(The following post is poorly written because, twit that I am, I mistakenly published it when it was in draft form. This is why some sentences are inexplicable, why their are spelling errors and why it seems to end in mid-thought. It will be cleaned up later today - I hope!)
Is your online brain the same as your physical world brain and, if so, does it hurt?
Yesterday, I came across a posting that lead me to another posting that lead me to the boston.com article, How the city hurts your brain. The article states, "While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so."
They have their reasons for making a statement like this.
"The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power."
After reading the article, I began thinking if it in relation to Peter Morville's book Ambient Findability and what he discusses there about wayfinding, how we find our way in the world. His reason for discussing this was because it appears we find our way online, in the digital world, in much the same way we find our way in the physical world.
If this is true, and I suspect it is, and if the conclusions about the effects of the city on our brain are true, would it also be true that the digital world, our experience on computers and cell phones and other devices, has a similar impact on our brains?
I've often had teleconferences with people where one of us pauses a moment, saying, "Hang on. I've got too many windows open."
With multiple screens, numerous ads and information areas present on even a single browser tab (all trying to get our attention), with tools like twhirl and Gmail alerts, and all the other various things that appear, fly by, and also ask for our attention ... isn't this environment similar to the urban environment that is said to hurt our brains?
What happens when we move from a stimuli-saturated urban environment like the morning rush hour commute into the office and an equally stimuli-saturated environment of the digital world: email, browsers, alerts, pop-ups and so on?
The study referred to in the boston.com article says studies have found the natural world, even in small in small doses, "improve mental performance." They go to say, "This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain."
What does this mean for web design, if these studies of urban impact on the brain can be said to mirror the effect of online life? When we speak of web design we usually mean a single site's design. But in this case, it's not just a single site but the entire web, not to mention all the gadgets and other tools on our desktops. And phones. And ...
There are some brilliantly designed sites but no matter how well a site is designed, how do you design (control) everything else on the web, everything else someone has on whatever device they are using to access the Internet?
I suppose this problem is also true of urban design. You can design a city's downtown, but the entire city? That's costly and difficult (but possible, I imagine). But that's one city. What about all the others? For example, let's say you design a Toronto or Vancouver so the negative impacts of urban living are minimized. What about Mumbai? Or Tokyo? Or London? Paris?
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