Many people won't read past this headline—they're already bored.
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Science tells us that new information, whether slowly or quickly gained, triggers happy chemicals in our brain. That's why these days, we're increasingly forgoing longer, difficult pursuits like reading—to instead refresh our social media feed one more time. In Medium, Hugh McGuire explains what's lost (besides our attention spans) by prioritizing quick, easy pleasures.
Dopamine and digital
It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this:
New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush.
With fMRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centres light up with activity when new emails arrive. …
How can books compete?
Pleasing ourselves to death
There is a famous study of rats, wired up with electrodes on their brains. When the rats press a lever, a little charge gets released in part of their brain that stimulates dopamine release. A pleasure lever.
Given a choice between food and dopamine, they’ll take the dopamine, often up to the point of exhaustion and starvation. They’ll take the dopamine over sex. Some studies see the rats pressing the dopamine lever 700 times in an hour.
We do the same things with our email. Refresh. Refresh. …
Why are books important?
When I think back on my life, I can define a set of books that shaped me — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Books have always been an escape, a learning experience, a saviour, but beyond this, greater than this, certain books became, over time, a kind of glue that holds together my understanding of the world. I think of them as nodes of knowledge and emotion, nodes that knot together the fabric my self. Books, for me anyway, hold together who I am.
Books, in ways that are different to visual art, to music, to radio, to love even, force us to walk through another’s thoughts, one word at a time, over hours and days. We share our minds for that time with the writer’s. There is a slowness, a forced reflection required by the medium that is unique. Books recreate someone else’s thoughts inside our own minds, and maybe it is this one-to-one mapping of someone else’s words, on their own, without external stimuli, that give books their power. Books force us to let someone else’s thoughts inhabit our minds completely. …
The problem defined
And so, the problem, more or less, is identified:
I cannot read books because my brain has been trained to want a constant hit of dopamine, which a digital interruption will provide
This digital dopamine addiction means I have trouble focusing: on books, work, family and friends
Problem identified, or most of it. …
And, so, a change
And so, starting in January, I started making some changes. The key ones are:
No more Twitter, Facebook, or article reading during the work day (hard)
No reading of random news articles (hard)
No smartphones or computers in the bedroom (easy)
No TV after dinner (it turns out, easy)
Instead, go straight to bed and start reading a book — usually on an eink ereader (it turns out, easy)
The shocking thing was how quickly my mind adapted to accommodate reading books again. I had expected to fight for that concentration — but I didn’t have to fight. With less digital input (no pre-bed TV, especially), extra time (no TV, again), and without a tempting digital device near at hand … there was time and space for my mind to settle into a book.
What a wonderful feeling it was.
I am reading books now more than I have in years. I have more energy, and more focus than I’ve had for ages.
Read the whole thing here.
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