Head: (4 of 5)
Heart: (3.5 of 5)
Leadership Applicability: (4 of 5)

Is modern society's inability to focus its attention deeply in one direction heralding an impending Dark Age - a long, gradual decline of a civilization even as it becomes more affluent and technologically advanced? That's the argument author Maggie Jackson, a columnist for the Boston Globe, makes in Distracted. In this age of technological and scientific advances, she writes, "we are nurturing a culture of social diffusion, intellectual fragmentation and sensory detachment."

With the millions of web pages, articles, blogs, and even books online, literally at our fingertips, we have access to more information and ideas than ever before possible in human history- and yet we increasingly hit only one or two sites per search, and skim headlines for shallow bits of "facts" and opinions we already agree with. We can connect to hundreds of thousands of people in a single social networking site, yet we increasingly disconnect from intimate contact with our close friends and family, favoring email and instant messaging at the expense of face-to-face meetings and deep, meaningful conversations. We multi-task between tasks and communications at ever a faster and more furious pace, not realizing that we actually become less productive with each interruption, spending more time to get back on track than we gained by the switch.

"The premise of this book is simple," Jackson writes. "The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention-the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress. Moreover, this disintegration may come at great cost to ourselves and to society." Because if we lose the ability to pay attention, she argues, we lose access to the higher forms of thinking that are necessary for long-term planning, for making trade offs, and for building anything but the most shallow of relationships. In short, if we can no longer focus, we will no longer have the choice to step back, be still, and reflect. Without this choice, we will grow increasingly scatterbrained, anxious and fearful, unable to be moral, compassionate or happy.

To make her point about a coming Dark Age, Jackson compares this era to the Medieval Era, which was also a fertile time for technology, marked by many inventions designed to make life easier even as they were eroding the capacity for learning. Not only did the great libraries of Europe disappear during this time, but the memory of them disappeared, as well. "A dark age can dazzle if you fail to see the whole," she writes. "But inexorably, such a time leads to ‘a culture's dead end.'"

The book is largely a survey of the historical and philosophical antecedents to our current era distraction, divided into three parts:

I. Lengthening Shadows: Exploring our Landscape of Distraction
II. Deepening Twilight: Pursuing the Narrowing Path, and
III. Dark Times- or Renaissance of Attention?

She also draws on a broad array of research from modern-day cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and psychologists to make the case that attention is a biological system as important to our survival as our respiration or circulatory systems. This attentional system relies on three sub-networks: orienting, alerting, and executive, which in turn build awareness, judgment, and focus. She uses these competencies to help organize the chapters within each section; thus, both parts I and II have chapters entitled Focus, Judgment, and Awareness, each loosely tying together all the related historical and scientific information she has gathered on the topic.

This broad, multi-disciplinary approach to the study of attention is both the strength and weakness of Jackson's book. She covers a lot of interesting, thought-provoking ground; however, the reader sometimes feels as though Jackson herself is rushing and multi-tasking her way through the subject matter. When she covers three different psychology studies in one paragraph or jumps from interview to interview, this reader felt a longing for her to present fewer ideas and go deeper into each.

It is in the last chapter of the book, entitled "The Gift of Attention: A Renaissance at Hand," that Jackson stops building the case for the coming dark age and begins to ask what could change our course to hold it at bay. Here, she visits scientists who are building video games to stimulate and strengthen children's ability to focus, monks who are helping everyday workers to retreat from the world of distractions and build their attention networks through silent meditation, and artists who are eschewing fast abstract drawings in favor of slow, painstaking attention to detail. We are not born with a fixed allotment of focus; recent discoveries into neuro-plasticity, or the ability of our brains to grow and learn at any age, show that attention is a skill that can be strengthened -- if we take breaks from our constant frenzied multi-tasking to cultivate that skill through exercise and practice. Buy it.