Writing and technology

Apparently the blog-cyber-mediashpere is making us stupid. A study published in 2005 by the King's College London suggests that the distractions of e-mail and text messaging effectively rob your functional IQ of 10 points. Another, conducted at Kansas State University, suggests that watching "the crawl-the stream of headlines scrolling across the lower portion of the television screen-reduces memory retention by roughly 10%, and a brain imaging study at Carnegie Mellon showed that when performing two tasks at once, a person's brain activity is 56% of what it was when that person focused on the two activities separately. ( Wonder if the distractions of e-mail and text messages cause permanent loss of intelligence?) Memory retention is serious; I have reached the point when I do worry about seniors' moments. No more watching the scroll.

If we want to be writers, there is another perhaps more important consideration for writers: the loss of creative space. In his book Hare Brain, Tortoise Minda: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (Ecco 1999), Guy Claxton cites several studies that point to an "unconscious intelligence" that works while our mind is disengaged or working on something else entirely. Ideas emerge from a kind of creative womb, one that works while we are focused on mundane physical task, like walking, or riding a train, or staring at the ocean. Just letting the the mind run.
If simply staring at the ocean and allowing your unconscious intelligence to do its work is difficult in this age of too much information, there is another state beyond that, which has become even harder to obtain: flow. It's a state of mind in which your are so engaged in an activity that you lose track of time-even lose track of yourself. You forget about everything around you and wake up kind of surprised to find yourself back in your room. The state of flow is when your best work gets done and when writing becomes really fun.
Right now, I am going to engage in the really mundane- laundry. Not sure if it will get me into flow but I will try and hopefully get some ideas for the writing that I enjoy doing. Avoiding the distraction of e-mail is hard. The phone with call display is easier, at least I am able to avoid nuisance calls. (Please if I do not answer you call, it is not because I am screening the call; I might be practising or writing.) TV is not a great hardship since I find less and less that I enjoy watching. Time for that load of laundry and hopefully I will get some ideas. Not sure about the flow but aim to reach that state.