Attention, much like your daily allowance of money, is a limited resource, and in any particular moment, you can only have that much of it.

We live in an age of constant distractions. 9 to 5 is out, 24-7 is in. With my smartphone in hand, I bring my work with me everywhere. But our devices make us

less attentive. Having spent 10 years doing research in neurobiology, I wondered what technology

does to our brains. I set out to understand the science of distractions and learn how to be more

focused and boost our productivity.

By some measures were bombarded by more than 63 notifications a day.

We receive over 90 emails and write about 40 of them.

On average, we switch tasks every three minutes.

When we face distractions, two areas of the brain, the parietal cortex and the frontal cortex,

are in a sort of tug of war with each other.

Some research suggests that the parietal cortex responds to distractions.

The frontal cortex, which is involved in cognitively demanding tasks,

helps us maintain focus, so we get distracted if the activity of the parietal cortex gets

through to the frontal cortex. If the frontal cortex can keep the parietal in check, you stay

focused. The brain is deciding what's important and what's not, and that takes effort.

Even when you're cleaning your mailbox and you're not actually doing hard cognitive work, you kind of actually are

because there's all these essentially micro decisions looking at this email, do I need this?

And so each of those decisions requires a little bit more of cognitive effort. And so but when you add

2,000 of those you end up with no no power to make

any other important decisions after that you feel depleted.

Tell me a little bit about the study that you did focused on email.

What we found was that checking email more frequently throughout the day

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