Mindfulness in a Digital Age
Think of sitting quietly in a spartan room. There are no TVs, computers, smart phones, books, magazines or music. If you’re like most people then this probably sounds like a recipe for boredom. In our culture moments of not-doing are avoided like the plague because we don’t associate boredom with having any value. And our aversion to boredom and not-doing have been amplified in our hyper-connected age. A torrent of stimulation is just a click or touch-screen away, ensuring that even the slightest trace of boredom can be mitigated through constant screen connectivity. As beneficial as this perpetual connectivity can be, neuroscience has been uncovering some its detrimental side effects.
Recent brain imaging studies revealed that sections our brains are highly active during down time. This has lead scientists to imply that moments of not-doing are critical for connecting and synthesizing new information, ideas and experiences. Dr. Michael Rich, a professor at Harvard Medical School has said that, “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body.”
Over the last 28 years our consumption of information has increased 350 percent, while our downtime has been shrinking. In the midst of this multimedia blitzkrieg the importance of mindfulness and focused attention is rising in proportion to our increased consumption. If we can’t cultivate mindfulness and focused attention while sitting quietly in a room then how can we expect to bring these qualities of mind into turbulent circumstances both on and offline.
Fractured Attention, Fractured Mind
According to a 2008 report published by the University of California, San Diego, the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information every single day. To put these numbers in perspective, one gigabyte is a symphony in high-fidelity sound or a broadcast quality movie.
Our colossal consuming habits are not only crowding out essential neurological downtime, but our habits are creating a chemical addiction that has interest in little else. When we consume media — from watching TV to surfing the net, and from playing video games to using social media — we are triggering the brain chemical dopamine. Dopamine creates a “high” and we are wired to do what it takes to maintain this elevated state. When the dopamine levels decrease we begin to look for diversions that will restore the high.
In the absence of stimulation, and the corresponding dopamine high, we are likely to feel bored. As a result many of us become stimulation junkies and incessant multitaskers. In the New York Times article, Attached to Technology and Paying the Price, Matt Richtel writes, “While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress…And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.”
The Antidote of Mindfulness
Living in a connected age is double-edged. It delivers good news and bad news. While policy and regulation have their place within this matrix, it seems that human agency should be the keystone. Therefore, for the body politic to walk the razors edge between being empowered by our connectivity or being addictively cocooned by it requires a steady dose of mind training.
The practice of mindfulness is a time-tested antidote to operating in autopilot. “Mindfulness practice,” according to Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer of Mindfulness-based stress reduction, “means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.”
John F. Kennedy in a message to Congress on education, said “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.” Progress, while a result of a constellation of factors, is dependent, in part, on focused attention and mindfulness of ones self and environment. If one can’t maintain focus on the direction one is aiming for, then how can we hope to effectively navigate in that direction. Jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink may create a surge in serendipity but it also has the tendency to fracture focus and thinking, which can leave one idling in the (virtual) space-time continuum.
The direction in which education orients a person, to paraphrase Plato, will determine their future in life. While educational aims should be varied, an underlying goal should be in focusing student awareness in a metacognitive direction. If schools hope to prepare students for our hyper-connected world, it reasons that training students to be proficient with digital tools is only part of the equation. Students must also be mindful of how digital tools and perpetual web connectivity is shaping their brains, perceptions and habits.
It’s been said that the currency of the Net is attention. As Net connectivity penetrates the furthest reaches of our lives, schools increasingly need to treat attention as a skill to be cultivated. While the technique of mindfulness isn’t hard, developing a disciplined practice can feel like an Olympic challenge. Research at Duke University underscores why. Researchers found that more than 40 percent of our actions are based on habits, not conscious decisions. Unconscious habits and assumptions aren’t destiny, but if we don’t bring them into focus then the force of these habits will continue to chart our course.
Several promising studies have demonstrated the power of mindfulness mediation in schools to improve executive functioning, reducing stress, anxiety and aggression. In his book, Techgnosis, Erik Davis also see another value in integrating mind training into schools: “The contemporary rise of attention deficit disorder, a condition seemingly linked to the ubiquity of media nets, only underscores how much we need to treat attention as a craft, at once a skill to be learned and a vessel in flight. But the name of this chronic syndrome also contains a clue. For it is precisely disorder that we need to learn to pay attention to, because in that turbulence lies our own future manifold. The mind is an instrument, and we practice scales so that we may be able to improvise with spontaneous grace.”
This article was originally published in MediaShift.