No system, of course, can cope with infinite demands, but if I had been hired to design this aspect of the mind, I would have started by letting the deliberative, “rational” system take priority, whenever time permits, favoring the rational over the reflexive where possible. In giving precedence instead to the ancestral reflexive system — not necessarily because it is better but simply because it is older — evolution has squandered some of our most valuable intellectual resources.
Whether we are under cognitive strain or not, another banal but systematic failure hampers our ability to meet mental goals: most of us — at one time or another — “space out.” We have one thing that we nominally intend to accomplish (say, finishing a report before a deadline), and the next thing you know, our thoughts have wandered. An ideal creature would be endowed with an iron will, sticking, in all but the most serious emergencies, to carefully constructed goals. Humans, by contrast, are characteristically distractible, no matter what the task might be.
Even with the aid of Google, I can neither confirm nor deny the widespread rumor that one in four people is daydreaming about sex at any given moment,[48] but my hunch is that the number is not too far from the truth. According to a recent British survey, during office meetings one in three office workers reportedly daydreams about sex. An economist quoted in the UK’s Sunday Daily Times estimates that this daydreaming may cost the British economy about £7.8 billion annually.
If you’re not the boss, statistics on daydreaming about sex might be amusing, but “zoning out,” as it is known in the technical literature, is a real problem. For example, all told, nearly a 100,000 Americans a year die in accidents of various sorts (in motor vehicles or otherwise); if even a third of those tragedies are due to lapses of attention, mind wandering is one of the top ten leading causes of death.[49]
My computer never zones out while downloading my email, but I find my mind wandering all the time, and not just during faculty meetings; to my chagrin, this also happens during those rare moments when I have time for pleasure reading. Attention-deficit disorder (ADD) gets all the headlines, but in reality, nearly everyone periodically finds it hard to stay on task.
What explains our species-wide tendency to zone out — even, sometimes, in the midst of important things? My guess is that our inherent distractibility is one more consequence of the sloppy integration between an ancestral, reflexive set of goal-setting mechanisms (perhaps shared with all mammals) and our evolutionarily more recent deliberative system, which, clever as it may be, aren’t always kept in the loop.
Even when we aren’t zoning out, we are often chickening out: putting off till tomorrow what we really ought to do today. As the eighteenth-century lexicographer and essayist Samuel Johnson put it (some 200 years before the invention of video games), procrastination is “one of the general weaknesses, which in spite of the instruction of moralists, and the remonstrances of reason, prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind.”
By one recent estimate, 80-95 percent of college students engage in procrastination, and two thirds of all students consider themselves to be (habitual) procrastinators. Another estimate says that 15-20 percent of all adults are chronically affected — and I can’t help but wonder whether the rest are simply lying. Most people are troubled by procrastination; most characterize it as bad, harmful, and foolish. And most of us do it anyway.
It’s hard to see how procrastination per se could be adaptive. The costs are often considerable, the benefits minuscule, and it wastes all the mental effort people put into making plans in the first place. Studies have shown that students who routinely procrastinate consistently get lower grades; businesses that miss deadlines due to the procrastination of their employees can sometimes lose millions of dollars. Yet many of us can’t help ourselves. Why, when so little good comes of procrastinating, do we persist in doing it so much?
I for one hope someone figures out the answer, and soon, maybe even inventing a magic pill that can keep us on task. Too bad no one’s gotten around to it just yet: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In the meantime, the research that has been done suggests a diagnosis if not a solution: procrastination is, in words of one psychologist, the “quintessential self-regulatory failure.” Nobody, of course, can at a given moment do all of the things that need to be done, but the essence of procrastination is the way in which we defer progress on our own most important goals.
The problem, of course, is not that we put things off, per se; if we need to buy groceries and do our taxes, we literally can’t accomplish both at the same time. If we do one now, the other must wait. The problem is that we often postpone the things that need to get done in favor of others — watching television or playing video games — that most decidedly don’t need to get done. Procrastination is a sign of our inner kluge because it shows how our top-level goals (spend more time with the children, finish that novel) are routinely undermined by goals of considerably less priority (if catching up on the latest episodes of Desperate Housewives can be counted as a “goal” at all).
People need downtime and I don’t begrudge them that, but procrastination does highlight a fundamental glitch in our cognitive “design”: the gap between the machinery that sets our goals (offline) and the machinery that chooses (online, in the moment) which goals to follow.
The tasks most likely to tempt us to procrastinate generally meet two conditions: we don’t enjoy doing them and we don’t have to do them now. Given half a chance, we put off the aversive and savor the fun, often without considering the ultimate costs. Procrastination is, in short, the bastard child of future discounting (that tendency to devalue the future in relation to the present) and the use of pleasure as a quick-and-dirty compass.
We zone out, we chicken out, we deceive. To be human is to fight a lifelong uphill battle for self-control. Why? Because evolution left us clever enough to set reasonable goals but without the willpower to see them through.
Alas, zoning out and chickening out are among the least of our problems; the most serious are the psychological breakdowns that require professional help. From schizophrenia to obsessive-compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder (also called manic depression), nothing more clearly illustrates the vulnerability of the human mind than our susceptibility to chronic and severe mental disorders. What explains the madness of John Nash, the bipolar disorder of Vincent van Gogh and Virginia Woolf, the paranoia of Edgar Allan Poe, the obsessive-compulsive disorder of Howard Hughes, the depression that drove Ernest Hemingway, Jerzy Kosinski, Sylvia Plath, and Spalding Gray to suicide? Perhaps a quarter of all human beings at a given moment suffer from one clinical disorder or another. And, over the course of a lifetime, almost half the population will face bouts of one mental illness or another. Why is our mind so prone to breakdown?
Let’s start with a fact that is well known but perhaps not fully appreciated. For the most part, mental disorders aren’t random unprecedented anomalies, completely unique to the individuals who suffer from them. Rather, they comprise clusters of symptoms that recur again and again. When things fall apart mentally, they tend to do so in recognizable ways, what engineers sometimes call “known failure modes.” A given make and model of a car, say, might have a fine engine but consistently suffer from electrical problems. The human mind is vulnerable to its own particular malfunctions, well documented enough to be classified in the human equivalent of Chilton’s Auto Repair: the DSM-IV (short for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition; a fifth edition is scheduled for 2011).
48
Another study, commissioned by a soap manufacturer, suggests that in the shower “men split their time daydreaming about sex (57 percent) and thinking about work (57 percent).” As Dave Barry put it on his blog, “This tells us two things: (1) Men lie to survey-takers. (2) Survey-takers do not always have a solid understanding of mathematics.”
49
One recent NHTSA study suggests that fully 80 percent of fender-benders can be attributed to inattention. Among fatal car accidents, no firm numbers are available, but we know that about 40 percent are attributable to alcohol; among the remaining 60 percent involving sober drivers, inattention likely plays a major role.