When the Brain Gets Distracted

 

                                                  (image:youtube.com)

Hapit na mahigumad kay ya sa boot nagpanaw…

There was a bus full of students going home from school. The driver had a medical emergency and only one rider saw the event. He stood up to maneuverer the bus into a stop saving all on board. Why is it that he was the only one to see the event? All the rest were busy using mobile phones.

In his 1890 book “The Principles of Psychology,” psychologist and philosopher William James wrote that attention "is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.

Attention is the ability to actively process specific information in the environment while tuning out other details.

Distractions and multitasking are generally detrimental to learning and memory. The current experiments examined how distractions and divided attention influence one’s ability to selectively remember valuable information (Middlebrooks, 2017).

Research results show that there is really an effect to the brain when it is constantly distracted. The brain can only focus on one thing and when we subject it to multiple tasks, it adapts but will not function well.

According to cognifit.com, focused attention is the brain's ability to concentrate its attention on a target stimulus for any period of time. Focused attention is a type of attention that makes it possible to quickly detect relevant stimuli.

Attention is optimal when individuals are focused on one task at a time. However, with many competing sources vying for our attention, multitasking has become the norm for most [people] (Carrier, Cheever, Rosen, Benitez, & Chang, 2009).

While smartphones and related mobile technologies are recognized as flexible and powerful tools that, when used prudently, can augment human cognition, there is also a growing evidence that habitual involvement with these devices may have a negative and lasting impact on users’ ability to think, remember, pay attention, and regulate emotion.

Thinking or cognition is having glitches these days due to such distractions. People are so engrossed with the gadgets they do not mind that their ATTENTION and THINKING are degenerating.