A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (9 page)

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

O
NE 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.