The Slot Machine in Your Pocket

In 2010, five neuroscientists took a kayaking trip along the San Juan River in a remote part of southern Utah. The trip was organized by Dr. David Strayer, a professor of psychology at University of Utah. He wanted to understand what it would be like to spend five days without the possibility of an electronic signal. What happens when we step into silence, free from the nagging awareness of a cell phone in the pocket?

Strayer invited three neuroscientist friends to join him on the trip—one who shared his concern that ubiquitous communication is undermining our capacity for deep thinking and attention, and two friends who were skeptical. The two skeptics, including Dr. Todd Braver, came along for a fun vacation and to humor Strayer, but “they [were] not convinced that anything lasting will come of the trip – personally or scientifically.”^[1]

The journalist accompanying the researchers recorded their constant debates. One of Strayer’s skeptical friends, the neuroscience researcher Arthur Kramer (under whom Strayer earned his doctorate), is constantly connected. Though he has a colleague who complains that he goes on his computer during meetings, Kramer remains confident that multitasking hasn’t weakened his attention. But Strayer isn’t convinced: as the group stops for gas and Kramer checks his email one last time, Strayer remarks that his friend shows all the classic signs of addiction.

When the group finally put out on the San Juan River, silence descended. No more texts, emails, or notifications—just miles of beautiful scenery with occasional wildlife.

Being in nature against a backdrop of stillness spurred the group’s creativity, leading to challenging discussions. One of the scientists, the late Steven Yantis, suggested that the real significance of digital omnipresence might not be the actual interruptions coming from our devices so much as our constant readiness to be interrupted at any moment. Yantis, then chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins, remarked, “The expectation of e-mail seems to be taking up our working memory.”^[2]

Yantis’s remark gets to the heart of Strayer’s concern when organizing the trip. Is our working memory—the part of the brain that regulates attention, in addition to being responsible to creatively integrate ideas with past knowledge—compromised not just from actual interruptions that come to us from our phones, but also by the anticipation of what might be coming down the digital pipeline? As Matt Richtel wrote in his New York Times article about the trip,

These researchers are wondering whether attention and focus can take a hit when people merely anticipate the arrival of more digital stimulation…. Working memory is a precious resource in the brain. The scientists hypothesize that a fraction of brain power is tied up in anticipating e-mail and other new information.^[3]

The trip did not yield any great epiphanies for the cautious scientists, apart from strategies for how their various hypotheses might be clinically tested. Yet the time on the gentle river, free of all distraction, did seem to leave all of them—even the more technologically sanguine—with a new openness to quiet, and even boredom. When Todd Braver, psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, finally retrieved his phone, “it dawned on him how much he turns to it in tiny moments of boredom: ‘Sometimes I do use it as an excuse to be antisocial.’” ^[4]

After the wilderness excursion, all of the academics seemed more willing to consider that stillness, and even boredom, may have benefits. Perhaps the most telling part of the experience was that Arthur Kramer, the skeptic of the group, began rethinking his relationship to multitasking.

As they near the airport, Mr. Kramer also mentions a personal discovery: “I have a colleague who says that I’m being very impolite when I pull out a computer during meetings. I say: ‘I can listen.’”

“Maybe I’m not listening so well. Maybe I can work at being more engaged.”^[5]

The Paradox of the Unread Message

Fifteen years later, the hypothesis the researchers tossed around on the trip—that our working memory is compromised by constant availability to interruptions—has been established through a string of clinical studies. For example, a 2023 study by Adrian Ward, et al, demonstrated that even when a phone does not interrupt sustained attention, and even when it does not increase the frequency of phone-related thoughts, the mere presence of the device still adversely affects working memory capacity (WMC) and functional fluid intelligence (Gf).^[6] Subsequent meta-analysis has supported the phenomenon of phone-induced brain drain, despite many remaining questions.^[7] It all goes back to Dr. Yantis’s comment during the trip about expectation of messages. It seems that the presence of a phone keeps a person in a state of “interruption-readiness.” Knowing that at any moment your attention might be pulled away from an activity—whether homework, a conversation, a project at work, or restorative activities like reading or walking—seems to stop one from being able to fully engage in the task at hand.

If someone uses willpower to resist digital distractions, then the unread message or unviewed notification may undermine focus as severely as the brain drain experienced by someone who compulsively checks his or her phone, given the cognitive burden of unsatiated curiosity, especially curiosity about something that might be a stimulus for either anxiety or excitement, however mild. We might compare this to the brain-drain of a hungry person on a diet trying to read while there is a dish of chocolate within sight. The deficits this creates in working memory capacity and functional fluid intelligence should not be taken lightly, since these are the systems involved in attentiveness, as well as deep thought, meaningful connection, mental adaptability, and abstract thinking.

This challenges the popular tendency to think of distractions in purely quantitative terms (for example, as merely a time-drain). It may take only a split second to quickly glance at an incoming message during a conversation with a friend or while reading a book, especially if nothing relevant is communicated. But the research increasingly suggests that the real issue is not quantitative but qualitative—not time drain but brain drain. Moreover, it is not merely the messages, alerts and posts we actually read that siphon cognitive resources; it is also the unread ones, the continual stream of information potentially at our fingertips, always just a second away. And it is not even the unread messages and alerts that subconsciously drain our attention, but our constant anticipation of future messages and alerts, yet to arrive, for which we remain in a perpetual state of readiness, since we are poised to redirect our focus at any moment should we hear a beep, see a notification, or notice an incoming message.

Is Interruption-Readiness Addictive?

So why do so many of us remain tethered to constant digital noise, especially when we might easily remove ourselves from a state of interruptibility by simply turning off the phone or temporarily putting the device in another room? It may be that we are addicted not merely to digital noise, but to the state of passive interruption-readiness. Stanford addiction researcher, Dr. Anna Lembke, notes that a defining feature of addictive or pre-addictive behavior is when an activity that once brought significant pleasure becomes something a person must repeatedly engage in simply to feel normal.^[8] And if we’re honest, most of us require constant access to digitally-mediated messages and alerts to feel normal, which is why we find it difficult to turn off our phones for even an hour.

The key word here is “access,” for even when we are not actively using our devices, we normally still remain accessible to incoming stimuli in the form of alerts, status updates, dings for emails and text messages, etc. These interruptions excite the pleasure pathways in the hunter-gatherer brain, which are wired to remain alert to anything that could be useful, novel, or unexpected.^[9] To remove access to digital distractions—for example, by silencing all interruptions, having set times for checking messages, or implementing various digital boundaries that remove actual or potential distractions^[10]—may be experienced as a dopamine deficit state, a form of mental pain, however slight.

Consider further how interruption-readiness follows the same variable reinforcement schedule as slot machines: even if only one in every twenty interruptions offers the type of social nourishment we crave, the mere availability to be interrupted becomes linked to the potential for dopamine. Significantly, we never know when the silence will be punctuated by an interruption, nor when that interruption will actually result in a pleasure stimulus. It’s that not knowing, and the possibility of constant reward-prediction error, that keeps us on edge. This makes sense given how dopamine circuits work. If you drop a pellet of food into a rat’s cage every five minutes, eventually the animal stops being in a state of arousal, whereas if you drop the food at random intervals, the rat remains in a heightened state of anticipation. B.F. Skinner, the pioneer of operant conditioning, discovered that when birds could trigger a stimulus themselves but the number of pecks required varied unpredictably, they became excited and pecked frantically.^[11] This was the animal equivalent of slot machine use, or the activity or compulsively checking one’s phone.

In classic gambling activities like a slot machine, an individual activates the potential stimulus (for example, by pulling a lever). But often the smartphone user is passive, like the rat who never knows when a nourishing pellet will drop from the sky. Consequently, silence itself becomes subliminally stimulating, since at any moment the stillness could be broken by the pleasure-stimulus of a message or alert. The occasional rewarding moments of digital interruptions, mixed with unrewarding or irritating ones, compel us to keep returning, although in this case “returning” may simply be our willingness to remain available to audible or visual interruptions, even at times when such availability is clearly antithetical to wellbeing (for example, while driving or sleeping, nursing infants, or even immediately following sexual intimacy). If I mute or remove my phone while engaging in meaningful activities, then while the potential for interruptions is eliminated, so is the potential for dopaminergic distraction.

“But I’m Good at Multitasking”

Most of us likely imagine we’re outliers and can switch attention quickly between one thing and another without cost, or perhaps we even think that interruption-readiness and attention-switching increases our productivity. But multitasking—even when, or perhaps especially, when we’re “good” at it—always comes at a cost. Earl Miller, professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that “switch cost” (the loss of attention when we’re pulled away from a task, even if only for a split second to glance at a message) has an effect on the brain’s ability to focus that lasts up to 15 or 20 minutes. The worst effects of switch cost occur in the first 64 seconds after checking one’s email or text messages regardless of whether or not there was a message of significance.^[12] Miller’s research was echoed by David Strayer: in pilot data presented at Tedx, he shared that there can be a 20-minute technology hangover among subjects who walked in nature while using their phone, compared to those who walked without a device.^[13]

I would go even further. Because the brain regions that regulate attention are the same systems involved in critical thinking, problem-solving, and impulse control, when we weaken these networks through a lifestyle of multitasking and attention shifting, we inadvertently nudge ourselves toward increased susceptibility to various maladaptive conditions, including anxiety and low impulse control. After all, impulse control depends on rejecting interference from irrelevant stimuli, whether arising from one’s emotions, passions, and mental representations, or arising from an external source like a demon or a digital distraction. A person who has control over attention can nip negative cognitions in the bud before they mature into full-fledged anxiety or chaos. The implications should be obvious: if you want to resist the inner demons, start by resisting the digital ones.

But attention is not just how we weed out what’s negative: through the gift of our attention, we preserve the things we love. If there is something you care deeply about—whether a hobby, a type of music, or a spouse—you will need attention to protect it. But if we allow offline activities that are meaningful to us to be punctuated by digital distractions (including even interruption potential), we risk diluting the quality of our experiences by habituating ourselves to a condition of continuous partial attention, never fully engaged and never fully present.

Fifteen Years Later

What happened to the scientists who took the wilderness excursion fifteen years ago? To find out, I phoned Dr. David Strayer, still at the University of Utah and now professor of cognition and neural science.

Stayer, whose meticulous mind is reflected in a measured and deliberate speaking style, told me of a plethora of studies his lab has undertaken to identify brain-based measures of cognitive restoration. A great outdoorsman who loves the wilderness of Eastern Utah, Strayer has been particularly intrigued by the restorative effects of time in nature. In study after study, he and his colleagues have proved that benefits of time in nature include enhanced creativity, better attention, improved working memory, and healthier functioning in the brain regions associated with emotional regulation.

I asked Stayer what his thoughts were today on the phenomenon of interruption potential. “The mere presence of your phone,” he said, “especially if it’s starting to go off and so forth (even if you’re not interacting with it), leads to the thought, ‘is that my phone?’” He explained that a person habituated to these types of distractions may experience interruption potential even after the phone has been removed. Reflecting on the 2010 hiking trip, he said that some of the people who came along were so conditioned to their devices that they experienced phantom vibrations, even though their devices had been left behind at the base.

I asked if he had any different perspectives now, fifteen years later. “Well,” Stayer said, “I wish I knew then what I know now about what the science has discovered over the last fifteen or twenty years, because I would have been able to answer the skeptics….We haven’t answered all the questions but now there is an abundance of research…. Fifteen years ago there was a debate about whether you could become addicted to this technology. But now, years later moving forward, there is a pretty clear consensus that it can be a behavioral addiction, with all sorts of negatives. The message isn’t that technology is bad but that if we are unwise in how we use it then our social interactions suffer, as do our cognitions and creativity.”

Carving Out Wilderness With Technological Askesis

Is there a solution to our addiction to interruption potential? Not all of us can unplug to go on a five-day wilderness expedition. But we can carve little spaces of wilderness into our lives—times of quiet where we can slow down and embrace stillness, removing the continual stream of information potential from our fingertips. And the research suggests that this stillness might be easier to access than we realize, as it could simply involve removing the phone from our presence for periods of time, or turning off the features that keep us tethered to a condition of interruption-readiness.^[14] In the book I co-authored with Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity From the Machine, we offer a number of best practices for creating healthy digital boundaries for school, home and church. In my own life, I have adopted a rather extreme solution: I have a kSafe device that enables me to lock up my phone for a specified period of time. This helps protect periods of prayer, quiet and creativity by removing even the potential for interruption.

These strategies are similar to how we have come to approach food. As a species, we have not fully adapted to the food surpluses of the agricultural revolution, and hence we have the obesity crisis. Similarly, we have yet to adapt to the information surplus wrought by the digital revolution, and hence we have a range of attention disorders. The solution to abundance of information, like abundance of food, will be found in the arts of self-limitation and askesis. A healthy individual recognizes that even though he may be hungry and even though food may be readily accessible, he can wait until the next meal. Similarly, we are coming to realize that even though digital stimulation may be only a click away, we need to take measures to limit the availability of digital distractions, protect our attention, and preserve silence. When we crave noise and stimulation, those are often the times when we most need to lean into greater stillness and quietude; when we most feel the urge to fill up life’s silences with distraction, those may be the very moment when God is calling us to submit to the pause.

Further Reading

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[1] Matt Richtel, “Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain,” The New York Times, August 15, 2020. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html.

[2] Matt Richtel.

[3] Matt Richtel.

[4] Matt Richtel.

[5] Matt Richtel.

[6] Ward, Adrian F., Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos. “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 2, no. 2 (April 2017): 140. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462.

[7] See the meta-analysis of Böttger, Tobias, Michael Poschik, and Klaus Zierer. “Does the Brain Drain Effect Really Exist? A Meta-Analysis.” Behavioral Sciences 13, no. 9 (September 2023): 751. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13090751.

[8] Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (New York: Dutton, 2021).

[9] “For our prehistoric ancestors, information was a precious commodity, just like food. It makes sense, from the perspective of adaptation, that new information would stimulate the pleasure pathways in the brain. After all, being able to listen, learn, and notice—especially about changes happening in the visual or auditory field, things that might incite fear or outrage, or anything unusual—could mean the difference between survival or destruction for your family or tribe. Moreover, in a culture before writing, failure to pass on new information—whether information about a medicinal use of a plant to the habits of an animal— might mean permanent loss of critical facts from the collective memory of your society. In itself this would not have thrown our paleolithic ancestors into a condition of chaotic alerting because the amount of new information available to any single people group was relatively unchanged from day to day. When there was a sudden influx of new information, this would usually have signaled something wrong or unusual—certainly something to attend to. The problem is that humans still have what is essentially a hunter-gatherer brain, with the same insatiable curiosity to know all available information. Our brains are still perfectly adapted for an environment of information scarcity. Our dopamine and adrenaline systems, like that of our ancestors, are still wired toward novelty, stimulation, excitement, fear, and outrage. Yet unlike our ancestors, we no longer live in a world where the opportunities for novelty, stimulation, etc., are comparatively limited. Instead of living in an environment of information scarcity, we live at a time of information surplus. Just turn on your phone and you’ll find an endless supply of content to feed the brain’s hunger for novelty, stimulation, excitement, fear, and outrage. The problem is that our paleolithic brain is unsuited for this type of stimulatory flood. The instincts that served our ancestors well—to constantly listen, learn, notice, and pass on all available information—becomes maladaptive in the digital age.” Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine (Basilian Media & Publishing, 2024), ch. 30 & 31.

[10] For best practices on digital boundaries, see Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine (Basilian Media & Publishing, 2024), 372-3.

[11] Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long, The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race (Dallas, TX, BenBella Books, 2018), 12-13.

[12] “Mindfulness: The New Science of Health and Happiness,” Time Special Edition (New York, NY: Time Inc. Books, 2016).

[13] David Stayer, “Restore Your Brain with Nature,” Tedx, November 2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/david_strayer_restore_your_brain_with_nature.

[14] For some suggestions of best practices at digital boundaries, see Phillips and Pauling, Are We All Cyborgs Now?, chaps. 30 & 31.