Why the modern world is bad for your brain

> Now of course email is approaching obsolescence as a communicative medium. Most people under the age of 30 think of email as an outdated mode of communication used only by “old people”. In its place they text, and some still post to Facebook. They attach documents, photos, videos, and links to their text messages and Facebook posts the way people over 30 do with email.

This is silly and disconnected from reality. My generation knows e-mail is ubiquitous. E-mail is seen as necessary for professional communications and everyone from the "millennial" generation realizes that once they get to college.

I'm not going to text my professor or potential employer let alone contact him or her on Facebook (which I barely use anymore), when I can use the convenience of e-mail. Not only does it look more professional, but it keeps the correspondence intact within a time stamped thread.

That’s why I’ve decided not to own a smartphone. I’m connected while at work, I don’t want to carry my work when I’m out. Been idle sometimes looks useful because it allows me to observe the world even if it is other people in the super market. Spending all day looking at various screens I believe will melt my brain, reducing my ability to really focus when I need to. For that same reason I’m not a big fan of social networks either, I just don’t find any use for them. On the contrary I find them extremely annoying and I believe they'd hummer my productivity if I was to check every hour or so what my friends did online. Of course I know I’m a minority.

On the opposite side of the spectrum from too much multi-tasking is what happens if you single-task intensely for 15 hours a day, 300+ days a year. For guinea pigs we have professional online poker players, one of whom started noticing some problems, got some brain scans and wrote about it here[0]. The TL;DR is his doctor told him if he kept it up he'd have stroke before he turned 50.

For reference, if you're "multi-table grinding" as a poker player you may average 750-1,000 hands per hour. At 750 hands/hr that's about 1 hand per 5 seconds. That's a single task repeated over 10,000 times a day, sometimes every day for months at a time.

As with everything, balance seems to be the key.

[0] - http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/15033-dusty-schmidt-thi...

>Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something.

I see many people at work with this type of addiction and I think it is responsible for luring a lot of technical people into the management world. As a manager, your work day can consist entirely of these micro-tasks and micro-accomplishments that satisfy the novelty-seeking portion of the brain. And attending meetings should be included in this category as well since people also get a false sense of accomplishment from attending those, and I think they have more potential to satisfy our novelty bias as well since they have a degree of spontaneity.

"Just a decade or two ago, those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered during a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability."

It's true that with cellphones you can reach someone even if they aren't at their home or desk, but aren't people switching their phones to silent a lot more? Maybe this depends on where you are, but I can't immediately get through to a lot of people I know the first time I call their cellphone. Text messages also make it a lot easier to communicate asynchronously, if you'll pardon the metaphor. I have actually been wondering if the expectation of availability for realtime remote voice communication isn't going to slowly die over a period of decades.

I'm not a fan of linkbait-style titles like this: "Why the modern world is bad for your brain."

How about "Neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin explains how constant multitasking is making us less efficient"?

This article really rings true for me. I've found that I'm far more happy and productive when I'm not multitasking.

One thing that I've found particularly challenging is dealing with text messages from significant others while at work. Programming and problem solving tasks that take 30-60 minutes just to get started with mentally, can easily turn into a few hours of intense concentration. But interactions with others during this time can significantly derail things, despite not being responsive also derailing things through a feeling of guilt.

I think content aggregators like reddit or HN have this problem too. "That looks interesting! I wonder when the comments say... First one: good point! Second: hadn't thought about it that way! Third: that was dumb. Fourth: boring. Next thread." They encourage shallow thought and glossing over details. I often wonder how my attention span would change if I could get myself to quit these sites.

This post reminds me of the book "Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload".

My take is optimistic. Charlie Munger uses mental models to handle his business decisions. Maybe we just better mental models to handle high frequency information digestion and distribution.

"We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives..."

My first experience with Uber was to order a ride for my wife and daughter. As they were en route, it occurred to me: I had unwittingly accepted the job of dispatcher, and was paying for the pleasure.