Adam Gazzaley

So many technological innovations have enhanced our lives in countless ways, but they also threaten to overwhelm our brain’s goal-directed functioning with interference.

Is it any wonder that 80 percent of car accidents and 16 percent of highway deaths are the consequence of distracted driving? We are all cruising along on a superhighway of interference.

Former Microsoft executive Linda Stone dubbed this constant multitasking ‘continuous partial attention.’... frequent task switching is something we all do, and the more often we switch, the more detrimental it is to our real-world performance.

All complex systems are susceptible to interference, including the functioning of our cars, laptops, 747s, and the Hubble Telescope. The opportunity for interference to degrade any system’s performance seems to scale with its complexity. When it comes to the human brain, undeniably the most complex system in the known universe, it should thus come as no surprise that it is extremely sensitive to interference at many levels.

That is what our prefrontal cortex and its network offers humans to differentiate us from much less evolved animals: the ability to pause in response to a stimulus and enact complex goals in a nonreflexive way.

A major premise of this book is that our Distracted Minds are generated by a head-on collision between our high-level goals and our intrinsic cognitive control limitations; this conflict generates goal interference that negatively impacts quality of life. If we want to overcome the derailing forces of goal interference, we need to increase our understanding and expand our awareness of our cognitive control limitations so that we can find ways to minimize those factors.

In many ways, we are ancient brains in a high-tech world.