Sun - February 27, 2005

It's funny how one thought like that leads to others. It wasn't just movies I was avoiding, I realized. It was all media. I haven't watched television or listened to the radio recently either. Or pored over books. Or skimmed magazines. Or mined Sunday newspapers articles like a giddy prospector the way that I used to. Outside the office, I've recently retreated into a sensory cocoon, preferring long walks and longer naps to more traditional forms of entertainment.
But why?

I'm usually a stimulus junkie. My working world swarms with voicemails, urgent email attachments, ringing Skype phones, and open IM windows. I can't remember the last time that I chatted with a colleague when one of us wasn't simultaneously monitoring a half dozen other electronic communications. And yet, I found that the very thought of watching television left me ... anxious.

This puzzled me until a colleague—with suspiciously good timing—gave me a copy of Edward M. Hallowell's article, "Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform" from the January, 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review. The author, a psychiatrist, theorizes that executives who desperately try to deal with more input than they possibly can suffer from an unrecognized neurological phenomenon called attention deficit trait, or ADT, the core symptoms of which are distractability, inner frenzy, and impatience. Hallowell writes:

Like the traffic jam, ADT is an artifact of modern life. It is brought on by the demands on our time and attention that have exploded over the past two decades. As our minds fill with noise—feckless synaptic events signifying nothing—the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and thoroughly to anything.

The result, the author says, is that as the brain's frontal lobes approach capacity, the lower brain interprets these signals as danger signs and shifts into survival mode, triggering fear, anxiety, impatience, irritability, anger, or panic. "In a futile attempt to do more than is possible, the brain paradoxically reduces its ability to think clearly," Hallowell writes. "The most important step in controlling ADT is not to buy a superturbocharged BlackBerry and fill it up with to-os but rather to create an environment in which the brain can function at its best."

Although the author offers few facts to prove his theory, his conclusions troubled me long after I set the article aside to answer 10 new emails and four new instant messages. Did ADT explain my own withdrawal, my own sense of having too many inputs, too much noise, and too little value attached to them?

The answer to that question implicates far more than my own awareness. If Hallowell is right, then his theory belies the worthiness of high tech's effort to serve us more information better, faster, in more media and to more places. If Hallowell is right, then psychonomics—my self-coined term for regulating technological stimuli—must one day take its place alongside ergonomics as a measure of healthiness in an office environment. If Hallowell is right, then Bill Gates is wrong. Business at the speed of thought is really business at the speed of nought because a barrage of unfiltered information slowly robs us of an essential capacity to reflect upon and reason from that information. If Hallowell is right, then devising technological means to filter information is as important—and perhaps more important—than creating technologies to deliver information. If Hallowell is right, then I may be one unwitting victim of the first computer virus that a human can catch.

If Hallowell is right.

Only time will tell whether he is on to something or not. All the same, I felt much better this weekend when I used an old and proven technology to end the constant data stream enabled by newer ones: I flipped the off switches, lay down, and read a book.