Working in Movement

I was just reading about some new research when the cat jumped onto my desk and distracted me. Then the phone rang, new email arrived, and I decided to update my RSS feed reader with the latest news. It was a while before I got back to the research.

Kind of ironic because the research deals with how aging effects how easily we get distracted. Why the Aging Mind is Driven to Distraction describes the study done at the University of Toronto and the Rotman Research Institute, and published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The researchers put forth the idea that aging, starting at about 40, interrupts a balance between two brain regions dealing with attention span.

"It's known that older adults are more easily distracted. We think we've found a mechanism in the brain to explain this," (lead researcher Cheryl L.) Grady said. "The functional changes are detectable by middle age."

Maybe so. But what about the role of learning and environment in all this? Even Grady concedes that learning might have something to do with it.

Grady, however, suggested that people in their 20s today — their brains molded by instant messaging and all of the other high-technology of the short attention span — may be better able to manage unwarranted interruptions when they reach old age.

"If you are a 20-year-old today," Grady said, "you may find it easier to deal with distraction when you are 60 because you have had so much practice."

I noted a couple of things here. Since the study used brain imaging to discover what was going on, it might not be revealing the whole picture. See Searching for the Person in the Brain And the idea that culture is presenting many more things to keep track of in less time is nicely dealt with in the Steven Johnson book Everything Bad is Good for You.

Now where was I?