Will the Blackberry Sink the Presidency?

Distraction, interruption, addiction: there is evidence the iconic handheld can change the way we think. But it all depends on how you use it.

By Sharon Begley

And a great cry arose from all across the land: in business offices where managers flashed back to important details they had missed during meetings; in cubicles where wage slaves recalled the countless hours lost trying to figure out what they were doing just before the interruption; at power-lunch spots from Manhattan to Malibu where patrons mourned the relationships they had sundered with their habit; in homes where spouses seethed over the third party in their bed; in labs where scientists studied the impact of technology on thinking; on train platforms where commuters wistfully recalled the days when they spent their wait mulling, pondering and daydreaming. That cry, uttered in response to the news that President Obama was getting to keep his beloved BlackBerry, sounded like this:

Uh-oh.

Technology has affected the way people think, interact and make decisions ever since Homo erectus mastered fire and, for the first time, had a way to keep surplus mammoth from rotting. Result: cooperative hunting. The cognitive and social effects of the BlackBerry on its 21 million users aren't so unambiguously beneficial. So while legions of BlackBerry fans cheer Obama's success in keeping his, insisting it makes users more productive and connected, experts in cognitive psychology and in human-machine interactions who study pop-ups, e-mail alerts, calendar reminders and instant messaging—the most intrusive and ubiquitous pre-BlackBerry technologies—have two things to say: distraction overload, and continuous partial attention. For whatever the virtues of a handheld, there is no question that, depending how you use it, you risk never focusing exclusively on any thought or perception for long and never being able to work straight through to completion on anything. That's OK for tasks you can handle with half your cerebral lobes tied behind your back. It's less fine when the task is, say, watching for track signals while operating a train.

How damaging an interruption is depends on when it occurs. In a 2004 study, scientists led by Brian Bailey of the University of Illinois had volunteers edit text and search the Internet while being interrupted by news alerts. It was much less annoying to be interrupted between what the scientists call "coarse breakpoints," such as at the completion of a paragraph or thought. Not only is it easier to jump back into the previous task after the interruption, but when you are not trying to keep in your head what you need to finish a task you can pay more attention to the interruption itself. If you answer the BlackBerry's call at natural breakpoints, you're much more likely to be able to take in the e-mail and then resume what you were doing without that "where was I?" brain lock. In some demanding tasks, however, there may not be any natural breakpoints. Pilots who are interrupted during a preflight checklist sometimes miss an item when they try to pick up where they left off, notes psychologist Deborah Boehm-Davis of George Mason University, who studies interruptions. Last summer's crash of an airliner taking off from Madrid was apparently the result of an interruption-induced error; 153 people died.

There are no good studies on how often BlackBerry users let themselves be interrupted by its seductive call, but research on other electronic interruptions is not encouraging. When Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, shadowed employees at two high-tech firms, she found that the average worker spends only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and asked to do something else. IT workers have it worse, switching attention every three minutes, on average. The BlackBerry (which isn't nicknamed CrackBerry for nothing) is way more seductive than, say, e-mail alerts. Thanks to its growing social and cultural cachet, it can make the most inconsequential middle manager feel as important as the CEO who must always be reachable, and it can feed the illusion of the lowliest salaryman that his input is so central he must be thumbing away at the dinner table and on vacation.

The distraction of almost-irresistible interruptions has been the killer app, so to speak, for some BlackBerry newbies. Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, like almost every politician on the Hill, got a BlackBerry after 9/11 for security purposes. But he gave it back. "I was always distracted," Cochran said. "I couldn't concentrate. Every time the light came on or it beeped, I felt this compulsion to stop everything I was doing." Though he doesn't begrudge his colleagues for their addiction, Cochran says the result is that during meetings on the Hill almost everyone is "always checking messages" or typing, he says. "It just beeps or buzzes, all the time, and people get up and leave the room."

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.

Given the damage caused by interruption overload and continuous partial attention, we can infer either of two things about people who use their BlackBerry while holding a conversation, weighing decisions, trying to solve a problem or attempting to do creative work with, they claim, no ill effects. Possibility one: they are lying. Possibility two: their work just isn't that hard. Yes, you can schedule meetings. No, you cannot craft a smart stimulus bill. One wonders whether financiers who did not comprehend the esoteric derivatives they were selling (as Robert Rubin, former co-chairman of Citigroup, told NEWSWEEK last year) might have understood them if they had given the guys who invented them their full and undivided attention, rather than BlackBerrying during presentations. But we're just guessing here.

Obama will be spared the worst consequences of continuous partial attention and interruption overload for the simple reason that he agreed to cut way back on his BlackBerry habit, using it mainly to stay in touch with family, close friends and top advisers. Although the White House declined to say when and where he will use his BlackBerry or even have it on, sources say it is off during briefings and meetings. Several lawmakers who have met with Obama privately in recent weeks tell NEWSWEEK they haven't seen him with it—"and I was looking," said one Republican senator.

BlackBerry fans who cheered Obama's victory over those who would take it away from him assume that the leader of the free world will be shielded from the damaging cognitive effects it can have on mere mortals. Roger McNamee, managing director of the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Elevation Partners, had nothing but scorn for the suggestion that a BlackBerry might pose problems in the Oval Office. "You just turn notification off—that's what everybody does—and it doesn't bother you at all," he told NEWSWEEK's Daniel Lyons. "I do not allow notifications for e-mail, text or any other application. As a result, the devices are not a distraction." Even Senator Menendez, who recognizes that an insistent BlackBerry is not something you want when witnesses at a hearing are trying to explain the arcane details of, for example, toxic bank assets, says, "The bottom line is, I couldn't imagine accomplishing all the things I need to do without it." (Viacom's Sumner Redstone and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, however, apparently have no trouble imagining it: neither is known to use a handheld.)

In Obama's case, however, it is hard to see how the man who is never farther from an aide than his pillow is to the bedroom door is in any danger of being unconnected from the people and information he needs for his job. "He's not getting important facts on it—he's probably staying in touch with his buddies," speculates Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York, himself an admitted BlackBerry addict. "I'm sure he's much more likely to glance down to see how the Steelers are doing and stay connected than to use it for work. I'm not concerned that the president will be distracted. But the next time he's at a state dinner and glances down under the table, he's much more likely to be BlackBerry-ing his wife 'When can I leave' than anything official."

At least Obama shouldn't have to worry about one detrimental effect of BlackBerry interruptions. The stress and hence the cognitive damage caused by e-mail, text and similar intrusions are inversely related to a person's self-esteem and to how much control he perceives he has over his working environment, scientists in Scotland reported in 2006. Obama has not shown many signs of low self-esteem. Similarly, people who feel they are at the whim of individuals and forces beyond their control tend to suffer the worst consequences of interruption overload. Lowly personal assistants who are constantly juggling the boss's BlackBerry texts and e-mails, terrified of missing an important one, have the most trouble returning to what they were doing before the BlackBerry trilled, and suffer the worst cognitive lapses. If you're the most powerful man in the world? Not a worry.

Via:

www.newsweek.com

Will the Blackberry Sink the Presidency?

Suicidal behavior may run in families

The poet Sylvia Plath, who made a name for herself through prose and poetry that conveyed a sense of depression and suicidal tendencies, famously died by asphyxiating herself in an oven in 1963.


The best way to prevent suicide is to treat the underlying psychiatric disorder, says Dr. David Brent.

The recent reported suicide of her son, marine biologist Nicholas Hughes, brings to light a known psychiatric phenomenon: the heredity of suicidal behavior.

A first-degree relative -- a parent, sibling or child -- of a person who has committed suicide is four to six times more likely to attempt or complete a suicide, said Dr. David Brent, psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Studies on twins have shown that suicidal behavior is between 30 and 50 percent due to heritable factors, he said. Suicide victims' biological relatives who were adopted away also show an increased risk of suicide, he said.

The rate of suicide in America is 10.9 suicide deaths per 100,000 people, according to the latest information from the National Institute of Mental Health. That means, although the likelihood of suicidal behavior increases in families, a completed suicide is still a rare event, Brent said.

"Genetics is not destiny," he said. "The odds are still very much against you having this happening to another relative."

Family history of suicide and family history of mental disorder are two risk factors that the National Institute of Mental Health lists.

More than 90 percent of people who die by suicide have depression or another mental disorder, or a substance abuse disorder in combination with another mental problem, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Learn about the link between depression and creativity

Research shows that depression runs in families.

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows biological markers for the inherited condition. The researchers found, in a sample of 131 people, that the biological offspring of depressed people had structural differences in their brain. Some of these people had been followed for more than 25 years. Learn more about mood disorders »

People at high risk of developing depression had a 28 percent thinning of the right cortex, the brain's outermost surface, the study found. Those with an extra thinning abnormality in the left cortex were most likely to develop depression or anxiety.

The data set shows that this brain surface thinning was present before these people developed mental problems, and was found in both children and grandchildren of depressed people, said Dr. Bradley Peterson, psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center and co-author of the study.

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The new study may point toward more individualized medicine -- one day people may be screened for these brain abnormalities that indicate high depression risk, and receive treatment based on that, he said.

Researchers believe the cortical thinning causes depression by interfering with the processing of emotional stimuli, he said. A person with these brain abnormalities may benefit from therapy targeted at responding to social stimuli more appropriately, he said.

With both depression and suicide, research suggests that causal factors are a combination of genetics and environment, Peterson said.

The best way to prevent suicide is to treat the underlying psychiatric disorder, Brent said.

Besides Hughes and Plath, famous examples of two or more close relatives committing suicide include Ernest Hemingway's family -- Hemingway's father, brother, sister and granddaughter, in addition to the famous novelist himself, killed themselves.

The poet John Berryman jumped off a Minneapolis bridge in 1972; his father had committed suicide when the poet was a child. More recently, the playwright Spalding Gray apparently killed himself in 2004; his mother had taken her own life many years earlier.

Do relatives of people who killed themselves imitate suicide? This is possible, but hard to prove or disprove, Brent said. In fact, there is more evidence of copycat suicides among people who did not know the victim well, but merely learned about him or her through the news.

If you've actually lost a relative to suicide and go through the bereavement process, you may be more likely to understand the aftermath of suicide, Brent said.

Suicide "can also represent the learned or transmitted way of coping with unbearable stress," Peterson said.

What exactly gets transmitted in families with suicide? One theory is that it's a difficulty in emotional regulation.

"Not necessarily depression per se, but it's the ability to restrain yourself from acting on suicidal thoughts," Brent said.

Via:

www.cnn.com

Suicidal behavior may run in families

Legends' Last Songs and Epitaphs

Have you ever wondered what songs the legends sang just before they die? Did they feel that something was going wrong and the end was getting closer? These are impossible questions since we can never know if Lennon was whistling any of his latest songs while he was walking towards the apartment Dakota or Cobain singing anything just before he pulled the trigger... etc. But at least, we can follow the clues and reveal their psychlogical situations the day they died and this may help us to learn much about them.

You Know You Are Right - Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)
(February 20, 1967 - April 5, 1994)

Kurt wrote this song as a sarcastic reference to his wife Courtney Love, at a very turbulent time in their relationship (shortly before his suicide), the title and predominant lyric: "you know your right" and also "nothing really bothers her, she just wants to love herself", both refer to Kurt's frustration with Courtney.

On April 8, 1994, Cobain's body was discovered at his Lake Washington home. A suicide note was found that said, "I haven't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing . . . for too many years now" with a shotgun pointing at his chin. A high concentration of heroin and traces of Valium were also found in his body.

Since the group recorded the song when they had some spare time one weekend, it went unreleased after Cobain suddenly died.

A Change is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke
(January 22, 1931 - December 11, 1964)

Cooke was deeply affected by the death of his infant son, who drowned in a swimming pool in 1963. He started writing more introspective songs and took an interest in black history and politics.

The song was released as a single a few months after Cooke died. He was shot by a motel owner who claimed he was raping a young girl in one of the rooms. A lot of controversy surrounded his death; Cooke owned his own record label and publishing company, and some people thought he was killed as part of a plot.

"There been times that I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will"

Voodo Child - Jimi Hendrix
(November 27, 1942 - September 18, 1970)

This was the last song Hendrix performed live. On September 6, 1970, which was 12 days before his death, he played it at a concert in Germany.

Hendrix's last public performance was an informal jam at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho with Burdon and his latest band, War.

Early on September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix died in London in a Hotel under the circumstances which have never been fully explained.

Redemption Song - Bob Marley
(February 6, 1945 - May 11, 1981)

Marley completed his last album in the summer of 1980. He was suffering from the cancer that would eventually kill him at age 36, but was very productive in his later years. He refused traditional medicine because of his Rastafarian beliefs and chose to make music and perform as long as he could.

This was the last song Marley performed. He sang it from a stool at a show in Pittsburgh on September 23, 1980.

"Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
'Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;"

Mercedes Benz - Janis Joplin
(January 19, 1943 - October 4, 1970)

The last recordings Joplin completed were "Mercedes Benz" and a birthday greeting for John Lennon ("Happy Trails", composed by Dale Evans) on October 1, 1970. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites' song "Buried Alive In The Blues" prior to recording the vocal track and scheduled for the next day.

She failed to show up at the studio by Sunday afternoon, producer Paul Rothchild became concerned. Full Tilt Boogie's road manager, John Cooke, drove to the Landmark Motor Hotel (since renamed the Highland Gardens Hotel) where Joplin had been a guest since August 24. He saw Joplin's psychedelically painted Porsche still in the parking lot. Upon entering her room, he found her dead on the floor. The official cause of death was an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.

To Live is To Die/Anesthesia Pulling Teeth - Cliff Burton (Metallica)
(February 10, 1962 - September 27, 1986)

Fresh from their triumphant UK tour, Metallica had headed once more for Scandinavia where they'd played three shows at the Olympen in Lund (September 24, 1986), the Skedsmohallen (September 25, 1986) in Oslo and at the Sonahallen in Stockholm (September 26, 1986). The last song of Cliff Burton was also his latest solo bass performance "Anesthesia Pulling Teeth" in the concert. It was approaching dawn on Saturday, the 27th of September 1986, and Metallica's two tour buses were on their way to do a fourth show in Copenhagen. The were traveling along a god forsaken road between the Scandinavian cities of Stockholm and Copenhagen. Apart from these vehicles, the route was deserted, there was no one else traveling at that early hour of the morning. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, just before dawn, at about 5:15 am, one of the coaches swerved violently to its right and started careening wildly down the wrong side of the road. It was out of control, and a crash was inevitable. Cliff Burton was thrown through the window of the bus, which fell on top of him causing his death.

Swedish police arriving on the scene of the accident immediately arrested the driver as a matter of routine. They later released him without charging him after further investigation revealed that the cause of the accident was black ice on a nasty bend in the road.

James Hetfield later stated that he first believed the bus flipped because the driver was drunk, claiming he had smelled alcohol on the driver's breath after the accident. Hetfield also stated that he himself had walked long distances down the road looking for black ice and had found none. Local freelance photographer, Lennart Wennberg, who had attended the scene of the crash the following morning, when later asked in an interview about the likelihood of black ice being the cause of the accident said that it was 'out of the question', stating that the road had been dry and the temperature around zero degrees Celsius. This was also confirmed by the police who also found no ice on the road.

"To live is to die" is a tribute to Metallica's bassist Cliff Burton. It is instrumental except the spoken word piece near the end - this was a poem that Cliff wrote before he died.

When a man lies he murders
Some part of the world
These are the pale deaths
Which men miscall their lives
All this I cannot bear To witness any longer
Cannot the kingdom of salvation
Take me home

The Best is Yet to Come - Frank Sinatra
(December 12, 1915 - May 14, 1998)

Sinatra's final public concerts were held in Japan's Fukuoka Dome in December 1994. The following year, on February 25, 1995, at a private party for 1,200 select guests on the closing night of the Frank Sinatra Desert Classic golf tournament, Sinatra sang before a live audience for the very last time. His closing song was "The Best is Yet to Come."

After suffering heart attack, Frank Sinatra died at 10:50 pm on May 14, 1998 at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, with his wife Barbara by his side. He was 82 years old and Sinatra's final words, spoken as attempts were made to stabilize him, were "I'm losing."

The words The Best Is Yet to Come are imprinted on Sinatra's tombstone. But one of his songs "My way" soon became the most requested song by men to be played at their funerals.

Walking On Thin Ice - John Lennon
(9 October 1940 - 8 December 1980)

On the night of 8 December 1980, at around 10:49 p.m., Mark David Chapman shot Lennon in the back four times in the entrance of the Dakota and Lennon died immediately on the event scene.

The last song of his own that John ever recorded was "I Don't Wanna Face It," recorded on September 2nd but never fully finished by John; it appears on the CD Milk and Honey. The last song Lennon played on was probably Yoko's "Walking On Thin Ice," which appears on her album Season Of Glass; he was working on it at the time of his death. The last recordings he ever made at home, however, were four new songs recorded as demos at his Dakota residence on November 14th. Two, "Pop Is The Name Of The Game" and "You Saved My Soul," have never been officially released. The other two, "Dear John" and "Serve Yourself," were released on 1998's Lennon Anthology.. The lyrics of "Dear John" consist mainly of this verse:

Dear John,
don't be hard on yourself.
Give yourself a break.
Life wasn't meant to be run.
The race is over, you've won.

Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain - Elvis Presley
(January 8, 1935 - August 16, 1977)

Presley's final performance was in Indianapolis at the Market Square Arena, on June 26, 1977. According to many of his entourage who accompanied him on tour, it was the "best show he had given in a long time" with "some strong singing".

Another tour was scheduled to begin August 17, 1977, but at Graceland the day before, Presley was found on his bathroom floor by fiancée, Ginger Alden. According to the medical investigator, Presley had "stumbled or crawled several feet before he died"; he had apparently been using the toilet at the time. Death was officially pronounced at 3:30 pm at the Baptist Memorial Hospital.

Although Elvis appeared pale, weak, and overweight, as he had with increasing regularity, there was nothing to suggest his impending death -- indeed, there was nothing unusual about his show on the tour, except that Elvis for some reason introduced practically everyone from his life on stage that night. Some take this as "proof" Elvis knew he was in his final days; others maintain that he was worried about the imminent publication of Elvis: What Happened?, a tell-all biography by former bodyguards Sonny and Red West that publicly broke the story of his drug abuse, and what those revelations might do to his image.

The last recording Elvis made was a vocal overdub on "He'll Have To Go" on October 31st, 1976 in the "Jungle Room" at his home at Graceland.

The last song Elvis performed in private was a rendition of "Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain," on his piano in Graceland hours before his death.

In the twilight glow I seen her
Blue eyes crying in the rain
When we kissed goodbye and parted
I knew we'd never meet again
Love is like a dying ember
And only memories remain
And through the ages I'll remember

Blue eyes crying in the rain

A Winter's Tale/Mother Love - Freddie Mercury (Queen)
(5 September 1946 - 24 November 1991)

October 8th 1991 was the last time Freddie Mercury performed on stage. At the time, he was terribly ill with AIDS, although he didn't want people to know about it. He announced that fact the day before he died. Being ill he continued to compose and record songs and even took part in making videos (ex: "I'm Going Slightly Mad" video)

On November 24th, 1991 Freddie died peacefully at his home in London of AIDS-related bronchial pneumonia.

"A Winter's tale" and "Mother Love" was the two songs he cannot find time to complete recordings. Queen guitarist Brian May in the name of the band Queen sang the rest of the lyrics and published in Queen's 1995 album "Made in Heaven".

Freddie mercury did not officially have a grave. He was cremated and the whereabouts of his ashes remains a mystery. It has been said that they are buried under the cherry tree in his garden, at garden lodge. It has also been said that they were scattered at Lake Geneva, a place where Freddie had an apartment, and a place where he found great peace.

My body's aching, but I can't sleep
My dreams are all the company I keep
Got such a feeling as the sun goes down
I'm coming home to my sweet -
Mother love

Via:

http://kuday-eng.bloggum.com

Legends' Last Songs and Epitaphs