Made. Information Communication Technologies have transformed our society. Today. Digital data washes over us from. We carry devices everywhere. And ultimately the entire planet. Computers and tablets constantly seeking our attention and technology. And. These Digital Tools and electronic leashes and cause cognitive overload and especially in the workplace. Researches are only now starting to measure the effects the Digital Media have on people what can we do to cope. With. Today half of the worlds population uses the Internet Exchange one hundred fifty billion emails per day we are submerged in data and this causes im president of levels of stress. Thats too much information to process it comes in to fast and in volumes that are not humanly possible to handle that combines the course of your stress. With with those of us a civil suit. Has written a book on how to survive in our digital society. Abrahams Information Technology is for the increase in stress in the workplace. Now days the world produces as much information in two days as it did in all of digital history the quantities are so vast that they become abstract. Heres a comparison Frances National library has one of the biggest in the world it has about fourteen million books every second data equivalent to two such libraries is distributed on the web that works out to sixty three million French National libraries a year. I see you know were living in an age of the wild west of technology where weve got all these different applications and devices in people are switching back and forth between all these different devices and applications its really like the wild west because its chaotic. Were faced with a paradox the devices that should be simplifying our lives actually seem to complicate them. How did this happen how has Digital Technology revolutionized the world of work thats what cindy fell you know a researcher in information and Communication Sciences wants to find out by interviewing Business Managers about their report with the digital world. I wanted to find out how this was impacting the workplace particularly employees who use Digital Technology every day and i wanted to find out whether digital devices are creating new psychosocial risks in the workplace. For Research Fellow interviewed some one hundred managers because they seem to suffer most from digitally induced stress. This children are for my soon to many dealing with the demands of all this information distracts them from their primary functions some of the managers told me that they feel cut off from their real work my analysis indicates that this technology has made work more intense the work seems more condensed and more urgent because these digital devices allow everyone to be instantly reachable all the time. Ban arm on an as is one of the managers interviewed by cindy. At his last job he was stressed out because of all the digital data that came across his desk. So he got a new job. Lets say you start work on a subject at eight thirty in the morning. At eight thirty six you receive an email mark urgent almost sixty percent of emails these days im out urgent because people think otherwise you wont answer i mean why are you receiving text then a phone call then you return to the does you started on i thirty and i will be ten fifteen ten thirty or Eleven Oclock on the by now you lost the thread of what you want to do which means excuse me. When im in a meeting back you know. Its true that when youre constantly assailed by ringing. And alerts. You lose your concentration. Concentration. Over being a kook and obviously when hes interrupted he loses his train of thought thats very characteristic of these environments i describe it as electronic bombardment or water torture in my working groups theres an interruption every six minutes with this new digital working system is structured so that you cant work. See what i mean its called you know. Its. These incessant demands for sense to respond creating a cycle that can eat up a lot of time experts estimate that employees spend about a third of their day just dealing with emails. Much you paid work for a company that manages data networks. His job requires him to be permanently connected. With yes francis. Now go ahead im listening. Well make it quick trip avoid which one of im going to have to be reachable twenty four hours a day weekends the nights whenever shipping and im sometimes called in the middle of the night when there are major problems that go toward ok lets talk about it all and i would love to see more police id be the first to say wed all like to be able to breathe a bit and switch off from time to time of the committee. Nowadays half of all managers stay connected to the office at home in the evening. In the modern world of work its become almost impossible to do otherwise. Yet in fact. Theres a sort of unwritten law that you have to stay connected and reply to emails as soon as you get them because youre equipped with this phone and thats exactly why you have it all remember he said he feels that if it is right if youre connected to your job around the clock it can cause trouble in your personal life it could lead to divorce or at least arguments with your partner due to this intrusion of the professional world into the home was. Just left for an officer then. And when work takes over like that it can lead to burnout. Stephanie went through that in her previous job she now works at a winery. You know you dont have her come on. Time id often get up in the middle of the night to deal with emails from china and india. I thought i was being efficient. I felt i was doing important work for the company so it didnt really bother me. That i was paying no attention at all to my personal life. In fact i felt that i had to be online all of the time it was a total addiction if i wasnt online i wasnt alive. I had to keep up on what was going on i check emails on the weekend during vacations even during my honeymoon. And then i realized that i had to stop. It you dont really know. What triggered it was when my daughter lou said to me one day mom all you do with shout youre really mean you need an operation well actually and thats when i decided to start cutting back on being connected. Connected in her new job stephanie still has to work online but on a more limited basis she worked out a plan with her employer. Stephanie narrowly avoided burnout but not everyone is so lucky so heres her just. Were only just becoming aware of the effects of digital stress. But can a way analyze the nature of this stress are we exhibiting new behaviors new ways of working that threaten our aqua librium psychologist gloria mock is trying to find out shes a professor in the department of informatics at the university of california irvine. Research focuses on the interaction of humans and technology for two decades shes carried out field studies focusing on how the growing role of Digital Technology is changing us. When i began i would interview and i would ask them about their experiences and everybody got distracted from you know so i looked for a few words like that was willing to have its employees cut off email it took me six years to find an organization. A u. S. Military Research Center near boston agreed to take part gloria mock wanted to study the effect that a male had on Staff Members she observed employers on the job and measured their physiological responses. Hi im gloria mark and were doing a study thank you very much for volunteering so i have some devices id like you to. This device measures the persons heartbeat which can indicate the level of stress. And this one keeps track of the interactions between coworkers. And so your other colleagues when they come in close proximity to you the signals from these badges pick up each other and it can tell when youre close with another person and interacting with them ok. Now were going to cut off your email for a period of five days. Gloria mark compared the results before and after she discovered that those whod had their email cut off were more likely to interact directly with their coworkers the study concluded that email is the leading source of stress in the office what we found was that the more time people spend on email the higher their stress is we also found that the longer time on email the lower people assessed their productivity at the end of the day for the past ten years gloria mark has been measuring the Attention Span of people who sit in front of computer screens she says theres been a dramatic change. In two thousand and four we found that the average length of time that people focused on any activity was three minutes in two thousand and twelve we found that on any computer screen peoples attention was about one minute and fifteen seconds on average so there are attention shifting is happening more frequently ive also done a very large study with college undergraduate students these are the millennial generation these are young people that have grown up with the internet with digital devices with smartphones and there are attention duration on any computer screen is even shorter its about forty five seconds. I think people have multitask you know for a long time i mean weve had telephone weve had radio but i think whats different now in the workplace is that people have access through Digital Media to more information faster than theyve ever had in history people report burnout because each time you orient to a new task its a strain so we know that multitasking and the consequent interruptions create stress and create a cognitive overlap. In our increasingly digitalize society constant pressure and multitasking have become the norm. But how well can the brain deal with that kind of overload. Stephon be fine is a military doctor and. A specialist in aeronautics hes been studying the cognitive capacity of pilots specifically the mental effort thats required to carry out tasks during a flight. To do that too far and his team measure the pilots brain activity and heart rate. And observe their behavior during that flight. Well you know some is that on it using all these parameters were going to evaluate some of their internal activity which we can correlate with the cognitive load during the flight. You know whats interesting about these measurements that they give you a dynamic reading of his state during the flight in the actions and we can then analyze these readings. And i guess if you think about this type of simulator we can simulate a flight and the occurrence of certain technical problems will divide these has to be managed by the pilot who will have to deal with this increasing demand youve also done all that. If you dont that is going to move if we give them several competing tasks at the same time the pilot needs to mobilize all his resources for you know terms of both memory and attention you know he has to manage his priorities to execute his actions ok engine failure. Ok were down everythings fine. If you know when the helicopter pilot has to deal with a mechanical failure in a power line yes to decide which is the most immediate danger you know how people you will probably treat the powerline is in imminent emergency but switching tasks has a cost in terms of information treatment time and in terms of errors you can observe this in a simulator mission yet. During the same united engine failure. Malfunction has occurred can you manage a conversation at the same time. Can i ask you what is three times for. An answer twelve and can you recite the alphabet backwards. For example each time you switch tasks you will slow your Response Time and you also become more tired. The impression of dealing with multiple tasks is deceptive because in fact each of these tasks is dealt with superficially. The analysis of the data recorded during the test indicates that multitasking reduces performance even in experienced pilots. Many people claim that they can use digital devices to multitask efficiently but in most cases the impression of efficiency is merely an illusion. Of what i actually happens in our brain when we try to handle several tasks at once. And what impact does multitasking have on our Attention Span. Is a research at the university of. She specializes in cognitive neuroscience studying human Attention Span. Dr says that attention comes in different forms. But i dont think there is only one type of attention there are several varieties. They are based on different cerebral mechanisms different types of activity in the brain thats what im trying to unravel. It. For example. Is studying sustained attention the ability to remain attentive for several minutes or even hours. And selective attention which helps us to shut down time wanted background noise in our environment the research wants to find out how these mechanisms Work Together when we multitask. Experience now and this experiment to a measuring brain activity while the test subject tries to perform to tasks that once. You develop for. Your own toma dont print id like you to count the number of times you hear your name. At the same time numbers will appear on the screen when you see the number to left click the mouse if you want to thank you. So much. But. You know what the signals from the electrodes in the back of the head indicate that the subject has become less alert shes paying less attention to the task at hand is going to confirm. It is using the same network of neurons and she carries out those two tasks that leads to a conflict in her brain. She didnt count on his. When you talk on the phone and write an email at the same time the brain tends to alternate between those two terms. So while youre writing you may miss something on the phone. But these two tasks both use the brains Language Network and when we try to do them at the same time the Network Becomes such rated one of the tasks will lose out particularly fox in the mind it is a comedic youve all but you. Oh theres lots of noise in the workplace phones ringing coworkers talking scientists call this norm curtain and information. Like the deep sunless experiment that noise distracts our attention even though were able to ignore most of it. The brain has inhibitor mechanisms that reduce our response to nonpertinent sounds while were carrying out a tone ask now in the case of sounds its as if the brain silences them and stops reacting to that information. From this room. The inhibitor mechanisms are essential because our brains are constantly bombarded with sound and visual information. But when people multitask those filters dont work as well. When we try to do two things at once we cant properly filter out nonpertinent stimuli like the sound of a coffee machine nearby or someone walking down the hallway. This experiment shows that when people do two things at once they cant filter out background noise effectively and their attention suffers the studies refute the notion that some people are multitasking has little does. There are no serious cognitive studies that show that young people are more capable of multitasking than older people are. In fact young people zap around constantly and that can be harmful. We might expect young people to experience less stress because they are supposedly comfortable with digital devices lyrically midweek easels with zol is a little unique its a deal. Astonishingly studies show that the opposite is true a major European Survey involving thirty thousand employees found that stress levels related to Information Technologies were significantly higher among young people compared to older people so persons who remove superior. Than survey conducted by the j. F. K. Market Research Institute in twenty Nine Countries show that thirty nine percent of people under thirty believe that work takes up too much of their lives. Digital devices constantly demand our attention so we have to learn how to deal with these multiple distractions starting at an early age. In france experts have developed workshops that it is nine to enhance the Attention Span of school children. The workshops are conducted by neuroscientist john feely plush show in cooperation with education administrators in the leon region. Show is convinced that children can learn to resist the siren call of digital devices. Now for seventy two i never thought id find myself back at school. I thought i was finished with that but i took on the challenge of implementing a program to train childrens Attention Span and. She isnt from oh the course here the scientist my kids. One thousand pupils are taking part in this program its aimed at helping them to resist the massive on song to digital content. The idea is to show children that they can control their Attention Span a skill that will also benefit them in later life. If the Pilot Program while it will be extended to all schools in france. What is the brain for. For thinking. For being attentive if you like but you can also have fun with it was amusing. To give a tumble to put it that he doesnt see it all depends on how much importance we attach to attention. I mean if a family focuses on this and makes it a priority then the children will be more attentive. Lets say youre reading a story to an infant if the childs attention starts to wander and you stop reading then the child will realize that you expect a certain level of attention. There are lots of Little Things that parents can do to improve a childs Attention Span. So we have to Pay Attention to our Attention Span it plays a key role in our lives but it is increasingly threatened by digital communication. When the brain is attentive it uses regions that are responsible for high level cognitive functions like memory planning and understanding. But when youre not paying attention those parts of the brain remain silent or do other thing