The offer of content, entertainment, distractions and above all experiences (now there is even augmented reality in the iPhone X) has grown in a way unimaginable just 10 years ago. This is undoubtedly a positive thing: abundance is always better than scarcity. However, it happens that the other object of the relationship, ie the time available for the consumption of needs, remains an invariable constant. Just flying from New Zealand to Italy can earn almost a day; there is no other way to stretch time on the planet.
A survey by the Pew Research Center tells us that the free time of Americans, the population most affected by these phenomena, has remained almost the same in the last 10 years. Judy Wajcman, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, has dedicated two accurate studies (Pressed for Time and The Sociology of Speed) to the acceleration of life dominated by the new media. The thesis of the Australian sociologist is essentially this: it is not that in this acceleration we have simply become hostages of communication devices or machines, rather it has happened that we have made ourselves prisoners of self-imposed priorities and parameters. Fortunately, one might say, because something can still be done. Surely! But there are some who doubt our corrective capabilities
In English, a book by Franklin Foer, an esteemed liberal-minded journalist and former editor of the New Republic, was released on September 12, with the emblematic title World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. One can certainly nurture a certain skepticism about the thesis that the technology dominated by the large Internet corporations is an existential threat to humanity, but it is certain that we are entering, as Foer writes in the Washington Post, a new phase in the relationship between the mind of man and machines. A phase, as Google co-founder Larry Page says, in which, postulating that "the human brain works like a computer", why not "accelerate the day when we will become complete cyborgs?". Having attended a Montessori school, the founder of Google and his partner, Sergey Brin, are at the zenith of creative thinking.
THE ECONOMY OF ATTENTION
Waiting for the metamorphosis into cyborg, it happens that the competition between the "big techs" no longer takes place on the market of goods and services but on something absolutely ethereal, that is people's attention. Grabbing a chunk of their attention has become the new business model of tech and new media companies. Winning attention means taking over people's time. A great deal is invested in this enterprise and something is achieved. Consumers of new experiences generally respond to stimuli by dividing their attention between multiple tasks, as happens with time sharing in advanced operating systems, as Larry Page would say. However, multiple micro-attentions can produce an overall distraction which is a phenomenon that is increasingly observed, particularly among digital natives.
Has people's attention become such a fundamental economic factor?—?even more important than the consumer's wallet (which comes as a consequence)?—?than two unconventional scholars (Erik Brynjolfsson and Joo Hee Oh) of MIT's Sloan Management School they hypothesize that the economy of the future will be an attention economy. Whoever has the attention will have hegemony. Whoever conquers time will dominate society. Attention is wealth.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE FIGHT FOR ATTENTION
With what cognitive consequences on individuals? Many have asked this question and there are many psychometric, cognitive and neural studies on it. However, there are those who have gone beyond this trifle to ask themselves the vexed question: does this state of affairs make us happier, or not?
The matter of happiness is a very serious matter that even the American constituents have taken so seriously as to make it a piece of their political and ideal construction. "The pursuit of happiness" along with life and liberty is one of the cornerstones of the United States Declaration of Independence. Even a small Himalayan country, Buthan, measures the well-being of its citizens not on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but on Gross Domestic Happiness (GDP). The per capita GDP of the small Asian monarchy is 2000 dollars, but the GNP is the highest on the continent
Those who have gone beyond psychometrics and cognitive theories in trying to understand the consequences of a mind that becomes increasingly wandering and wandering, like the biting hordes of the Walking Dead, are two esteemed Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, who have set themselves the task of measuring the perceived happiness of a large number of people engaged in various activities in a specific moment of the day and state of mind.
The two scholars have developed an iPhone application distributed to 5000 volunteers from a hundred countries. These people, consensually and consciously, could receive a notification at random intervals throughout the day. If they accepted it, they were specifically questioned about their current activity, the degree of happiness they perceived and above all they were told to declare whether at that moment their mind was concentrated on what they were doing or was wandering in pursuit of other thoughts and sensations. If this happened they were asked to say whether it was a pleasant, unpleasant or neutral digression. Such a brilliant idea, when candid. Can you imagine someone engaged in extracurricular activities, as Trump would say, receiving a notification from their iPhone asking questions about their current well-being?
In any case, the research showed that 46,9% of the people questioned were thinking about something different from what they were doing and that this condition generated a perception of unhappiness. According to this research, the wandering mind appears to be the default state of the human mind of half of the people inhabiting the planet. Not bad!
But let's leave the floor to Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert who described the results of their research in "Science". We have translated this article entitled "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind" for you, advising you not to wander too much with your mind while you are reading it.
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A WALKING MIND IS AN UNHAPPY MIND
Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what's not happening around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, those that might happen in the future, or that never will. In fact, "stimulus-independent thinking" also known as "wandering mind" appears to be the brain's default mode of functioning. While this ability is a major evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it can come at an emotional cost. Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness can be found in living in the moment, those in those traditions trained to resist the wandering of the mind to "be here now." These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. They are right?
Laboratory experiments have revealed much about the cognitive and neural underpinnings of mind wandering, but little about the emotional consequences in everyday life. The most reliable method for investigating emotions in the real world is "experiential sampling", which involves contacting people while they are engaged in their daily activities to ask them to state their thoughts, feelings and actions at that moment. Unfortunately, recording real-time reports from large numbers of people during their daily lives is so complex and expensive that experiential sampling has rarely been used to examine the relationship between mind wandering and happiness and thus has always been limited to very small samples. . We solved this problem by developing an iPhone application which we used to create a valuable and large database of realistic reports of thoughts, feelings and actions on a large sample of people during their daily life activities.
The app contacts participants through their iPhone at random times during waking hours, asks questions and records their answers in a database at www.trackyourhappiness.org. The database currently contains almost a quarter of a million entries from around 5000 people from 83 different countries aged 18-88, collectively in one of 86 major occupational categories. To find out how often people's minds wander, what topics they wander about, and how these wanderings affect their happiness, we analyzed samples of 2250 adults (58,8% male, 73,9% US residents, mean age of 34 years old) randomly designated to answer a series of questions on the following topics:
1) Happiness (“How do you feel now?”) with a variable rating on a continuous scale ranging from very bad (0) to very good (100).
2) Activity carried out at that moment (“What are you doing right now?”) with a possible answer chosen from 22 work or leisure activities. adapted from the “day reconstruction method”).
3) Wandering condition of the mind (“Are you thinking about something other than what you are doing?”), being able to answer with one of four options: no; yes, something pleasant; yes, something neutral; yes, something not pleasant.
THE THREE FACTS DISCOVERED BY THE SURVEY
First, people's minds wandered frequently no matter what they were doing. The condition of wandering mind occurred in 46,9% of the sample and during any type of activity, except that of sexual intercourse, in at least 30% of the sample. The frequency of the mind-wandering condition in our sample was considerably higher than that typically measured in laboratory experiments. Surprisingly, the nature of the activities individuals engaged in had only a modest impact on whether their minds wandered while it had almost no impact on the pleasantness of the topics their minds wandered about.
Second, people were less happy when their minds wandered, regardless of the activity they engaged in, including less pleasant ones. Even though people's minds were more inclined to wander on pleasant topics (42,5% of the sample) than on unpleasant (26,5%) or neutral topics (31%), people were no happier when thinking about things pleasant than they were thinking about their current activity. They were considerably less happy when thinking about neutral or unpleasant topics. Though negative moods are known to cause the wandering mind condition. Time-lag analyzes suggested that in our sample, mind wandering was generally the cause, and not simply the consequence of unhappiness.
Third, what people think is a better indicator of their happiness than what they do. The nature of people's activities accounted for 4,6% of the variance of happiness in non-relationships and 3,2% of the variance of happiness in interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, the wandering of the mind accounted for 10,8% of the variance in the happiness of non-related people and 17,7% of those in a relationship. The variance of mind wandering was largely independent of the variance related to the nature of the activities, suggesting that the two states have independent influences on happiness. In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive dynamic that comes at an emotional cost.
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The graph drawn up by Killingsworth and Gilbert, based on the results of the survey, is of great interest for understanding what can happen to our perception of well-being when we are engaged in a specific activity, part of our daily menu, or when the mind starts to wander and chase foreign thoughts. There are many reflections to be made that we gladly leave to you.
