for quite a while, have you looked at any longitudinal stuff to do with this?

Have we had degradation over time? Is it worse now than it was 20 years ago? Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. So I first started studying this back in 2004. And what led me to study this was I noticed my own attention was becoming problematic. And I found myself switching from project to project and you know app to app and webpage to webpage. And I wondered if it was just me. And I started talking to other people, other people started mentioning similar kinds of things. So, you know, being a researcher and a psychologist, I thought I can study this empirically and find out if it's just me. So, at the time, back in 2004, we used pretty primitive technology to measure this.

We used stopwatch, so we would click the stopwatch every time a person shifted screens. And it's very accurate, but it was very laborious and took a long time, but we were able to get objective results. And back then, we found attention was about two and a half minutes on any screen before people switch to another screen. At the time it astounded me, but I kept measuring this and then computer logging techniques were invented, which made the process so much easier. They again could get very objective measures of how long people are on any computer or phone screen. Around 2011, we found attention spans to decline to about 75 seconds. What was on the first one was two and a half minutes? Two and a half minutes down to about a minute and 15 seconds. And this is on average. and in the last five, six years, we find it's about, it's reached a steady state

of about 47 seconds on any screen before switching. This has also been replicated by others who found results within a few seconds. So it seems to be that our attention spans have diminished. And let me present another way to look at this, which I think is, you know, makes you see this perhaps more clearly. If you look at the median of our measurements, that means the midpoint, the midpoint. We find that half of all of our measurements show people's attention to be less than 40 seconds. So, you know, yes, of course, sometimes we spend longer, but half the time that we're on our devices, our attention spans are 40 seconds or less in duration. That is absolutely terrifying. That is absolutely terrifying. It is and you know, I was surprised back in 2004, but I am continued to be amazed.

What has happened over the last 20 years that has had the biggest impact on our attention? You know, I'm not sure we can say there's one single influence. There there's one single influence. There's so many things. There are, of course, there are individual differences. Some people happen to be better at self-regulation than others. There are, it's the fact that we're social beings. It's our social natures.

Don't forget social media. The big one, Facebook came along in 2003. And because of us being social creatures, we're just drawn to wanting to communicate with others. I wonder what would have happened if you'd started your research a decade earlier. I wonder if you would have seen a real inflection at Facebook because that was kind of a step change. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's such a great question. And I really wish that others had been studying this

so that we could track this much longer. So, you know, unfortunately, we don't know because we don't have the data. What do most people get wrong when it comes to thinking about how attention and distraction works? So there are several things. There are some myths. I think one myth is that we tend to blame all of our distractions on notifications, targeted algorithms, and that is certainly a source. Absolutely can't deny it. But it turns out that people are just as likely to interrupt themselves. So about half the time, people interrupt themselves. And so we can't just blame it on something external to us,

but also there's something within us. So that's definitely an another thing. And maybe we can spend some more time talking about it is that people tend to think of us of our attention as being in two states, your focus or not focused. It turns out there's it's a lot more nuanced and complicated than that. Given that around about half of our distractions are self-generated and yet we've seen attention go from two and a half minutes to 75 seconds to 43 seconds over the last 20 years, our nature hasn't changed. So what it would suggest is if 50% of an increased

number of distractions, the calls coming from inside the house, that there is an interrelationship between the changes that we've seen environmentally that are now engendering some kind of internal state, which is causing us to distract ourselves more quickly. Is that fair to say? I think that's exactly right. I think you've nailed that, right? So it's who we are as humans. We have social natures. We have particular personality types. And there's this interaction with the environment, the digital world that we live in. And let me also point out that it's not just computers and phones where we see attention spans to be short, but it turns out that other media that we watch,

things like TV and film, the shot lengths of TV and film have also decreased over time, and they average now four seconds. Do you have a look at, I think it's Fast and Furious 9? No. I think, I may be miscoordered on this, I think that Fast and Furious 9 is the blockbuster that has been released with the highest number

of scene cuts ever. Oh, it could be, yeah. For precisely that reason. A TikTok generation that goes swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, that kind of pace. I know Colin. See, the internet can hear that we're talking about it. Swipe. That pace of it, it's reflecting, like a pace, like a cadence, a tempo that people have got themselves used to when it comes to dealing with anything on a screen. And that's now,

it's so crazy that the use of social media has impacted our expectations of what we see on a screen, which has then caused movies, which have been around for much longer, to have to reverse engineer our own new overclocked nature. Yeah, so that's an interesting way to put it, but we have to be really careful. We can't make a causal claim. We can't say that the faster shot changes in TVN film have caused our attention spans. We can't say our attention spans have caused that. These are two parallel trends. The way I interpret it is that when you watch TVN film, it just reinforces us to have these short changes.

And we don't know what's causing TV and film to be to switch so fast. It could be that directors and the editors themselves are influenced by their short attention to the spam. Wow. We're all downstream from Stephen Spielberg's attention span. Imagine that. Yes. Yes. Or it could be that they're gearing, they're editing based on what they think would the audience will respond to, or it could be something else, but we can't say causality,

but it's a really interesting trend. I think that one thing thing that I I do believe has an effect is that social media platforms constrain the length of content that we can post right it constrain our text you know Twitter the length of videos like TikTok and I do feel that this has an influence. So people are used to having short snippets of content, right? They're used to snack on social media, and I do feel that this has an effect. This interrelationship between us, the predisposition that the human mind has for how attention works that has now potentially been reinforced or weaponized or utilized by an ever speeding up technology input and then is now starting to reinforce. Going back to absolute basics, let's say that somebody has no idea how our attention system works.

Why do we have an attention system? What is it? What does it mean? What are the nuts and bolts of attention? Well, attention helps us survive in the world, right? And there are different types of attention. There's conscious attention when you're really intentional about where you're paying attention to, but there's also automatic attention. When we reach for our phones, when

we go to check email or check social media, that's an automatic kind of attention. Like we're just not really aware of that. So there's that. And you know, there's the father of psychology, William James, has his wonderful quote. He says, everyone knows what attention is, right? It's using your conscious awareness, devoting it to something. I would say, of course, we know what attention is. We can't always control it. There's a distinction between knowing what it is and knowing where to control it. But we have so many things on the internet.

Ultimately, the human mind is a bottleneck. We can't possibly take in all that information. And so we're faced with our humanists and figuring out what we can attend to, what we can't, and sometimes it gives us problems. Yes, because there is more that we can attend to than we have capacity to attend to. That's right. That means that we have this task switching, attentional distraction. I remember once hearing someone describe it the same way, they've modeled how squirrels forage for food

and they said that humans forage for information in a similar sort of way. Oh, this is something new. Oh, this is something. Oh, this is something. Yeah., this is something, oh, this is something. Yeah. You get one headline and half a paragraph into a news article before you decide to go to something else, because there might be something even better.

So, okay, you come up with, I think, a slightly novel way to categorize different types of attention, this sort of layer of four. What are those different types? Right. So, I mentioned that, you know, most people tend to think there's two states of attention. You're focused or not focused. It's a lot more nuanced. And when I first started studying this, I realized you can pay attention to something and be challenged. So if I'm writing, I'm really using effort in writing and I'm engaged in it. And we have, humans have a limited amount of resources, cognitive resources, you can call it mental resources, attention resources, it's our capacity of attention.

Okay, and if you're doing focused work, you're using a lot of those resources. But we can also be engaged in something and not use much of our resources. An example is playing solitaire or, you know, I have an anagram game that I'd like to play. It's easy, but I'm really engaged in it, and I'm not really putting in a lot of effort. It's not challenging. If you're not engaged or challenged, that's a state of boredom, right? We all experience boredom at times. And if you're challenged with something and not at all engaged, we call that frustration. An example is when I have a tech problem. it really frustrates me and I'm just not engaged in it at all.

I don't want to deal with it, but I have to. And as a result, it gets me frustrated. So those are the four types. Which quadrant are people the most fulfilled or the happiest in and which are their beliefs happy in? Yeah. So this is really surprising. It turns out when people are engaged with something but they're not challenged, right? We call this wrote attention or wrote activity. Turns out people are the happiest. They feel the most positive

when they do this. Why? Because it's easy, people like to do what's easy. Very often when you play these simple kinds of games, you get rewards and you get rewarded very fast and it brings people positive feelings. And you know strangely enough, they're happier than when they're focused. Why? Because when you're focused, it involves some amount of stress, right? It can be very fulfilling, but it involves stress. On the other hand, people are the most unhappy. Well, of course, when they're frustrated, and also when they're bored, right? In fact, it's really interesting because when you're bored, you're not using any of these mental resources. And as a result, you have to devote them somewhere and you devote them to paying attention

to time, right? And so that's why when you're bored, you're always looking at your watch, you're looking at the clock because you have to be, you know, thinking of something. So we tend to think of time. Is wrote attention where people will go when they're on social media? Is that engaged but not challenged? Yes, most of the time, I would say yes. I mean, obviously, there are times you can be on social media and you're using some amount of mental effort, but most of the time it's just easy,

wrote kinds of activity. What's kinetic attention then? Because you come up with this time too. Yeah, so I mentioned that half the time our observations show people spend 40 seconds or less on an e-screen. And I was very intrigued. And, of course, I observed a lot of people. And, you know, I observed them switching their attention so fast and checking something and scrolling. And I was looking for a word to describe that kind of attention behavior is dynamic. And so, in physics, the term kinetic just seemed to explain it very well. So much of the time that we're on our screens, we use this kind of kinetic attention, which is just we're not able to stay on one screen at the same time. What do you think is happening with this prevalence of ADHD?

Because I'm seeing more conversations around it now. Is it becoming more common? I don't know whether this is your area of expertise, or could you imagine that it might be common or possible for these environmental factors to influence ADHD? So I can't speak to the interaction of an individual with the ADHD and certain distractors. What I can say as, and I wrote about this in my book, that I did a deep dive to look at the prevalence of ADHD. And in the adult US population, it seems to be roughly about 8.5 percent or so. And for younger people, I think,

up through the age of around 16 or so, the prevalence is higher. I think it's something like 14% or so, 16%. Oh, maybe I have those figures wrong. I think in the adult population, it's 4.5%. And I think up to the age of 16, it's about 8.5%. So it's certainly prevalent, but I wouldn't say it's an, to me, this does not suggest an epidemic.

I think what a lot of people are thinking because I also hear these conversations is that when people are on their computers and phones, their behavior mimics what ADHD behavior is like. But it doesn't mean that that individual has ADHD because you can get off your computer and you should be able to read a book or you should be able to walk in nature and you should be able to focus if you don't have ADHD. In other words, it seems that there is a mimicking of this behavior without actually having ADHD. Well, I think the concern that people have, and we mentioned earlier on, is this bleed from our technological relationship with regards to attention into our attentional environment generally, even when we go away from it. If 50% of the reason that we're distracted is self-generated, you take the technology

away, you still have an increased 20 year, relative 20 years stat of, I mean, you have based on where it's at because it was two and a half minutes down to less than one minute now, your 50% of self-generated stuff would have been the same as the entirety of your distractions, including external stuff only 20 years ago, which is absolutely crazy. Yeah, I mean, I was talking to my housemate, Zach, earlier on, and he said, dude, I think I might have ADHD. What makes you say that? And he says, I walk into rooms all the time, and I don't know why I've gone in. I realized that I was supposed to go in for something, and I've forgotten the reason I was in there. And I said, how many times when you do that,

are you on your phone? And it's a lot, it's a lot of the time is in that task switching mode. And as you said, the half of the number of times that we get distracted, it's less than 43 seconds. So, you know, the amount of time it takes you to go from the kitchen to the bathroom or wherever it was to get whatever it is you needed. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Okay, so there is, there is a battle for our attention at the moment, right? That is the attention economy is organizations, all of

which are competing with each other. Netflix competing with Kindle competing with audible competing with Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and everything. Attention is the prime resource that you have, I suppose, in that time is limited. Your time on this earth is limited. And although time is a limited resource, what you do with your time is what you mean when you talk about time. You don't talk about time just as something that you can go and exchange for something else. The exchange that you make with time is how you deploy it with whatever you're focused on that's in front of you. That's right. Yeah. I mean time is a precious resource. So is our attention. The other thing to keep in mind is when I talked about limited attention resources, these are so precious. And every time we switch our attention, think of it as you have a tank of resources and

that tank leaks because you're expanding resources when you switch. And so there's so much to pay attention to and we utilize these mental resources when we pay attention to things. Unless of course it's simple activity, then we can stretch our resources a bit farther. One of the things we find is that when people accumulate what's called sleep debt, sleep debt is the accumulation of lack of sleep night after night. We find that as sleep debt increases, attention spans decrease. So if you're a person, you need eight hours of sleep a night, but you're only getting

six hours. You're accumulating sleep debt. And what we find is, and we've measured people over the course of days, that their attention spans are shorter. And what do they do? They tend to do more lightweight activities, like Facebook, for example. Oh, so they'll stay engaged,

but they won't go into challenge. Right, because they just don't have the mental resources available. They're, you know, the best, one of the best things you can do to increase your attention span is to get good sleep. Wow, yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things, especially having done this podcast, you'll be episode 600 or something. And over the last five years, I've got to be able to play

with my mental capacity. You know, I really got a sense now for how agile everything feels up here. And I can usually relate that to my inputs. Did I get enough sunlight earlier on today? Did I sleep well? Am I hydrated? What's my blood sugar level like? Is it going up? Is it going down?

Did I have a big meal? Am I stressed? Am I distracted? Like, ting, ting, ting, ting. And I've got myself to the stage now where that this is my, how do you say, primary output of performance. This is the metric that I'm optimizing for, right? How quickly is my brain working and what's my purpose, the austerity to deploy that like?

How quickly can I get that to move? And for me, as soon as I push sleep, as soon as I do, there's an ambient anxiety that comes in because I know that I can't perform as well on the show today as I could have done had I have gotten an extra hour and a half or whatever it was. I had this big, I had this huge podcast, I went on Joe Rogan's show toward the back end of summer and two nights before it, I was in Houston Airport and they, all of the flights had stopped and I got an Uber from Houston to Austin because I just needed to get two nights of sleep. I knew that if I had two nights sleep in my bed, that it wouldn't matter if I didn't get in until 4am, everything would

be fine. So I can, I can absolutely guarantee that it is a huge impact when it comes to mental agility, verbal dexterity, focus, attention, even the creativity side of stuff as well. So going into one of the topics I've discussed a number of times on the show is to do with multitasking, multitasking versus mono-tasking. Everyone will be familiar with this. Anybody that's listening that thinks that multitasking is even a thing and by multitasking we've mean parallel processing, right? Not switching from one thing to the other. What is the elevator pitch for someone that

believes I can do two or three things at once that will stop them from realizing that? It's not humanly possible. It's not humanly possible to do two or more things at the same time that require mental effort. Right? If you're going to use conscious attention, you can only pay attention to one thing at a time. What people are doing is they're switching their attention.

Now you can be consciously aware and devote your attention to something and then do something automatic on the set. So, you know, I can be writing and there could be easy music playing in the background. But as soon as rap music comes on, I might start listening to the lyrics and then I'm devoting attention to that. So, if one activity is automatic, that that was like driving a car. Like driving a car is automatic, you can talk at the same time. But as soon as the car swerves in front of you, and all of a sudden your attention is focused on that car in front of you, and you stop talking, right? Because now your

conscious attention is directed at that thing in front of you. So it's not humanly possible to, as you say, parallel process, to or more things that require effort at the same time. And what is the red pill when it comes to multitasking as in task switching quickly, just how bad and degrading is that to the quality of our work? Well, it has effects, for sure. just how bad and degrading is that to the quality of our work? Well, it has effects for sure. So first of all, you know, we know that people have more errors when they multitask. And there's been studies done with physicians, nurses, pilots that show when they switch their attention, they make more errors. One scary study showed physicians make a lot of prescribing errors when they multitask.

We know that it takes more time to finish a task because there's something called a switch cost. So every time you're switching your attention from one task to another, it takes some time to reorient to that new task, and that's called a switch cost. And probably the worst news of all is that stress increases when people multitask. So we know from decades of laboratory research that blood pressure goes up when people multitask. There's a physiological marker in the body that increases when people multitask. In my research, we've used heart rate monitors.

We had people wear heart rate monitors in their offices and we've also measured their switching of attention. And we find this correlation. The faster the attention switching, the higher is the stress measured. And you know, the last thing of all is that when we ask people about their perceived stress, they report higher perceived stress when they multitask. All of these measurements are consistent. And they paint a picture that says that multitasking is just not a good idea.

If you want to be productive, if you want to be effective in your work, and you want to have well-being. Why, if it's the case, that multitasking causes people to experience stress physiologically, why is it so alluring to do multitasking? I would have presumed that we would have had this felt sense of the blood pressure and everything else. You don't want to keep doing this and yet people continue to do it. Yeah. So I would say, you know, there's there's several reasons in the workplace. People just have to react the demands of their work environment. So people are, by their preference, people are monotaskers.

People prefer doing monochronic work. It's what makes people that happiest. But we live in a world that's polychronic, which means switching your attention among multiple things. So you're in a workplace and all of a sudden you get a Slack message or email where you should switch your attention to something else, someone comes into your office and asks you a question. So it's the polychronic environment that's causing us to switch. But there's also, I talked about our social natures, you know, I talked about our social natures, right? We have social natures where we're just compelled to want to respond to other people

because we care about something called social capital, right? We want to be in good, you know, to appear in good, good esteem with others. And so we respond to their messages. good, good esteem with others. And so we respond to their messages. We, you know, we want to be good citizens. So it's our social natures wrapped up in this as well. And of course, there are individual differences with self-regulation. Some people just have this urge to be switching their attention. And that's, you know, it's, it's their natures. I remember reading an article a little while ago that said, wearing noise-cancelling headphones in an open plan office helps a little bit, reducing cognitive errors by 14%, but actual silences reduces those errors by one-third.

So everybody just needs to shut up basically. I think so, yes. What about monotasking but being interrupted? Let's say that it's not task switching, but there is some sort of interruption that occurs. Have you looked at that? We have. So, you know, it's really interesting.

So I have done a laboratory study where I had people do a task. And in one case, they were not interrupted. And in in the other case we gave them interruptions, this same task and we measured how long it took for them to do the task. So we subtracted the time out from doing the interruptions strangely enough and it's counterintuitive. People actually performed the task faster when they were in the condition where they were interrupted. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind. It sounds good. It sounds like it's good news for a multi-tasky.

But there was a price and the price was that stress increased. So people worked faster, but the stress went up. Now, the other thing, this is a laboratory experiment and people did this over an hour, but over the course of an entire day, right? This is just not not not tenable. You know, there was another study done where they had people do difficult tasks over a six-hour period, which is more similar to a day. And they found that when you're expending your mental resources to do something difficult and it could be like switching attention, people had less ability, as time went on to be able to guard against distractions. So they made more impulsive choices. And so, you know, it shows that there's parts of the mind that we're down. There's a part of the

mind called executive function that can't function as well as it should. And this is what we can expect when people are multitasking. Do you think it's right to use the term tech addiction when talking about people's relationship to their phones and screens, or would tech compulsion or something else be more accurate? Yeah, I like to stay away from the term addiction. It's a very strong word. Yeah, I like to stay away from the term addiction. It's a very strong word, and there's a very precise definition for addiction in the medical

community. I think compulsion is a more accurate way to explain what's going on and to describe it. People, we do have this compulsion when we sit in front of our screens. And even when we don't, we have this compulsion to reach our phones. What's the difference between an addiction and a compulsion?

Well, you know, when you have an addiction and when it's taken away, you have withdrawal effects. So, and that, of course, might be, you know, a lot of people might experience that. Some people may consider themselves addicted, but, you know, I think compulsion is a softer term to use. I like to stay away from these kinds of extreme I like to stay away from these kinds of extreme definitions, because I think compulsion is a more apt way to describe. And I do think that certainly people have the capability to exert control. They can take control.

And when you're addicted, it's a little bit hard to take control. And you know, when you're addicted, it's a little bit hard to take control. So I changed the wording that I used about six months ago when I had Dr. Andrew Hubeman from Stanford on the show and he said the exact same thing. He sort of term checked me on calling it attack addiction. He said to me, it behaves much more like a compulsion. The reason I like that reframe as well is it puts the power back in your hand. We can't underestimate how important the lexical linguistic tools that we use to describe the things that we're doing in our lives are. If you were to call it, let's say, a tech law, you know, like the law of thermodynamics,

I have to pick up my phone. It's a sort of undefeatable attractor. That would be even stronger, right? This would be like a law of the universe, but it's not, okay, so why don't we not only use more accurate language, which is also, as far as I can see, kind of more empowering to the individual more sufficiency, more agentic, etc. etc. I do believe that people can develop agency over their attention.

So I think you're absolutely right. I agree with you that calling a tech compulsion And calling a tech compulsion paves the way for people to be able to develop agency, to understand that they can develop agency. I learned from you that the guy that invented the internet designed the internet to replicate the way that a human brain works. And because he did that, it's basically too good. And that's why it's a slippery for us to get distracted. Can you explain that? It's so ironic, isn't it?

So the idea for the web originated with an engineer by the name of Vanavar Bush in 1945. And this idea was called the Memex. And at the time, Vannevar Bush, he ran a very large scientific research office in the US, and he was managing 6,000 scientists. And he was very frustrated with how information was organized. And at the time, there was the Dewey Decimal System. And he thought there's got to be a better way.

And he was an innovator and he thought information should be designed the way people think. And that's by association. And the theory of how people's memory is organized is according to a human semantic network. We associate concepts together. So, you know, when I think of cat, I immediately think of dog or think of catnip or, you know, the name of my cat buster. And so, the Memex idea remained an idea, but then others came along and they built upon it and then the web was developed. And then, of course, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the software that made it possible to exchange all

kinds of media to associate nodes and links so that we could share all kinds of media. Now, where we are today is that the web, the way it's designed, mimics the way human memory is organized. And there are so many entry points into our minds network when we go on, say, a Wikipedia page, we'll be reading something. And it primes us with so many different ideas and associations. And then we see a link. And we've been cognitively primed to be thinking of that. We click on it. We read new content.

And again, there's just this firestorm of associations that goes on in our mind. We see another link. Click on that. And so there's this mirroring of the behavior we're doing on the web, the way the web is organized, and the way our minds work. What has happened from what already sounds like a pretty optimized environment when it comes to trying to encourage people to follow down whatever path it is that their attention takes them on. What has happened with the introduction of algorithms and AI? Yeah, so you know every time you go on the internet and you know this, you leave digital traces,

right? You you like things, you comment on things, you visit certain sites. And so algorithms are can be very sophisticated to take a person's digital information and they can be used to target information that will make that person want to respond to it. So, you know, person's personality can be detected through algorithms. And so, you know, advertising can be geared to you. Notifications can be geared to you. You know, if your personality type is, if you happen to be an extrovert, ads can be geared towards, you know, what extroverts might want to respond to. So yeah, we

live in a world where our digital information is being used and incorporated into algorithms to to capture our attention. The thing that I learned from Stuart Russell, guy that wrote human compatible, he's also like, it's the textbook when it comes to computer science. I think he's Mr. Algorithms. And he wrote a book called Human Compatible, which is trying to reverse engineer algorithms to be more pro human. This apps, I completely lost my mind when I learned this in his book. So he said that the way that algorithms work is that they are prediction

engines trying to work out what it is that you want to maximize, usually click through, sometimes click through and watch time, some other metrics. But it's like, will you click on this or will you be interested by this? And there's two ways that the algorithm discovered that it could achieve this. Remembering that the algorithms for the most part are black boxes, you know, for everybody's sake, we want to see what's happening inside of YouTube's algorithm. Their own devs don't know what's going on. They don't have a clue. They just set it away with an optimizing function and now it's this big beast that's able to deliver funny cat videos when you want them. And two ways to do it, right? First way is you can, the algorithm can deliver to you

more accurate predictions for what it is that you want. The other way is to change your preferences to be easier to predict. So there is a two way street going on between AI algorithms and the users of that platform. So if you are, for instance, able to allegedly make individuals more partisan, more extreme interviews, it is significantly easier for you to detect what it is that they will want because there is less nuance.

If you have someone that's in the middle, they're going to fall either side on different points of view. Whereas if you can push them out to the sides, and then when you roll on top of that, we'll get into it, the desire for social approval, our inherent tribal biases, you have this reinforcement mechanism, and then there's a third element that I really wish I'd spoken to him about, which is audience capture from creators that make content. So you have this two-way relationship, AI to user, back and forth, trying to predict, but also trying to reprogram in order to make them easy to predict. But then you also have me. So I am someone who creates

the content that the algorithms are deploying to the people. And I am being influenced by what happens and what the people that are watching my stuff click on. So there is a concept called audience capture, which you might be familiar with, where a creator starts to continue to feed red meat to his audience, his or her audience. They start to do what the audience, they know the audience will respond to

as opposed to what to them feels creatively right. And what you end up with having there is an ever more sort of caricatured, extreme, one-dimensional version of that creator, because they back themselves into a corner of constantly being cooked by their own audience. The audience just tells them what they want to do. So there is now a third element in this manage-a-toi of attention distraction.

And yeah, I found that that two-way relationship fascinating, and then you layer on top the creator and the audience capture. I thought that was so interesting. That's right. There's so much to talk about with algorithms. Acrythms can be very agile. An example of that is the TikTok algorithm. So TikTok learns very quickly what you like, and it feeds you the videos based on what it thinks you like. Then as soon as you change

and you start finding something else of interest, the algorithm is flexible, it changes and it starts learning what your new preferences are. So algorithms learn from humans' behavior and they adapt. This is then reinforced, as you said before, by us wanting social connections online, right? Yes. So, the fact that social media is social, we have this predisposition for wanting to be connected, for wanting status, for wanting belonging, so on and so forth. So this creates an incentive for us to actually become more distracted in an ever more convenient world. Yes, that's right. I mean, there are so many aspects to our social natures. And as you

put it so nicely, the interaction between our social natures and the computing environment. So I mentioned the idea of social capital. There's also identity. You know, people are very concerned about their social identity. Not just the identity on social media, but work identity and as a result, you know, people are compelled to do. What do you mean when you talk about identity? So how you present yourself to others on the web.

So the impression that you want others to have of you. So we spend a lot of time crafting our identities, right? And you know, some people spend more time than others because that's, we're concerned with what's called impression management. And that means the impression that we with what's called impression management. And that means the impression that we want others to have of us. And sometimes, you know, we have more control over our online identity than we have over our identities in real life.

Absolutely. Yeah, you can curate your online version of you significantly easier than you can create the real world version of you. Yeah. And that can be a time think for a lot of people. And of course, there's power relations. So, person who's lower in the social hierarchy tends to spend more time looking out for messages from someone

higher up on the hierarchy. So there's so many things that are going on when we talk about our social natures. That's a very interesting element that I hadn't really considered. I've had a lot of conversations to do with status and cestrally and how that relates to the modern world too. Somebody who is low status, I mean, child mortality outcomes, pick what health lifespan, pick whatever outcome you want, basically, the higher your status,

the better your outcomes in life for the most part, right? But another thing that you have is that as you become higher in status, you need to apply less energy to maintaining that identity, to keeping up appearances, because you kind of move under your own momentum. If you're one of the top 10 people within your field, there is less requirement for you to constantly be hungry and checking. What do people think about me? Because people already know about you. And that's an element of status that I hadn't really considered before that adds to this

power-lure of the Matthew principle, right? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Yes. The status will get more statusful, and they get more statusful in a more easy way. Yes, that's right. I mean, there's so much nuance that's involved with using the internet, absolutely. What's the relationship between our personality

and self-regulation? Yeah, so some people were born with good self-regulation, so they're lucky. They were dealt a good set of cards. Others are not born so lucky. Just because you're not born with good self-regulation doesn't mean you can't develop it. You can develop it as a skill. But there are personality differences. We find that if a person scores high on what's called neuroticism, there's a personality instrument that's the most widely used instrument to measure personality. It's called the big five.

There are five dimensions of personality. One of those is neuroticism. Naroticism is, you know, you have a propensity to be stressed. Narotics tend to replay events over and over in your mind. You know, oh, I just have that conversation with that person. I should have, it should have played out differently. Derotics tend to have the shortest attention spans. So shorter than others. Now if a person scores high on another one of these big five trades, that's called conchi-entrassness. And that means that you're very disciplined.

You're a very disciplined person. They tend to actually check their email more because they don't want to let anything get through the cracks. And so, you know, we find that they have, they check more frequently than others. So there do seem to be personality differences. That's very interesting. Conscientiousness is the best personality predictor of outcomes in life, I think, in terms of wealth and life achievement, overall educational outcomes as well.

But there is a price that you pay for that industrious motivation to keep on thinking about things, to always be wanting to check. Yeah, I'm a moderate low in neuroticism, but I'm quite high in conscientiousness. So I'll blame my lack of attention on my inbuilt personality. But as if you,

have you looked at the relationship between technology and happiness, how happy people are, either when using it, after using it, if there's an optimal amount, if there's a maximum amount. So I've looked at it more at a micro level in looking at the actions that people do and what makes them happy. So I know there's a lot of people who've looked at the relationship of social media and well-being. And those results are pretty mixed. But we find that when people are doing this kind of road activity, simple, mindless kinds of activity where they're still engaged, they do tend to be the happiest or, you know,

provides them a kind of solace. And what about have you looked at retrospective ratings of happiness there? Because that needs to be folded in, right? You know, the actions that you do and the pleasure that it gives you has consequences not just in the moment, but also afterward. I also everybody would just be taking MDMA and cocaine and a cocktail on a lilo, right? There is not just happiness that would be meaning as well, you know, there would be satisfaction, there would be purpose. It wouldn't just be the state, it would be the trait effect of doing that. And I certainly know, maybe this is me trying to find a cope for the way that I, not shame, but sometimes the guilt that I feel after I've used my phone for too long, that yeah, maybe in the moments

there was a sense of pleasure. And if you said, do a self-writing on how happy you are right now, I'm like, yeah, I'm watching this good video about some documentary to do with space or something. But if I do that for two and a half hours, the way that I feel after that is all manner of self-flagulating unhappiness. So I wonder how when you smear or aggregate tech use across an entire day, which includes your ability to reflect and ruminate on how much of a piece of shit you are because you just spent forever on TikTok or whatever. I wonder how that changes.

Yeah, so it's interesting. You're making me think of a study we did where we looked at happiness, you said, in the moment, people are happiest when they do face-to-face interactions. So, you know, and it's not surprising. You know, we're we're human. We like to interact with people. But when you look over the course of the day and you ask people at the end of the day how happy they are. They're happy as correlates very highly with the amount of time that they spent on Facebook. Now, at the time we did the study, Facebook was the most common social media used by this particular group of people. They were knowledge workers, all different work roles. Now, how do you explain that? Well, it's interesting. It

didn't seem right to us that the more time on Facebook, the happier you are when you reflect on it over the course of the day. It also turns out that when people are really engaged in their work, and they have a lot of work to do when they need to be focused. It's actually better for them to do something simple like social media that doesn't require a lot of effort. Why? Because people can be in control of their attention

to go in Facebook and out when they need to. When you're in an interaction phase to face, you're not always in control. You can be a prisoner in an interaction. It's hard to be impolite and suddenly cut yourself off when you have a lot of work to do. And so for times when you have a lot of work to do, you've got a deadline, something like phase-to-phase can actually offer people a break, but if they use it strategically and they don't get stuck in the rabbit hole. I see. Yes, so it's like an on-demand social break you get.

Well one of the things that's kind of obvious is the story I tell myself about my social media use constitutes the lion's share of what that means to my life. You know, the time has gone. The hour that I spent watching the space documentary has gone. I have the option to tell myself that that was, I deserve a break, wanted a break, enjoyed a break, it doesn't matter let it go, or I can lambast myself for the next couple of hours saying you need to grind your nose against the grindstone in an attempt to try and make up for it. Have you looked at guilt and shame around our lack of attention? Because people's ability to self-flagulate that I should have worked harder.

I should have done more. God, I finished today and I didn't do as much as I should have done. And the reason for that was I was just, I'm so distracted. I need to be more disciplined. Let me listen to some Jocco Willink and David Goggins' motivational videos. I'm going to put some rock music on. I'm gonna work until two in the morning. Have you looked at this?

Yeah, of course. People feel terrible when they spend a good part of their day on social media and they feel that their work is neglected. That's not a good thing, right? You know, on the one hand, I'm saying people are happiest when they do these things that make them engaged, but it's not very challenging, but only if they do it wisely and strategically and not spend hours with their time doing that.

People have to learn how to use these kinds of activities to their benefit. And it's really important to be able to take good breaks. So that's something that people neglect to do. And we get ourselves exhausted. We're, you know, people can't hold sustained focus where people can't hold sustained focus for lengthy periods in the same way that we can't lift weights for extended periods. We get exhausted. We are mental resources get drained. So we need time to be able to take a break,

to be able to step back. And you take whatever break works for you, right? But it's not a break that's extensive. If you've got a lot of work to do, you have to put limits. What does a good break look like to you? The best break of all is to take a walk in nature to go outside. So, you know, there's a really nice study that shows 20 minutes in nature makes people less stressed, relaxes them. I've done a study where we show that 20 minutes in nature significantly increases people's ability to generate ideas. It's called divergent thinking. And so the best break of all is

get out in nature. I realize that circumstances don't allow always for going outside. And I know many of the listeners might be living in places right now with a weather. Speaking to somebody that spent 33 years in the northeast of England, so yes, correct. Yes, right. So there are other things we can do. It's always good to get up to move your body to, you know, stretch. That's always a great thing. But, you know, if you need a quick break. It's okay to do some mindfulness activity. It's okay to, you know, I have my silly anagram game. and I do that and it helps relax me. The mind is engaged, it's lightly engaged, and so you can let ideas incubate in the back of the mind. The great writer, Maya Angelou,

talks about her big mind and little mind, and I just love this. She says that her big mind was used for her deep thought and she really you know was challenged and put in a lot of effort in her writing. It didn't come easy for her. She said she wanted to strangle the critics who said that the writing came easy. But then she had what she called her little mind which is when she pulled back, took a break, relaxed it for her, it was crossword puzzles, and it helped her replenish. And so, you know, if you look at a lot of great scientists and writers, they all have their kind of

wrote activity that they do that helps them replenish and regenerate. And one of my favorites is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said he got his best ideas when he peeled potatoes. That was his wrote activity, right? You're lightly engaged, right? Otherwise, you'd cut your finger. But it enabled him to kind of his mind could still turn. He could think of ideas and he was doing something very broke.

You know what my favorite thing is, so when I take breaks, if I've been in here for too long, I go outside and it's usually beautifully sunny in Austin. And I've got a tennis ball and I just throw a tennis ball against a wall on a, it's called a slack block. there's like a, it's called a slack block. It's like a slack line, but you can transport it. So it's like a wobbly board that you stand on and I can just throw that against a wall and I am lightly engaged, but not too much. It's not too challenging. It's a tennis ball against a wall. I could have done it when I was five, but one of the concerns that you could have when we're

talking about, okay, so, um, light engagement, bit of enjoyment, don't be bored, that's your break. The problem of using social media as that is that social media is attempting and the rabbit hole goes so deep that the break becomes greater than the amount of time that you just worked for that you're taking a break from. So you spiral down and doom scroll

for the remainder of the hour. Yeah, totally agree. And this is where it's so important for people to develop agency over their actions so that they can control the amount of time that they spend on these kinds of activities, especially social media. So people need to become more intentional in their activities. And you can become more intentional by probing yourself, right? When you have this urge to go on social media, you probe yourself and ask yourself, why

do I need to go there now? Is it because I need a break? Is it because I'm bored? And okay, it's fine. You can give yourself permission to go there, but when you're there, continue probing yourself. Am I still getting value out of this? What kind of value am I getting? And am I replenished?

I feel it's time for me to go back to work and then get yourself back on track. But you have to keep yourself aware of what your actions are so that you have more control over that. Another thing that you can do is to practice forethought, and here's what I mean by that, is to understand how your current actions can affect your life downstream, and the best time frame is later in the day or at the end of the day. And so if you're going to go on social media and you know you're someone who can spend an hour there or longer, practice for thought and say before I go there, what's my day

going to look like? Am I still going to be up working on that deadline at 10 p.m. or am I going to be relaxing with a glass of wine reading a book watching my favorite show? What's my life later in the day going to look like? So practice thinking of your future self when you have that urge to go on social media. You and David Goggins, one of the hardest men on the planet, Navy Seal and Ultramarathon Runner, have the same idea. So he calls it the one second decision and with the one second decision, he plays forward what happens if he decides to do this right now. So he uses the example of seal selection and he's on the beach in California in freezing water. And he is tempted to ring the bell. He wants to leave. He wants to get out.

He wants to quit. He thinks, what happens if I go and do that? Well, I'll be warm, but I'm gonna be warm in five days in any case. You know, so only five days, hell week. So what happened? I go up, I ring the bell, then I get warm, then I go to bed.

What do I feel like when I go to bed tonight? I'm racked with shame and guilt and insufficiency. And the same thing goes for this. The best question that I asked myself and I got everyone that listens to the show to ask during COVID was, what would have happened to have happened by the end of lockdown for you to look back on lockdown and consider it a success. And what I love about the idea of forethought toward the end of the day is for the most part when you get distracted and when you do a distracting activity like going on social media, you are optimizing for pleasure in the moment, which will cause you discomfort in the long term. What you're doing with the fourth thought exercise is you're reversing that. You're allowing some of that future pain to get front loaded into this decision making process right now. So it's no longer

as hidden. I think that's very, very good. That's right. Exactly. Right. What about how someone should design their day if they want to maximize their focus. Most people most days are relatively similar, relatively routineized, or at least weeks are, same stuff, same sort of time. If you were to design a day to maximize focus, what would you do? Yeah. First of all, it turns out that people have rhythms over the day for when their focus is at its peak. Most people have peak focus late morning, around 11 a.m. and mid to late afternoon, 2 to 3 p.m.

And there are individual differences. If you're an early type, your peak focus is much earlier on the day, if your late type is much later. So this is just what's representative of most people. So one of the first things you can do is to design your day to schedule those tasks that are going to be the hardest that require the most thought, the most creativity, to schedule those around your peak focused times. And for goodness sake, don't spend that time doing social media or doing email, but use

it for doing work that really requires mental effort because you've got those resources at that time. And this kind of rhythm, you know, it ebbs and flows and it's, you know, coincides with our mental resources. We, you know, gather up our mental resources and then we, you know, expend them and, you know, take a nice lunch break where you can get yourself for a planesh, you eat well, then you can ramp yourself up again and be ready to do focused work. Now, you should not schedule things back to back without a break. It's just not good, and we tend to think that.

That's the way scheduling has always been done. Let's pack the most we can into the shortest amount of time, put ourselves on this tight schedule so we can finish. And I want us to reframe the conversation. And I want us to think about putting our well-being first because if we put our well-being first, we will be productive along the way. And that means also scheduling in important time for breaks, for meaningful breaks. And I call this negative space. You know, before I got into science, I actually was trained as an artist. And when you do a painting, you think of, of course, the figure you're creating, but also the space around that becomes very important. That space frames the figure and it sets it

off. And if you are familiar with the sculpture of Henry Moore, you know, that's also an example. He's a British sculpture or most great artist and sculptures, or even Japanese gardens make use of this idea of negative space surrounding the rocks in a garden. Let's translate that into our day, right? We've got hard work. We want to do over the day. But we want to also schedule in time that can maybe proceed and follow this hard work where you can replenish and you can use that time, you know, whatever works for you, right? It can be contemplation, can be taking a walk in nature, can be doing some road activity,

but schedule that in. And consider that as important as the tasks you're doing, because that negative space or empty space in the day is going to help your performance shine. Also importantly, those negative spaces should not be filled doing social media. Well, if it's probably not a good idea to fill them with social media, I agree. What else have we missed? What else in terms of strategies that move the needle the most for people's attention or focus?

Haven't we got down? We talked about sleep, intentionality, matter of awareness. What about blood sugar level? What about have you looked at the relationship between foods that people eat and the attention? So I have not looked at that in my research. I do know that when people have a sugar crash, it affects their attention, even though I've not looked at that in my research. Okay, and then you also talk about like this agentic, sovereign view. And it seems like the word is almost like intentionality.

But what am I doing right now? Is this the thing that I'm supposed to be doing, creating that meta awareness, being able to see what's going on? Exactly. Yes. And I do believe that people can develop a skill for this type of meta awareness. It might seem hard at first. You know, I observe people in my research,

and I'm a professional observer of people's behavior. And I learn to become a professional observer of my own behavior. And I did it through practice. I believe it's a skill that anyone can create, can develop. And it becomes second nature. You're probing yourself and it just becomes second nature and it becomes a habit for you. And then it enables you to become more intentional.

Whenever you have an urge to go to social media, you probe yourself. It's second nature and say, why do I need to go there? There is another thing we could talk about, which is we talked about solutions at the individual level, but I also think that there can be solutions at the collective level. So when it comes to electronic communications, you know, I talked earlier in the show that people, you know, have to respond to the demands in the environment. And if anyone simply cuts themselves off from, you know, email and Slack and communications, they actually penalize themselves, especially if you're in the workplace because they don't

have access to important information. And so, I believe that organizations need to come up with a solution. For example, you know, some companies have email-free days, and that's shown some promise. You can shrink the window of time for when electronic communications are sent. So, you know, we've tested batching, which means sending email out, you know, beginning of the day, middle of the day, end of the day. Unfortunately, we don't find that it moves the needle, doesn't make people feel more productive or less stressed, but people do average checking their emails 77 times a day. And I do think that if email is batched, at least people wouldn't be checking it 77 times a day, then might

check it three times a day. Yes, as a collective, that's going to be difficult because as soon as one person breaches that, you know, have a cascade of emails coming in. Well, you can turn off the server, the email server. as one person breaches that you now have a cascade of emails coming in. Well, you can turn off the server, the email server. So that's the hard stop. Yeah. Yeah. The hard stuff. You know, another thing we can do is I'm very interested in this notion of right to disconnect laws.

Francis and I France has it. Ontario has policy. Ireland has policy. Believe it or or not New York City tried to introduce a right to disconnect law and stupid idea they had they had a council meeting was very interesting most businesses argued against it and one of the most interesting arguments was from the Bureau of Tourism that said, the reason why New York City is the number one tourist attraction is that we're the city that never sleeps and therefore, you know, workers should not turn off. But, you know, a right to disconnect law would not punish individuals who choose not to answer electronic communications after

work hours. It helps people detach from work and if you can detach from work, you know, it gives you a break, gives you a chance to replenish. It's good for people's well-being and as a result, it helps people more effectively reattach the next day. Elements, which is one of the shows, the sponsors on this podcast, they do three weeks on one week off every employee, one problem being that if there's something urgent that needs doing on the Monday of that one week, tough luck, on on the Saturday on the Saturday after the Friday of week three. It's a painful nine day wait to get a response from anyone and there's no one in the office so that's

an extreme version of it but yeah I think you're right on a collective level. We are individuals, hellis-apes trying to battle back against the most powerful algorithms in history and billion dollar companies with the smartest data scientists on the planet powering them. Yes. It's not quite a fair fight at the moment. And all of the any legislation that we can have put in that I think that assists us to disconnect is probably a smart idea.

I agree. But you know, it's ultimately people, we have created the internet. We contribute content. And I really think people have the power to make change. Dr. Gloria Mark, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do, where should they go?

They should go to my website, which is gloriamark.com, all one word. And then you can learn a lot more in my book, Attention Span. LinkedIn the show not to blow. Gloria, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.