The most recent issue of New York magazine featured an article by Sam Anderson called “In Defense of Distraction.” It’s a thorough study of our modern Poverty of Attention, diving in to the science of it and looking at what the problem might mean in the whole evolutionary scheme of things. This is a problem that fascinates me right now, writing more and more prescriptions for neurological performance-enhancing drugs.

He starts off the long eight-web-pages article by trying to focus in the attention the reader:

I’m going to pause here, right at the beginning of my riveting article about attention, and ask you to please get all of your precious 21st-century distractions out of your system now. Check the score of the Mets game; text your sister that pun you just thought of about her roommate’s new pet lizard; …refresh your work e-mail; …upload pictures of yourself reading this paragraph to your “me reading magazine articles” Flickr photostream; and alert the fellow citizens of whatever Twittertopia you happen to frequent that you will be suspending your digital presence for the next twenty minutes or so…Good. Now: Count your breaths. Close your eyes. Do whatever it takes to get all of your neurons lined up in one direction…Now it’s just you and me, tucked like fourteenth-century Zen masters into this sweet little nook of pure mental focus.

The ironic thing is, just reading his humorous introduction, and then trying to read through the whole article made me realize just how hard it is these days to focus and get through an article like this. Especially reading it on the computer. Several times I thought of pausing and checking Facebook, or checking a baseball score (Braves, NOT Mets). The kids interrupted me and their Wii game tempted me as well. But I made it through. Here are some of the highlights, though I suggest that–even if it is just a test to see if you yourself still have the power to ignore the distractions around you and get through a scholarly article like this–go and read it yourself.

…our attention crisis is already chewing its hyperactive way through the very foundations of Western civilization. Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the “dumbest generation” is leading us into a “dark age” of bookless “power browsing.” Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese. Formerly well-rounded adults are forced to MacGyver worldviews out of telegraphic blog posts, bits of YouTube videos, and the first nine words of Times editorials. Schoolkids spread their attention across 30 different programs at once and interact with each other mainly as sweatless avatars…We are, in short, terminally distracted. And distracted, the alarmists will remind you, was once a synonym for insane.

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The most advanced Buddhist monks become world-class multitaskers. Meditation might speed up their mental processes enough to handle information overload.

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A quintessentially Western solution to the attention problem—one that neatly circumvents the issue of willpower—is to simply dope our brains into focus. We’ve done so, over the centuries, with substances ranging from tea to tobacco to NoDoz to Benzedrine, and these days the tradition seems to be approaching some kind of zenith with the rise of neuroenhancers: drugs designed to treat ADHD (Ritalin, Adderall), Alzheimer’s (Aricept), and narcolepsy (Provigil) that can produce, in healthy people, superhuman states of attention. A grad-school friend tells me that Adderall allowed him to squeeze his mind “like a muscle.” Joshua Foer, writing in Slate after a weeklong experiment with Adderall, said the drug made him feel like he’d “been bitten by a radioactive spider”—he beat his unbeatable brother at Ping-Pong, solved anagrams, devoured dense books. “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my in-box apparently shut down,” he wrote.

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It’s possible that we’re evolving toward a new techno-cognitive nomadism, in which restlessness will be an advantage.

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Which brings me, finally, to the next generation of attenders, the so-called “net-gen” or “digital natives,” kids who’ve grown up with the Internet and other time-slicing technologies. There’s been lots of hand-wringing about all the skills they might lack, mainly the ability to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but surely they can already do things their elders can’t—like conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media, or pay attention to switching between attentional targets in a way that’s been considered impossible…The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly…Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.

Here’s another interesting article in The New Yorker magazine about “cosmetic neurology” and performance-enhancing drugs like Adderall.