Pay attention

Meditation is difficult. Sitting still may not seem all that complicated, but go ahead and try it and you'll realize that simple does not mean easy.

One common Zen Buddhist practice is to sit with your back straight and eyes closed, and count your breaths, starting over at 10.

Do this in a quiet place for five or 10 minutes and you'll probably lose track several times.

Why does this happen? It's not that counting breaths is too difficult for your Penn-trained brain. It's too easy.

Our brains are conditioned and primed for full-on assaults of input. Seeing and hearing nothing is a sensory underload, and consequently, your mind wanders.

Today's society presents us with an ambivalent view of the short attention span.

On the one hand, we should be able to focus, pay attention, and read a hundred pages of Hobbes' Leviathan without nodding off. Difficulty sitting still and listening carefully are seen as childlike deficiencies, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a treatable learning disorder.

Folks with longer attention spans are better readers, writers, listeners and learners. Yes, the ability do one thing and do it right is admirable, but what about the ability to multitask?

Most college students try to cram 24 hours of activity into 18 hours of wakefulness.

We read while we eat, we watch TV while we study, and we talk on the phone while we drive. Taking notes in and of itself is multitasking, but look around a class, and see what other activities have consumed your peers: crosswords, doodles, or maybe even other coursework. Or sleep.

I usually walk to my first class while eating breakfast and listening to music. I never just listen to music or eat without doing anything else. In fact, I rarely even walk without a supplementary activity. What else are you doing while you read this article? Listening to music? Eating? Riding a bike?

The digital era is a major contributor to our multitask-oriented mental conditioning. Wireless phone technology has allowed us to stack conversations on to any of our activities and to fill downtime anywhere with talk time.

With his or her computer, the modern college student can listen to music, visit visually stimulating Web sites and chat with several people at once. But the ultimate culprit is television.

First of all, watching TV is often accompanied by studying, socializing or eating. Just watching TV by itself should be enough of a sensory burden, for TV provides full throttle visual and aural stimuli in eight-minute segments, broken up by four-minute advertising blitzes. Some brain scientists postulate that eight minutes has become the average human attention span.

These eight minutes are sometimes continuous, but more often TV programs break them into smaller segments.

MTV provides an extreme example of short attention span television. A music video lasts only three to four minutes and the camera shot changes every few seconds, and some MTV shows, such as Total Request Live, usually shorten the videos to 30 second clips.

But the network of our generation isn't the only culprit; lots of TV programming caters to the short attention span.

News broadcasts are particularly bad. In addition to packing each news story into a minute-or-less presentation, the broadcasts include a variety of simultaneous supplemental stimuli. Live sports and news tickers are standard fare, and sometimes stock market and weather information is also available onscreen.

These arguments do not amount to a blanket condemnation of phones, computers and Carson Daly. I do not mean to decry technology and hark back to the good old days of tire swings and typewriters. In fact, people have probably always had short attention spans, just as children have always been hyper and meditation has always been difficult.

However, the way we condition our brains to multitask cannot be denied, and the potential link between this conditioning and attention deficit should not be ignored.

The mixed messages we're left with about attention prompt further questions: does multitasking lead to worse test-taking skills? Do ADD treatments hamper the ability to multitask? What are the optimal conditions for studying? Are you still paying attention?

Daniel Nieh is a senior East Asian Languages and Civilizations major from Portland, Ore. Low End Theory appears on Fridays.

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