A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention

by Matt Richtel

  According to the police, as reported by the Associated Press, the driver of the car sent a text at 10:05:52. She received a reply at 10:06:29. Thirty-eight seconds later, someone called 911 to report the fiery, deadly wreck.

  BAIRD WAS APPRECIATIVE OF the law student’s memo, but concerned. This was not an easy case, with little if no precedent and a potential defendant in Reggie who may well not have known the risks of his behavior. Even if Reggie knew, or suspected, how would they prove that? To Baird’s knowledge, there had been no big movement to warn people. Heck, Baird himself had barely heard of the concept of texting and driving. What would a jury think?

  And Reggie was a nice kid, wasn’t he? Just a regular guy, churchgoing, on a mission, clean-cut. He lied. But people lie, Baird thought, when they have their backs against the wall. He was like any of us, Baird allowed himself to think; any of us could make a mistake like this.

  He needed more information. On July 23, he wrote a memo to Singleton, the investigator, asking him to detail what Kaiserman the farrier had seen.

  That same day, Terryl was forging ahead. She wrote another memo, this one five pages, detailing the facts on the morning of the accident. She couldn’t get the case out of her head, like so many others that had grabbed hold of her over the years. But this one really irked her, and it wasn’t the texting and driving piece, at least not first and foremost.

  “What bothered me about this case was that he didn’t say he was sorry. It really bothered me. He didn’t apologize and he didn’t acknowledge what he had done. I know George [Daines] told me he had a good attorney who was working for him, but he didn’t even acknowledge that he killed two men.

  “When apologies are needed, people are owed apologies.”

  CHAPTER 27

  THE NEUROSCIENTISTS

  WHAT DOES ALL THE evidence about the powerful lure of personal communications technology add up to?

  Researchers answer by way of an analogy. In the twenty-first century, technology can be compared to food. You need food to live. And while you may not require technology to survive in the same way as food, our cultural and social lives require it.

  One of the great innovations in modern times has been the industrialization of food. No longer must people till their own gardens to eat, or hunt for their own meat. Someone else does that, and we buy it at the store. As a result, we have much more time in our day to do something else—to create, spend time with our families, play, build and improve societies.

  But the downside of that industrialized food process is that, if we’re not careful, we can succumb to the ease of access. Eat too much, and you get obese. Eat the wrong things, you get sick—everything from a stomachache to cancer to heart disease. But tempting us is fast food, or a vending machine that is only steps away, providing in a single bag of potato chips the fat and sugar content that, generations ago, we would’ve had to work all day to discover, prepare, and consume. In the old days, by the time we found (even fought for) the calories, we’d earned them. If we are not careful, the ease of access to high caloric (salt and fat and tasty) food, will wind up using our most primitive cravings against us.

  There is a pointed parallel to personal communications technology. In the same way we crave food, we crave connection. Not just for its own sake but because connection is essential for survival. It helps us form networks, understand sources of opportunity or threat, create alliances, fight enemies. It is primal. “We are a kind of animal that has evolved for social learning,” says Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and Yale professor, who is an expert in social networks across time. By way of example of the value of social connection, he notes the incredible value of, say, learning from someone that fire can burn, rather than each of us having to get burned to understand fire’s danger.

  Now come ultra-powerful devices that provide such easy communications that they can, if we’re not careful, use our social survival skills against us. A simple example illustrates the point. There are few impulses as basic and inescapable as the one that urges you to turn around if someone taps on your shoulder. You must discover if the person is an opportunity or a threat.

  When your phone rings, it is a proverbial tap on the shoulder. You want to find out who it is. You need to. Your bottom-up survival system demands it.

  All the research by Dr. Atchley and many others have illuminated the idea that this new technology plays to our deepest human needs. When you add it all up—the social lure of information, receiving and disclosing; the intermittent delivery mechanism; the stimulation of interactivity and the neurochemicals associated with reward—you wind up with something powerful to the point of being overpowering. To some researchers, it feels like a process of neurological hijacking.

  “The cell phone, and other similar technology, meets a deep need for social connection with a greater ease and greater potential detriment to it in the same way that a vending machine that is right down the hall plays to our need for calories,” Dr. Christakis says.

  He and others point out that digital communications are not alone throughout history in raising questions about how technological change impacts life and interaction. The printing press raised questions about whether we’d be overwhelmed with information; the telephone raised questions of whether people would lose face-to-face interaction. But with digital technology, researchers say the amount of information, the speed of its delivery, and, pointedly, its interactive nature, have changed our world by orders of magnitude.

  “We use stone-age brains with space-age technology, and that can lead to trouble,” said Daniel E. Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. Our tech tools let us be “hyper social,” he says, which has many benefits, and also costs. “We’re using them with brains not geared for this sort of thing.”

  In addition to comparing digital technology to food, there is another compelling analogy. It is far-fetched in some ways, but also highly illustrative. It compares technology to the immune system, which is, of course, crucial for survival. It protects the body, helps defend it against intruders. But sometimes it can spin out of control and produce antibodies that attack the body itself. The survival mechanism has become the enemy, as in such illnesses as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis that can attack organs, joints, even the brain. So, too, our personal communications can, if out of control, turn a powerful survival tool into one that works against us. That’s not to say they will kill us, or lead us to kill someone else, as in the case of distracted driving. But they may work at decided cross-purposes to what they are designed for. Rather than assisting in our stated goals—productivity, creativity, long-term thought—the tools can undermine those crucial aims.

  The top-down goals become swamped, overwhelmed by the primitive bottom-up system aimed at warning us of opportunity or threat, playing to our deepest social needs. The thing is, the information that comes in may not be crucial at all; it may actually be irrelevant, spam, but, weirdly, that seems to reinforce the compulsion to answer the device. In fact, the mere pressing of buttons is rewarding, providing a dopamine release. This primitive warning system that is meant to serve us, can, instead, enslave.

  “When the phone rings, it triggers a whole social reward network. And it triggers an orienting response that has been wired into us since hunter-gatherer times. You had to pay attention for survival. If you didn’t attend you got eaten by lions. We’re hardwired that way, no matter what we want to do. It’s extremely difficult to turn those things off. It’s in our DNA,” says Dr. Strayer. “Engineers have co-opted these devices to have those very signals we can’t ignore.”

  SO IF THE CALL of junk food leads to overeating and too much obesity, what does too much interaction with our device lead to? What are the downsides?

  For one, researchers worry that heavy use of interactive media can, over time, reduce attention spans. The fear is that we grow so accustomed to frequent bursts of stimulation, we have trouble feeling satisfied in their absence. This effect could be true even if the burs
ts are not addictive, and merely just habit-forming. Think about it: You hear the ping of an incoming text or call, you respond; the ping happens, you respond. And each time you respond, you get a hit of dopamine. It’s a pleasurable feeling, a release from the reward center. Then it’s gone. There is no incoming text, no stimulation. You start to feel bored. You crave another hit.

  Chasing a dopamine hit runs counter to focus and goal-setting; needless to say, it becomes hard to sustain periods of attention.

  This is something that seems particularly true of young people, children, and adolescents. This concern gets wide agreement among researchers, even when they disagree about whether our gadgets are actually addictive, or merely compelling. Dr. Potenza, the Yale scholar who has a more cautious approach than Dr. Greenfield or Dr. Atchley, says, “We’ve led to a generation that is perhaps less tolerant of waiting for delays. It’s hard for them to occupy themselves without the same degree of stimulation.”

  Dr. Greenfield, predictably, goes further. He deems young people who are raised on digital devices “Generation D.” “They’re so amped up on dopamine that when it’s not firing, they feel dull, dead,” he says. And that means they need to move on to the next thing, quickly, rather than staying with something. “They have no threshold for attentional capacity.”

  The concern isn’t limited to children, but many scholars say they are more vulnerable because their frontal lobes are still developing. What that means is that even in the absence of interruption, they are still developing the capacity to set and sustain goals. Add in a device that rewards interruption and the challenge gets that much more intense, according to Dr. Michael Rich, executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. In an article in the New York Times about the impact of technology on young people’s attention, Dr. Rich said: “Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing.”

  While the broader concerns about attention span are widespread among scholars, the evidence can be indirect, some of it anecdotal. For instance, at the end of 2012, two surveys from highly reputable, nonprofit research groups—the Pew Research Center and Common Sense Media—each reported that American teachers believe heavy technology use is hampering students’ attention spans and their ability to persevere through tough challenges. The Pew report, done in cooperation with several other nonprofit groups, found that nearly 90 percent of teachers said the Internet is creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans.”

  Another study suggesting falling attention spans found that we are even spending less time with the apps on our mobile devices. The study, by a research firm called Localytics, looked at the use of five hundred news apps between July of 2012 and July of 2013. It found that people were spending 26 percent less time in each session. At the same time, it found that people were launching their news apps 39 percent more each month.

  It’s important not to read too much into one study. But the research points to a very interesting dynamic: The reason people are spending less time in each app session isn’t because their interest in news is declining. After all, people are launching news apps more and more often. They like and want news. They just don’t have the patience to spend much time with it.

  THERE IS ANOTHER INSIDIOUS way in which the power of our devices to capture attention could be impacting daily life. It could be compromising our ability to make decisions.

  This concern has to do with the toll taken on our brains when they are overloaded with information. Going back to World War II, researchers had shown that we make more unconscious mistakes when we are overloaded (like pulling the wrong lever in an airplane). But newer research suggests that such overload can make it harder for us to make good decisions when we are confronted with clear choices. Take, for instance, a 1999 study that has to do with chocolate cake.

  In the study, undergraduate students were given the task of choosing what snack they wanted to eat, whether a delicious yet calorie-rich chocolate cake with cherry topping or a serving of healthy fruit salad. The question was complicated by the fact that the students were asked to memorize certain information before they made the decision. Some students had to remember a seven-digit number and others a two-digit number.

  What the researchers found was that students were more likely to choose the chocolate cake if they were asked to memorize the seven-digit number. As the researchers put it, “Choice of chocolate cake was higher when processing resources were constrained.”

  There is other supporting research that shows how learning, memory, and decision making get impacted by an overloaded brain. The frontal lobe, the executive functions, get so overloaded, so taxed, that there are fewer resources left to make a good decision. Put another way, says Dr. Atchley, the frontal lobe is crucial in helping people inhibit impulses, like choosing the chocolate cake, which is a very basic form of decision making.

  Or, for instance, deciding whether or not to focus on the road or the phone when you’re driving. If your brain is taxed, you may not even be able to make a clearheaded decision about what is the right thing to do.

  “To make a choice, you need frontal lobes active and you need enough competitors in other parts of the brain so that you can engage systems to make a decision.”

  Add it all up, says Dr. Greenfield, and you get a picture of a teenager, with an immature frontal lobe, brain possibly too overloaded with information to make a good decision or just unable to resist the chime of the phone in the center console. For such a driver, says Dr. Greenfield, the act of picking up the device becomes primitive, bypassing higher-level thinking.

  “His brain is flooded with anticipatory dopamine. He knows on a primitive, neurochemical level that he’s about to get a squirt,” says Dr. Greenfield. “That’s why he pushes that fucking button. He’s not conscious of it.”

  YEARS EARLIER, DR. TREISMAN spoke of the idea that our very sense of reality gets established by what we pay attention to. This is maybe the most far-reaching implication of the powerful lure of our technology: If it co-opts our attention, it could reshape our sense of reality.

  It’s not nearly as far-fetched as it might sound. It’s based on a simple proposition: Our day-to-day reality is based on what we see and hear with what we experience. The thing about our electronic gadgets is that they can easily redirect our focus. They cause us to look down, switch what we’re listening to, change what we’re thinking about. When that happens, it changes our reality. Think of it this way: If a tree falls in the woods, but you miss it because you’re lost in a video game on the phone, did the tree fall?

  Or consider a more pointed example. Say you’re driving down the road and your phone buzzes with a text. You look down to read it. You aren’t looking at the road and slip across the yellow divider. You hit another car. But by the time you look up again, and realize what’s happened, the moment of impact has passed. Did you cross the yellow divider? Did the other car cross over? Did you hit a slice of ice?

  “If you read car accident reports, it’s very common for crash reports to read: ‘I was driving. I was paying attention, the person appeared out of nowhere. I was looking at the road, and the other car was there—like magic,’ ” says Dr. Atchley.

  “There are two options—either people are lying to protect themselves, or experientially that’s what happened. It’s like someone’s inattention literally has played a magic trick on them—which is that a car appears out of nowhere.

  “The eyes are open but the brain’s not processing all the information.”

  “CAN I BORROW YOUR phone?” Dr. Atchley says.

  He’s at the counter of the Hereford House steakhouse. It’s where he’s giving a lunchtime speech to the Engineers Club of Kansas City, just an hour after Maggie, the undergraduate student, tried to navigate the virtual driving machine while getting texts from Dr. Atchley’s graduate assistant.

  It’s crisp and sunny in this suburb of Zona Rosa. The steakhouse,
beige with red awnings, is in an outdoor mall with all the regular shops: American Eagle, Kay Jewelers, and the like. It’s a chain restaurant, serving food that has the trappings of being fancy. The open-faced prime rib sandwich ($13.95) comes with au jus gravy. Dr. Atchley feels mildly nervous. He should: He’s in the wrong steakhouse.

  He was supposed to go to Zona Rosa but in a different location. “These were the Google directions,” he mutters.

  Maybe, or perhaps, he concedes, he just mixed up the different locations, given everything on his mind. In any case, now he needs to borrow a phone so he can tell the people waiting for him to speak that he’s going to be late. And he needs to get directions to the other restaurant.

  The woman at the counter offers her landline. But she’s having trouble coming up with quick directions to the other location, in Leawood. Dr. Atchley, clearly anxious, borrows a cell phone and taps the right location into the mobile Google search engine. It looks to be about twenty minutes away.

  Reflecting on the value of the cell phone, he says, “It was a faster way to get the information.” But, he adds, “there were other options.”

  As Dr. Atchley tries to find balance with technology and prevent it from overtaking him, he finds there are occasions when his boundaries don’t serve him. Recently, during a heavy snowfall, he bought a second phone so he and his wife could each have one if they needed to communicate or got stuck in a jam, rather than continuing to share one phone.

  “We wanted her to have some way to call emergency services if she got stuck,” he says. “Why not have that device?”

  It seems like a silly question, rhetorical, for most people. Why not have the convenience? And Dr. Atchley really feels that way, too, despite the fear of temptation.

  “I’m not a Luddite,” he says. He points out all the technology in his world: the Wi-Fi connection at the underground house, the machines he uses to study the impact of technology—the brain scanners and driving simulator and computers he uses for everything from writing papers and doing research to complex tasks like doing statistical analysis. He emails with students and shares research with colleagues online. He can get lost for hours on Reddit, a tech-centric website he loves.