Will the Blackberry Sink the Presidency?

Interruption overload can impair higher cognitive functions, too, starting with decision making. It takes time to bring your mind back to the task you left when the BlackBerry called, which means (if that task was listening to someone, for instance) you have missed more than occurred during just the seconds it took to read an e-mail. People take about 15 minutes to productively resume a challenging task when they are interrupted even by something as innocuous as an e-mail alert, scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Illinois found in a 2007 study. The delay may reflect how long it takes to reactivate memories about the task and to "refocus cognitive resources that may have been usurped" by the interruption, they reported. If this delay causes you to miss key information, then you are basing a decision on incomplete knowledge, something even BlackBerry lovers understand. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, for instance, was spotted last year typing on his BlackBerry as he gaveled the debate on the Senate floor. "I've got a lot of traffic and action going on, and it helps me keep track of it all," he said. But he turns it off during crucial hearings and meetings, recognizing that it impairs his concentration and could make him miss key information.

Interruptions can also derail brain processes that sort incoming signals. Information first lands in short-term memory, but if it is to stay with you for the long term it must be encoded—put in the right mental file drawer. That process requires a few minutes, and, if interrupted, can be short-circuited. "Being forced to divert attention to interrupting messages," scientists in Finland concluded in a 2004 study, "can cause memory loss" and "decreased memory accuracy." If new information is not indexed correctly, some of what the brain has stored about, say, TARP will be inaccessible; it's there, but you've failed to construct the neuronal road map needed to find it.

The more brain power an interruption demands, the more disruptive it will be to the task it is pulling you away from. If dealing with the interruption requires so little concentration that you are still able to unconsciously "rehearse" the task you broke away from, be it programming your TiVo or walking into a room to retrieve something, you will do a better job on that task when you return to it. If the interruption requires significant mental effort, however, rehearsal breaks down and the subconscious cannot keep repeating, "I walked into this room to get my wallet." Hence the feeling of "What'd I come in here for?!"

Continuous partial attention is actually a misnomer. Computer scientists use it, but most psychologists disdain it because what seems like partial attention or multitasking is actually rapid-fire switching of attention among tasks. In that state of mind, says computer scientist Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research, you don't process information as fully and are not using your frontal lobe effectively.

A BlackBerry can have detrimental effects even, or especially, when users turn it on when they are doing "nothing." That "nothing" is what our pre-BlackBerry forebears called daydreaming, which is a propitious mental state for creativity, insight and problem solving. Truly novel solutions and ideas emerge when the brain brings together unrelated facts and thoughts. That is hard to achieve when you are attacking the problem head on. Because the idea of "buying music" is associated with specific thoughts that you have thought every time you've pondered that act, thinking directly about it sends brain signals along the same well-worn neuronal roads, arriving at the same oft-visited nodes. But daydreaming or thinking about something else keeps the signals off those rutted roads and allows far-flung facts and ideas to combine in novel ways, producing, say, iTunes. Hence the common experience of an "aha" moment of creativity or insight about some problem when it is not commanding your conscious attention. If mental downtime becomes BlackBerry time, eurekas will be rarer.

When Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied 238 people working on projects that required creative solutions, she found that fragmentation of attention also impeded creativity. Time pressure typically had the same effect, unless attention was focused on a crucial problem. (A surge of adrenaline can ramp up mental processes.) The NASA engineers who came up with a duct-tape-and-spit solution to Apollo 13's crisis in 1970 faced crushing time pressure—the three astronauts would die if NASA did not find a way to filter out carbon dioxide in the air, reconfigure power use and put the spacecraft on a new return trajectory within days. But they had no distractions (the brass at Mission Control shielded them from all interruptions) and their attention was totally focused, as thoughts of death tend to do.