Part 5 (1/2)

”There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet.”

-Kent Farnsworth, summarizing his father Philo Farnsworth's view on the device he invented: the television[62]

My wife Roz is actually three people: there's Normal Roz, there's Email Roz, and there's Zombie Roz. Let me explain.

Normal Roz is a sharp-as-a-tack, sweet-as-a-pixie-stick, pretty-as-they-make-'em woman. She loves the outdoors, loves to garden, and loves to get her hands dirty. She combines a French love for life with the German love of hard work and efficiency. She's been known to say to me, whilst I'm in the midst of enjoying the miracles of central air conditioning: ”Clay, yard work is just like that video game you're playing, except with a productive outcome.”

But should she run across a computer screen on her way outside to try to plant corn in our 16-square-foot back yard, it's over. Especially if an email window is open. She will sit down in front of her computer, and (according to her) time no longer exists. Hours later, she'll look up at me, eyes bloodshot, and wonder why I'm asking her to come to bed. Time stands still for her, the day pa.s.ses, and she has no idea where it went. Email Roz has no sense of time. I won't lie-sometimes when she wants me to go do yard work I have left a laptop open between her and the door. Works every time.

But the scary Roz is Zombie Roz. Normal Roz can be on her way anywhere, and if there's a television playing anything from Fox News to HGTV, Normal Roz turns into Zombie Roz: transfixed, and mouth agape at the television. It's as though a freeze-ray shoots out of our TV, and once it enters her field of vision, she's powerless to resist it. I once watched her stare blankly for 15 minutes at a Spanish language cable network. She doesn't speak Spanish.

I've caricaturized my wife to make a point: information consumption makes you sedentary, and sometimes, it ruins your sense of time. Being sedentary is bad for your health.

The Connection Between Obesities.

It turns out that sitting for long periods of time isn't particularly good for you. Whether you're sitting behind a computer, sitting in front of a television, sitting in your car listening to the radio on your way to work, or sitting and reading this book, we are usually sedentary when we're consuming information.

In 2004, one physician coined the term Sedentary Death Syndrome to cla.s.sify all the diseases that come from the sedentary state. The effects: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and yes, obesity. Some researchers are calling it the second largest threat to public health in America. What are we doing when we're sedentary? Few of us are meditating. We're usually consuming information.

New research points to sitting, especially amongst men, as a leading cause of death. Even if you exercise regularly, it turns out that sitting for long periods of time can be deadly. Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic: ”Adults who spent more than four hours a day sitting in front of the television had an 80 percent increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease compared with adults who spent less than two hours a day in front of the TV. This risk was independent of other risk factors such as smoking or diet.

And it's not just TV watching. Any extended sitting-whether that's at a desk or behind the wheel-increases your risk. What's more, a few hours a week at the gym doesn't seem to significantly offset the risk.”[63]

Most of us aren't consuming information while jogging on a treadmill. If you have a desk job, it's likely that your desk is one that comes with a chair, not a pad on the ground for comfortable standing. But as we sit there in front of our computers, we are slowly killing ourselves just waiting for the next hit of dopamine to come into our inbox.

As of 2008, according to the UCSD, we were consuming 11.8 hours of information per day per person while we're not at work.[64] While some of that may be listening to music or the radio while we're running on the treadmill, most of those hours are spent sitting down.

Do us both a favor: stand up and stretch, take a break and walk around for a bit. I'd like for you to finish this book.

The nice thing about physical obesity is that you can pretty easily tell if you're obese. Body dysmorphia aside, one need only to fly on a major airline to check oneself-if you need a seatbelt extender, you're likely obese. If you cannot see, much less touch, your toes because your belly is in the way, you're likely obese. And if you don't want to try those tests, any trip to the scale will tell you whether or not you're suffering from obesity.

The dangerous thing about information obesity is that it's a bit more nefarious. It's difficult to tell if you are suffering from information obesity or have poor information consumption habits. It's impossible to know if you're ignorant and as we've learned, even if confronted with our own ignorance, it's likely only to make us run out and consume more misinformation in order to avoid being wrong.

Socrates' view on this was simple: just accept your own ignorance as the only thing to be certain about. This view is important to keep in mind, and a healthy foundation for an information diet.

Information obesity isn't new. Just as it was possible to be obese 500 years ago, it was possible to experience this new kind of ignorance 500 years ago, too. It was just more expensive, and you had to work much harder for it. But now we're living in a world of abundance, and as it turns out, information obesity has some pretty serious consequences for our productivity, our health, and our society.

[62] /health/sitting/AN02082 [64] hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo.php.

Apnea.

Linda Stone is a quiet, deliberate woman who is obsessed with our autonomic nervous system: the stuff that we do relatively unconsciously, like make our hearts beat, make our skin perspire, make our mouths salivate, digest food, and, to an extent, breathe. She's constantly trying to figure out how technology affects this part of our daily function.

At the recommendation of her doctor, Stone started doing daily breathing exercises every morning to increase her respiratory health and reduce stress. Every morning, she gets up, goes for a short walk, and does 20 minutes of Buteyko breathing exercises.

When I met with her for the writing of this book, our meeting involved a few gadgets-the emWave2 and the StressEraser, small little contraptions that, when hooked up to your earlobe or the tip of your finger, show you how well you're breathing, and what your heart rate looks like. They're pretty simple devices that use a variety of blinking lights and sounds to calm you down and help you achieve an optimal rate of breath.[65]

You can even attach them to your computer to keep a diary of your breath. Stone often sits with a clip dangling from her ear and into her computer so that she can receive constant feedback there on her screen about her breath and heart rate, and continually try to stay in a relaxed, primed state.

After a few days of these breathing exercises, she noticed something interesting: just a few minutes after doing her breathing exercises, she'd head to work, check her email, and find herself holding her breath. Noting that there may be something wrong with that, she grabbed her gadgets and got to work finding out if she was the only one holding her breath in front of a monitor.

After about seven months, and about 200 interviews, Stone found that 80% of the people that she talked to and observed were holding their breath-especially when email came into their inbox.

So I decided to buy one of these devices and test myself during the writing of this book. I scheduled email checks only twice a day for one hour, and found that during those hours, sure enough, my breathing was more shallow and more irregular than during the hours in which I was writing.

Linda describes the problem with a term she coined: email apnea. But the irregularities go beyond email: I found that when I was dealing with all different sorts of incoming information online, my breath and heart rate became irregular. Any time I was dealing with something with a number by it or a queue, my breathing changed.

I noticed something else interesting when I dusted off my marathon training heart rate monitor and began to wear it to the office during the day: when I received a text message, my heart rate went up slightly and wouldn't go down until I read the text message or after about five minutes-the amount of time I suppose it took me to refocus on my work and forget about the message.

I'm uncomfortable with this method of consumption. I don't like a device giving even my most honest and caring of friends the ability to increase my heart rate with the push of a b.u.t.ton. It's too Pavlovian for me. And holding your breath has some serious consequences; not only does it regulate the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood, but it also helps regulate your fight/flight response. A lack of oxygen comes with a variety of awful health consequences like diabetes and obesity.

[65] /linda-stone/just-breathe-building-the_b_85651.html.

Poor Sense of Time.

When Email Roz looks up at me after a six hour inbox tour, she seems disoriented. How could it possibly be so late? She was just on her way outside to do some gardening. ”What do you mean it's dark outside?” she'll ask. Her eyes are a little bloodshot-it's like waking a person up.

I get it. The same thing happens to me. When I sit down in front of a computer, it is as though the world around it disappears. Metaphorical blinders go on, and it's as though I'm almost inside the computer itself. I've been captured by my 27” iMac. When I step out from of a long run in front of a computer, it's almost as though I have to reorient myself in the same way that I reorient myself in the morning when I wake up.

Every time you get a new email, text message, or other kind of notification, you also get a little hit of our old friend dopamine. It turns out that dopamine not only puts us into a seeking frenzy, but it also distorts our sense of time. We can spend an hour inside of our email inboxes when it feels like just a few minutes.

Email Roz and her husband Writer Clay have done some pretty terrible things to each other-they've left each other at train stations, been late to dinner dates, and let entire evenings pa.s.s them by while they've sat together. Just a quick check of the email when we get home can often end up in evenings entirely lost to LCD screens.

Attention Fatigue.

About two years ago, I started to wonder: what the heck happened to my short-term memory? And where did my attention span go? I've written a little, pithy 140-character tweet, sent it into the universe, and in no more than five minutes received a reply. The only problem is, I've already forgotten what I wrote in the first place. I've had to go back, and look at what I said just five minutes ago to understand what the person replying to me is referencing.