Yourself. Information and Communication Technologies have transformed our society. Today this deluge of digital data washes over is from all sides we carry devices everywhere they connect us with loved ones coworkers and ultimately the entire planet. Smartphones computers and tablets a constantly seeking our attention and our use of both as technology affects our brains and indeed our lives. These Digital Tools act as electronic leashes and cause cognitive overload and stress especially in the workplace researchers are only now starting to measure the effects the Digital Media have on people what can we do to help. Today half of the worlds population uses the Internet Exchange one hundred fifty billion emails per day we are submerged in data and this causes im president at levels of stress. That too much information to process it comes in to fast and in volumes that are not humanly possible to handle that combines the course of your stress. With those of stress a civil suit. Has written a book on how to survive in our digital society. Blames Information Technologies for the increase in stress in the workplace. Nowadays the world produces as much information in two days as it did in all of history the quantities are so vast. That they become abstract. Heres a comparison Frances National library has one of the biggest in the world it has about fourteen million books every second day to equivalent to two such libraries is distributed on the web that works out to sixty three million French National libraries a year. I see there were living in an age of the wild west of technology where weve got all these different applications and devices and people are switching back and forth between all these different devices and applications its really like the wild west because its chaotic. Were faced with the paradox the devices that should be simplifying our lives actually seem to complicate them. How did this happen how has Digital Technology revolutionized the world of work thats want cindy fell yo a researcher in information and Communication Sciences wants to find out by interviewing Business Managers about bad rep paul with the digital world. I wanted to find out how this was impacting the workplace particularly employees who use Digital Technology every day and i wanted to find out whether digital devices are creating new psychosocial risks in the workplace. For Research Fellow interviewed some one hundred manages because they seem to suffer most from digitally and used stress. To many dealing with the demands of all this information distracts them from their primary functions. Some of the managers told me that they feel cut off from their real work. My analysis indicates that this technology has made work more intense the work seems more condensed and more urgent. Because these digital devices allow everyone to be instantly reachable all the time. Is one of the managers interviewed by cindy fairly young. At his last job he was stressed out because of all the digital data that came across his desk. He got a new job. Lets say you start work on a subject at eight thirty in the morning. At eight thirty six you receive an email mark urgent almost sixty percent of emails these days im out urgent because people think otherwise you wont answer i mean why are you receiving text then a phone call then you return to the does you started on i thirty and i will be ten fifteen ten thirty or Eleven Oclock on the by now you lost the thread of what you want to do which means excuse me. Im in a meeting back you know. Its true that when youre constantly assailed by ringing. And alerts. You lose your concentration. You lose your concentration. Overbuilt you can obviously when hes interrupted he loses his train of thought. Thats very characteristic of these environments i describe it as electronic bombardment or water torture in my working groups theres an interruption every six minutes with this new digital working system is structured so that you cant work. See if you see what i mean its called you know. These incessant demands force us to respond creating a cycle that can eat up a lot of time experts estimate that employees spend about a third of their day just dealing with emails. Much you paid in are all works for a company that manages data networks. His job requires him to be permanently connected. With yes francis. Now go ahead im listening to make a quick trip avoid which one of a lot of i have to be reachable twenty four hours a day weekends the nights whenever and im sometimes called in the middle of the night when there are major problems that go toward ok ill call you back later to talk about it and then well be able to sing well please id be the first to say wed all like to be able to breathe a bit and switch off from time to time of the committee. Nowadays half of all managers stay connected to the office at home in the evening. In the modern world of work its become almost impossible to do otherwise. Yeah. Theres a sort of unwritten law that you have to stay connected and reply to emails as soon as you get them because youre equipped with this phone and thats exactly why you have it all remember so. If youre connected to your job around the clock it can cause trouble in your personal life it could lead to divorce or at least arguments with your partner due to this intrusion of the professional world into the home. Just not for. Me. And when work takes over like that it can lead to burnout. Stephanie went through that in her previous job she now works at a winery. You know you dont have her come on. Time id often get up in the middle of the night to deal with emails from china and india i thought i was being efficient. I felt i was doing important work for the company so it didnt really bother me but i was paying no attention at all to my personal life. In fact i felt that i had to be online all of the time it was a total addiction if i wasnt online i wasnt alive i had to keep up on what was going on i check emails on the weekend during vacations even during my honeymoon. And then i realized that i had to stop. It you dont really know. What triggered it was when my daughter lou said to me one day mom all you do with shout youre really mean you need an operation well actually and thats when i decided to start cutting back on being connected. Connected in her new job stephanie still has to work online but on a more limited basis she worked out a plan with her employer. Stephanie narrowly avoided burnout but not everyone is so lucky and. Were only just becoming aware of the effects of digital strands. But can a way analyze the nature of this stress are we exhibiting new behaviors new ways of working that threaten our equity librium psychologist gloria mark is trying to find out shes a professor in the department of informatics at the university of california irvine. Research focuses on the interaction of humans and technology for two decades shes carried out field studies focusing on how the growing role of Digital Technology is changing us. When i began i would interview and i would ask them about their experiences and everybody got distracted from you know so i looked for a few words like that was willing to have its employees cut off email it took me six years to find an organization. A u. S. Military Research Center near boston agreed to take part gloria mark wanted to study the effect that a male had on Staff Members she observed employers on the job and measured their physiological responses. Hi im gloria mark and were doing a study thank you very much for volunteering so i have some devices id like you to meet. This device measures the persons heartbeat which can indicate the level of stress. And this one keeps track of the interactions between coworkers. And so your other colleagues when they come in close proximity to you the signals from these badges pick up each other and it can tell when youre close with another person and interacting with them ok. Now were going to cut off your email for a period of five days. Gloria mark compared the results before and after she discovered that those whod had their email were more likely to interact directly with their coworkers. The study concluded that email is the leading source of stress in the office what we found was that the more time people spend on email the higher their stress is we also found that the longer time on email the lower people assessed their productivity at the end of the day for the past ten years gloria mark has been measuring the Attention Span of people who sit in front of computer screens she says theres been a dramatic change. In two thousand and four we found that the average length of time that people focused on any activity was three minutes in two thousand and twelve we found that on any computer screen peoples attention was about one minute and fifteen seconds on average so there are attention shifting is happening more frequently ive also done a very large study with college undergraduate students these are the millennial generation these are young people that have grown up with the internet with digital devices with smartphones and there are attention duration on any computer screen is even shorter its about forty five seconds. I think people have multitask you know for a long time i mean weve had telephone weve had radio but i think whats different now in the workplace is that people have access through Digital Media to more information faster than theyve ever had in history people report burnout because each time you orient to a new task its a strain so we know that multitasking and the consequent interruptions create stress and create a cognitive overlap. In our increasingly digitalize society constant pressure and multitasking have become the norm. But how well can the brain deal with that kind of overload. Stephon be fine is a military doctor and. A specialist in aeronautics hes been studying the cognitive capacity of pilots specifically the mental effort thats required to carry out tasks during a flight. To do that too far and his team measure the pilots brain activity and heart rate. And observe their behavior during their flight. Well you dont sound as if on it using all these parameters were going to evaluate some of their internal activity which we can correlate with the cognitive load during the flight. You know whats interesting about these measurements that they give you a dynamic reading of his state during the flight in the actions and we can then analyze these readings. And i guess if you dont do this type of simulator we can simulate a flight and the occurrence of certain technical problems will divide you about if you know these has to be managed by the pilot who will have to deal with this increasing demand youve also done all that. If you dont have is going to move if we give them several competing tasks at the same time the pilot needs to mobilize all his resources for you in terms of both memory and attention you know he has to manage his priorities to execute his actions ok engine failure. Ok were down everythings fine. If you know when the helicopter pilot has to deal with a mechanical failure in a power line yes to decide which is the most immediate danger you know how people you will probably treat the powerline is in imminent emergency but switching tasks has a cost in terms of information treatment time and in terms of errors you can observe this in a simulator mission yet. During the same united engine failure. Malfunction has occurred can you manage a conversation at the same time. Can i ask you what is three times for. An answer twelve and can you recite the alphabet backwards. Each time you switch tasks you will slow your Response Time and you also become more tired. The impression of dealing with multiple tasks is deceptive because in fact each of these tasks is dealt with superficially. The analysis of the data recorded during the test indicates that multitasking reduces performance even in experienced pilots. Many people claim that they can use digital devices to multitask efficiently but in most cases the impression of efficiency is merely an illusion. Of what i actually happens in our brain when we try to handle several tasks at once. And what impact does multitasking have on our Attention Span. Is a research at the university of. She specializes in cognitive neuroscience studying human Attention Span. Dr says that attention comes in different forms. But i dont think there is only one type of attention there are several varieties. They are based on different cerebral mechanisms different types of activity in the brain thats what im trying to unravel. For example. Is studying sustained attention the ability to remain attentive for several minutes or even hours. And selective attention which helps us to shut down time wanted background noise in our environment the research wants to find out how these mechanisms Work Together when we multitask. Experience now and this experiment to imagining brain activity while the test subject tries to perform two tasks at once. For. Your own phone but dont presume id like you to count the number of times you hear your name. At the same time numbers will appear on the screen when you see the number to left click the mouse you want to thank you. So much stuff. You know about it the signals from the electrodes in the back of the head to indicate that the subject has become less alert shes paying less attention to the task at hand is going to come through. It is using the same network of neurons as she carries out those two tasks that leads to a conflict in her brain. She did. When you talk on the phone and write an email at the same time the brain tends to alternate between those two terms so while youre writing you may miss something on the phone. These two tasks both use the brains Language Network and when we try to do them at the same time the Network Becomes such rated one of the tasks will lose out particularly fossum or the mind it is a comedic youve all but you know. Theres lots of noise in the workplace phones ringing coworkers talking scientists call this norm curtain and information. Like the deep sunless experiment that noise distracts our attention even though were able to ignore most of it. The brain has inhibiting mechanisms that reduce our response to nonpertinent sounds while were carrying out a toss. In the case of sounds its as if the brain silences them and stops reacting to that information. From this from. The inhibitor mechanisms are essential because our brains are constantly bombarded with sound and visual information. But when people multitask those filters dont work as well. When we try to do two things at once we cant properly filter out nonpertinent stimuli like the sound of a coffee machine nearby or someone walking down the hallway. This experiment shows that when people do two things at once they cant filter out background noise effectively and their attention suffers the studies refute the notion that some people are multitasking has. There are no serious cognitive studies that show that young people are more capable of multitasking than older people are. In fact young people zapper around constantly and that can be harmful. We might expect young people to experience less stress because they are supposedly comfortable with digital devices its a new movie source with zionism the Community Gets a deal. Astonishingly studies show that the opposite is true a major European Survey involving thirty thousand employees found that stress levels related to Information Technologies were significantly higher among young people compared to older people as you see below superior. That survey conducted by the j. F. K. Market Research Institute in twenty Nine Countries show that thirty nine percent of people under thirty believe that work takes up too much of their lives. Digital devices constantly demand our attention so we have to learn how to deal with these multiple distractions starting at an early age. In france experts have developed workshops that it is nine to enhance the Attention Span of school children. The workshops are conducted by neuroscientist show in cooperation with education administrators in the leon region. The show is convinced that children can learn to resist the siren call of digital devices. Now if possible you too i never thought id find myself back at school. I thought i was banished with that but i took on the challenge of implementing a program to train childrens Attention Span. Shes often oh look here the scientist my kids you. One thousand pupils are taking part in this program its aimed at helping them to resist the massive onslaught of digital content. The idea is to show children that they can control their Attention Span a skill that will also benefit them in later life. If the pilot rogue. It will be extended to all schools in france. What is a brain for. What youre. For thinking. Right for being attentive as you like but you can also have fun with it was amusing. But i think he does it all depends on how much importance we attach to attention. And i mean if a family focuses on this and makes it a priority then the children will be more attentive. Lets say youre reading a story to an infant. If the childs attention starts to wander and you stop reading then the child will realize that you expect a certain level of attention. There are lots of Little Things that parents can do to improve a childs Attention Span with. So we have to Pay Attention to our Attention Span it plays a key role in our lives but it is increasingly threatened by digital communication. Does us a little. When the brain is attentive it uses regions that are responsible for high level cognitive functions like memory planning and understanding. But when youre not paying attention those parts of the brain remain silent or do other things and. Heres another exercise the children have to keep refocusing their attention so that they can stay on the balance be the mental picture of the baby will be used throughout the workshop. At least in the kitchen. They have to stay on the beam despite the forces that tend to pull them to one side or the other its the same with attention if i have a task to perform to get from point a to point b. Im going to try to remain focused despite all the distractions i might want to talk to my friends for example or have an idea. I have to resist those forces by remembering this line in the body i have to relax and try to hold things together stabilize the body the mind and the attention. In another attention boosting exercise lets show trains children to break down assigned tasks into component parts. I have to talk to my room yes lets. This is a complex project for children but if they break it down into separate tox like organizing the toys and then making the pads they stay focused he said hes known for his children often trying to do everything at once and they lose concentration. We teach them to separate it into a series of smaller objectives. But can adults do the same thing divide the working day into a series of mini missions. The key to maintaining attention is to send to series have go and then carry them out one by one. That doesnt seem too difficult but most people think that they can get more done by doing several things at once. And the plan isnt for me children and adults often become distracted its because they havent set a clear goal the brain makes decisions several times per second about whats important and what isnt. And if you havent set your priorities you know that Decision Making process can become very complicated to melissa to present was our first family that. Plus digital devices make a huge demands on our attention we cant just focus on two or three potential interesting things i say theres more like fifteen thousand. Lets say im on the internet trying to answer a specific question and i see an ad or link that says click here so i do and then i forget what i was looking for. Multitasking takes up a lot of memory Resources Task number one number two and so forth and that causes cognitive overload the brain cant function properly. So its better to set up a series of many tasks and deal with them one at a time. John philip believes that people can learn to pay better attention just takes training. But even if we can filter out distractions can we constantly stimulate our brains without causing damage. Is a neuro psychology researcher at the university of normandy he says that sometimes we have to give our brain a break. New Information Technologies provide excellent access to knowledge. But i think we have to consider how they impact our daily lives and the workings of our brain. You know. One part of the human brain definitely needs occasional down time a system of neurons the Default Mode Network thats what theyre investigating here. You know this is a network that activates when people are awake for rest not doing very much but not in sleep mode. When were not doing much and our thoughts wander the brain keeps working but in a different way. The Default Mode Network. Not concentrating on a specific task such as making a calculation writing an email this network involves several regions of the brain. You can see these red zones thats the default network. That covers the middle part of the prefrontal cortex and towards the back of the posterior signal it cortex. So were talking about the areas over the forehead. And the areas at the back. In the folds of the cerebral hemispheres. This Network Becomes active for example when were driving on a familiar road in good weather with little traffic. Well know but vision of us was still paying attention just less than usual and a case of danger we can react right away asked cerebral machinery allows us to stay alert and do other things it might seem simple but its an elaborate mechanism and its very important for our mental aqua librium. To stashes Research Shows that the Default Mode Network plays a fundamental role in our memory. To maintain memory it seems essential to take proper care of the brains default network. That means taking mental breaks far from digital stimuli. I believe that the work of the brain the work of synthesizing memory can function properly only when we give the brain time to process and reflect. During this time it should not be at the massey of external stimulation. The stimulus makes them. Memory is not just a reservoir of data it also synthesizes our experiences we dont want to overload this vital resource. But Digital Information is so attractive to many people that they just cant do without it people cant control their urge to to check email to check facebook tuesday switch to the internet so people report when we interview them that they just feel compelled to check in with isha ive been in areas with no Network Coverage my cell phone with a different i felt the stress starting to build up of a high stress to the point where it felt like civilization had forgotten me really really this year usually i was out of touch and i couldnt reach anyone else if i needed to feel sure that it was worth spending half an hour or an hour in an area without any network whatsoever you made me feel stressed genuinely really stressed this is. Where does that urge to have constant access to information come from. Is it like being addicted to alcohol or drugs. Women also want to use them but the brain has a circuit called the reward system its composed of neurons whose main function is to memorize the things we like an activity of food a visual image like this process allows us to drink when were thirsty and eat when were hungry. But the reward system also reacts to a lot of other things including fresh stimuli like information. And. Smartphones constantly bombard you with information and new content. And they act as a powerful stimulus on the reward system. Seceded machines an external piece on postage if you like a boss. But digital environment the reward system much as drugs do but in the absence of serious mental or physical harm we really cant speak of a digital addiction in a medical sense. Will that be too bad. Its more a problem of excessive behavior. We need to find out more about what causes this intensive use. How does it affect society or a persons family life. In any case these issues need to be discussed since Digital Media have now become an integral part of our working life. Youd have to say. If we want to deal effectively with digital stress we have to take a close look at the way we use computers and smartphones. The time may come when these devices might actually help us to deal with an increased cognitive load. Professor robert jacob and his team have been working on new ways to improve technology in this area. Theyre trying to develop a computer that can read our mental capacity in real time when were walking. The computer would send us lots of data when our brain is capable of handling it and less when the brain is overworked. We think of the person and the computer as two powerful information processors connected to each other by a narrow band with very limited connection which is the user interface the screen the keyboard and elsewhere ever so were trying to improve the amount of information that can be passed across that you know particular work were trying to improve the information from the user to the computer because that seems like the one with the the lowest bandwidth with current technology. The computer wont be able to read our thoughts but it could keep track of our mental workload. Jacobs team has developed image. Software that analyzes blood flow in the prefrontal cortex the brain consumes more oxygen when its working hot. The computer is then able to vary the quantity of information it sends to us based on mental. Conducting tests that you simulated at Traffic Control time asks the user is controlling several airplanes at once they have to time share between the different airplanes first have to adjust this airplane then that airplane then go back to the first airplane what we did in this system was we tried to adjust the number of airplanes that youre assigned to control based on your workload we dont want to give you too few airplanes or youll get bored we dont want to give you too many or you cant handle them we like to adjust the airplanes to your mental state. We can also use this kind of measurement to decide when and whether to interrupt the user if the user is in the middle of doing something difficult and intense thats not a good time to interrupt if theyre at the end of a task and a little bit of a lot with less short term memory thats a good time to interrupt so our goal is to make what we call implicit user interfaces that pull information out of the user without taking any of their attention in order to do it. Base research would initially be used by any Traffic Controllers who have to keep track of huge amounts of information resulting in permanent stress in the long term the results could also be applied to other kinds of walk. And if youre not driving airplanes but doing office work this also applies your workload may go up or down and we can adjust adjust what you have to do based on it. Jacob also wants to develop a system that filters the data that we receive on digital devices based on our cognitive load during peak work periods would receive edited versions. If successful this research could go a long way toward reducing our information workload but is that really good news or just another intrusion of digital devices into the private workings of our minds. Its too early to say nor is it clear how far humans can adapt their behavior to deal with increasingly complex technology. For a living in this ng where we keep inventing it wonderful technologies and keep throwing them at people and people are at this point where theyre not quite understanding how to use them and so we have to think how we can Design Technology to adapt better to how humans think we want to design. Promote productivity for people to be a fact but also its. A fact. We will have to find ways to limit. Including. Attention span. We have the right to be disconnected. Who speaks. Miscible the. Impacts. Livable. Looks. Doubly. History books are brought to life. Maybe the stories there will get a rewrite. Of the russian revolution. From the perspective of writers thinkers and just what did it feel like to live in times over the revolution. Nineteen seventeen a real locked. Starting october twenty fifth t. W. Its all about the moments that right before. Its all about the stories in some life. Its all about George Chance to discover the world from different perspectives. Join us inspired by distinctive instagram or years at g. W. Stories new topics each week on instagram. This is developing news live from then germanys chancellor merkel appears to have made major progress toward forming a new government a Party Sources saying her christian democrats have reached agreement with the very an ally so i kept on migration the agreement could smooth the way to a new code
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