It may be the greatest irony of the information age.
All of that data flying at you by email, instant message, mobile phone, voice mail and BlackBerry — it could actually be making you dumber.
Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who has studied ADD — attention deficit disorder — for more than a decade, has identified a related disorder he calls ADT — attention deficit trait — and he says it's reaching epidemic proportions in the corporate world. Unlike ADD, people aren't born with ADT. It's the result, he contends, of the modern workplace, where the constant and relentless chatter coming from our computers, phones and other high-tech devices is diluting our mental powers.
Hallowell, formerly a Harvard Medical School faculty member, recently sat down with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com to talk about ADT as well as when the right times to log off, hang up or take a time-out might be. We paid attention.
Q: What is ADT?
A: It's sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it's a condition induced by modern life, in which you've become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving. In other words, it costs you efficiency because you're doing so much or trying to do so much, it's as if you're juggling one more ball than you possibly can.
What are some of the symptoms?
When people find that they're not working to their full potential; when they know that they could be producing more but in fact they're producing less; when they know they're smarter than their output shows; when they start answering questions in ways that are more superficial, more hurried than they usually would; when their reservoir of new ideas starts to run dry; when they find themselves working ever-longer hours and sleeping less, exercising less, spending free time with friends less and in general putting in more hours but getting less production overall.
When did you start to notice ADT as a disorder distinct from ADD?
So many people would come to me looking for a diagnosis of ADD, and I noticed some of them didn't really have the condition because it went away completely when they went on vacation, or it went away completely when they went off to a relaxed setting.
In ADD — the true ADD — it doesn't go away, wherever you go. So I realised that these people were having it induced by their work world. When they got to work, then symptoms would start to occur. So that meant that something was going on at work. That something is this overload.
Haven't people always had distractions at work? Is this really anything new?
It's new because never before have we been so able to overload the brain circuitry. We've been able to overload manual labour. But never before have we so routinely been able to overload brain labour.
