Your distracted life

Think you’re pretty good at multi-tasking? Think again. The latest science shows that when it comes to using our mobile phones you aren’t the effective juggler you may think you are. Here’s how we can outsmart our inherent attraction to distraction.

Think you can multi-task? Science says we’re not as good at juggling as we think

When you glance down at your smartphone, you see a helpful little device that makes life easier and keeps you connected to your friends and family. But psychologist Paul Atchley, who studies texting and driving, says our phones are more like a drug-delivery system – similar to a morphine pump with a button you can press any time you need a hit of pain relief. Except instead of relieving our pain, the emails, text messages, phone calls, social media, and instant-gratification web searches give us hits of dopamine – a feelgood hormone that lights up the reward centre in the brain and makes us crave more. It’s the same hit of hormone we get from eating a sugary doughnut or taking a kick-butt spinning class.

Here’s how it works

You feel your mobile phone vibrate or hear it ping, which prompts your brain to release a little dopamine. When you see that it’s a friend, you get another hit. You read her text and reply, and your brain releases even more dopamine. “Essentially, our smartphones are an opportunity for us to dose ourselves with feel-good chemicals,” explains Atchley. It’s no wonder we have a tough time ignoring them even when we’re walking across a busy intersection or barrelling down the freeway at 100 kilometres an hour.

Because of this physiological response – coupled with the fact that we’re rarely without our phones – we have an almost reflex-like instinct to react when we see a call or new message come in, says Stephen O’Connor, a psychologist who studies compulsive mobile phone use. “Our decision to answer a call or read a text happens before the brain is able to fully engage the frontal lobe, which is where we make logical decisions,” he explains. Which is why our phones lead us into doing dumb things, such as crossing the road without looking.

Our drive to distraction with our technology is instinctual, too, says Adam Gazzaley, a professor of neurology, physiology, and psychiatry and author of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a

High-Tech World. “Even though what we’re looking for on our smartphones isn’t related to our survival, we’re programmed to hunt for information the same way other animals hunt for food,” Gazzaley says. “And just as a squirrel will leave one tree filled with acorns to go foraging for more acorns in the next tree, we also hop from ‘tree’ to ‘tree’ on the hunt for more information.”

Because our version of those acorn-filled trees – web browsers, social media, email or any number of apps – is quick and easy to get to with the touch of a finger on our various devices, it explains our drive to swivel our focused attention from, say, driving or walking in response to either an external alert (like the ping of a tablet) or an internal trigger (like wondering about the answer to a question – how often do you pick up your phone to Google something mid-conversation?).

Multi-tasking on the go: a risky business

It’s one thing to send a bunch of emails while you’re in a work meeting or scroll through Instagram while watching TV. It’s a different story when it comes to multi-tasking while doing anything that could hurt you or someone else. That’s because our brains can’t focus on two things that require our concentration at once, says Gazzaley.

When we’re doing an activity that demands attention and some degree of focus, there’s a network in the brain that engages to zoom in on that one thing. Add another task that requires attention and focus, and another network in the brain “turns on” to manage that activity. “Try to do both tasks at the same time, and the brain has to switch between one network and the other,” says Gazzaley, “and that switching leads to a loss of information.” The kicker is that this brain bounce is subconscious, so chances are you’ll feel like you’re focusing on just one thing, he says.

This may be one reason most of us don’t realise how distracted we are when we multi-task – and why a study published in the journal PLOS One found that the people who thought they were good at multi-tasking turned out to be the least capable of it. Even more frightening, they were also the most likely to use a phone frequently when driving and the most dangerous behind the wheel. (Ironically, study participants who were good multi-taskers were less likely to text while driving.)

Regardless of our multi-tasking abilities, there’s also the fact that even without distractions, we’re not actually seeing as much of our surroundings as we think we are. When signals hit the eye’s retina for visual processing – a speed limit sign, a hole in the sidewalk, a low-hanging beam at a weekend Airbnb rental – only 40 per cent of them are processed by our brains. “This means that more than half of the signals that hit your eyes don’t even exist as far as your brain is concerned,” says Atchley. And that’s when we think we’re paying close attention. Try to read a text or have a phone conversation while you’re on the go, and your awareness of what’s in front and around you becomes even less, making it more likely that you’ll hit something in your path. (And in case you’re wondering: chatting with someone hands-free isn’t any safer.)

Even if you know you should pay closer attention, you have what psychologists call an “optimism bias” that makes you tell yourself, I’ll be fine, says O’Connor. In other words, the more we, say, text behind the wheel without getting into an accident, “the more we create an association that distracted driving won’t be an issue for us,” he says.