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Great article in this week's New York Magazine about multitasking, distractions, our Facebook and Twitter obsession and inability to focus on anything. Granted the article was looong, I did all of the following while reading it: ate dinner, watched a movie - in French - checked 3 different email accounts, put my laundry in the drier and hung clothes. No wonder it took me over an hour and a half to finish it.

Some interesting bits: apparently, distracted was once a synonym for insane (Shakespeare: "poverty hath distracted her."). Leading researchers on attention believe that we are living through a crisis of attention, and think that it might get a lot worse than people can imagine and our new frazzled state of mind is now called "continuous partial attention". Here is a scary one: "People who frequently check their email" - that's me - "have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana." Holy shit! Might as well just smoke up! And finally, an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry last year raised the prospect of adding "Internet addiction" to a list of diseases, which would make it a disorder to be taken as seriously as schizophrenia.

If I measured the time I spent on Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and various news sites in one day, I am pretty sure it would add up to enough time that I could fit in a run, a yoga class, experiments, or some extra time for sleep. It's a wonder I ever get anything done and still seem to have at least a couple of hobbies and still able to read about two books a month and see friends on an almost regular bases. But to think about how much more I could do, or at least how much more relaxed I could be!

The article ends on a very positive and optimistic note, stating that "attentional shift" is an advantage. If I understood the point, the author is basically hypothesizing that our brains are adapting so quickly to this new kind of multitasking that it will eventually get much better at it, and kids who are growing up with the internet will be able to pay attention to 34 things at the same time, including things that require lots of focus. I am not sure I buy this; can one engage in "mindful Twittering"? At least that's one thing I haven't started using yet, although since I figured out that Lance Armstrong has his own Twitter page that he updates about 3 times/hour (not while he's riding in the Giro D'Italia), I considered joining - after all, I could feel more like I was his friend or something - but then decided that this was even more unhealthy than having already too many virtual relationships on Facebook and gChat.

And now, it's time to switch my computer off for the night!