News—$&$—Interrupted
It is my practice to wake up slowly most mornings, sipping cafe au lait while perusing the news online. Having an entire periodical contained on my laptop is space-saving, and less likely than an old-fashioned newspaper to attract my kitty’s quick cutting claws. But to get to the news, my brain must filter through electronic data that is far more attention-getting than the mundane font delivering the journalists’ reports.
When physical newspapers used to arrive on the doorstep, reading the staid print that continued down the page in columns had a calming effect, even when the news was not good. Ads appeared along the side or the bottom of articles, or in slick multi-colored circulars that fell out of the paper—usually on a Sunday. But the information in a news story was uninterrupted.
Now, when I read the news online—which is the only option for many papers these days—stories are not only interrupted by ads, but the ads are flashing incessantly. Sometimes they contain images of important-looking people clearly on the verge of telling me something, if only I will click the little “play” arrow allowing them to speak.
Maybe the average U.S. brain was primed for this by commercial television, and I have simply missed the training, having lived without TV for a couple of decades. The way I remember it, we’d watch a program for 10 or 15 minutes, then the show would stop for an advertising break. Generally, we used these breaks to jump up and get a sandwich or run to the bathroom, keeping an ear out for the continuation of the program. Or, in some cases, one member of the family remained alert in the TV room and hollered, “Show’s back on!”
The filtering of ads was done for you by the broadcast companies: Programs were broken into segments separated by commercial breaks—which you could use productively or not.
But the filtering out of ads that actually jump into your line of sight while reading online is not passive. It requires a constant determining of which stimuli to attend to and which to ignore. Does this create anxiety in the user? Or has the human brain adapted? Are we improving our abilities to sift through and ignore irrelevant data?
I did a little research—accessing reputable sources such as the National Institutes of Health and professional periodicals on psychology.
First, I found confirmation that “multitasking” is a fiction. Our brains are not wired to attend to more than one thing at a time. When we’re “multitasking,” we are merely alternating attention between two (or more) things, and not doing either of them as efficiently as we would if we did them one at a time.
Reading online requires this erroneously named multitasking: We take our attention away from the text for the instant it takes to react to an ad—the brief realization that the ad exists and we must scroll over it (assuming we aren’t going to actually attend to it)—and then redirect our attention back to the text. Multiple studies indicated this behavior is reducing our ability to attend for long periods, and some even claimed it’s actually reducing gray matter in brain regions used for impulse control and decision making.
One particular study specifically stated that online shopping for 15 minutes reduces attentional abilities for a time afterward, in a way that reading a magazine does not.
So, just to be on the safe side, turn off your devices once in a while. Read a book. It’s apparently better for your brain.