– Video game players show more volume in brain areas where risk and reward are processed but also less activity in areas dealing with emotional regulation and aggression PLUS more dopamine, which parallels what happens in an addict’s brain.

– Distracted brains show specific regions that are activated in the brain and more distractions tends to parallel more activity.

– Chinese youth who were addicted to the Internet showed more white matter in the areas of emotion, attention and control but also showed disrupted nerve cell connections in other areas of the brain.

Lorna Salgado originally shared this post:

How do we teach focus in a world that is constantly drawing our focus elsewhere? One idea is to use “technology breaks” where you check your phone, the web, whatever, for a minute or two and then turn the phone to silent, the computer screen off and “focus” on work or conversation or any nontechnological activity for, say 15 minutes, and then take a 1-2 minute tech break followed by more focus times and more tech breaks.

The trick is to gradually lengthen the focus time to teach yourself (and your kids) how to focus for longer periods of time without being distracted. I have teachers using this in classrooms, parents using it during dinner and bosses using tech breaks during meetings with great success.

So far, though, the best we can get is about 30 minutes of focus. Thanks to Steve Jobs (and others) for making such alluring, distracting technologies.

Attention Alert: A Study on Distraction Reveals Some Surprises | Psychology Today

Distractions from our brains hurt as much or more than those from our tech! By Larry Rosen, Ph.D. …