Stone grew even more intensely interested when others reported that they, too, sometimes held their breath while reading or writing email-a phenomenon that she started calling "email apnea." She told me that she came to realize that "breathing is the regulator of attention." Stone reminded me that holding one's breath is directly connected to the "fight or flight" response. When your ancestors and mine heard a noise, they held their breath until deciding whether to flee, fight, or ignore the sound, while their glands pumped energy-mobilizing hormones into their blood-streams, just in case. Holding your breath affects the body's balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen oxide. It activates the sympathetic nervous system, causing an increase in glucose and cholesterol levels in the bloodstream along with an increased heart rate as well as a sense of hunger. Stone remarked that regular breathing patterns, by contrast, activate the parasympathetic nervous system, causing relaxation, the release of diges-tive enzymes, and a sense of satiety-signs of a "rest and digest" mode. She pointed out that "we're putting our bodies in a state of almost constant low-level fight-or-flight. This is great when we're being chased by tigers. But how many of those 500 emails a day is a TIGER? How many are flies? Is everything an emergency? Our way of using the current set of technolo-gies would have us believe it is."23 Paying attention to your breath-the core technique of mindfulness meditation methods-is where Stone sug-gests starting to moderate our online reactions. I'll get back to that later. For now, I'm convinced that Stone is right to think that attention to breathing could be a tool to help moderate our unthinking, ultimately unhealthy reactions to many online stimuli.

I don't argue with the Thoreau objection. I embrace it. Years ago, I cut a door in my office wall; it's now three steps to my garden. The fact that I acknowledge my attraction to distraction doesn't mean that I have to suc-cumb to the urge to be constantly connected. I simply ask myself when I reach for my iPhone while waiting in line, Why not stay disconnected for a minute and see what happens? Or I deliberately leave my podcasts at home when I take the dogs out for a walk in the neighborhood. Throw some sand into the machinery that automatizes your attention.

When I interviewed Nass, he proposed that a better way for getting things done than multitasking all day is to deliberately work on a single task for fifteen to thirty minutes before going with the multitasking flow for five to ten minutes. This insight is the basis for a simple attention-training methodology known as the "Pomodoro Technique."103 The method is easy enough. Write down your major tasks to accomplish each day on a piece of paper. Set the timer (which resembles a tomato; hence pomodoro) for twenty-five minutes and work on one task in whatever medium the task requires until you hear the alarm sound. Then take five minutes to do what you want. Repeat. Every four pomodoros, take a longer break. Train your-self to be present and aware of whether what you are doing online is going to help you achieve your own goal. Eventually you don't need the alarm clock

I bring my attention back to my breath. I don't try to "think about nothing." I don't strive to do better than I did yesterday or last year. I simply observe the way thoughts emerge and pass away with or without my conscious intent. Attention! 71 If you haven't done it, watching your breath with your eyes closed and labeling your thoughts as they pass through your mind sounds like a colos-sal waste of time. I admit that I get antsy, and look forward to getting back to work, play, or whatever I had been doing. I don't assign the "fun" tag to meditation.

Today's technology may be new, but using media to change (some would say expand) human consciousness at least goes back to forty-thousand-year-old cave paintings.

In one arena of daily life, distraction has proven to be life threaten-ing. Who hasn't witnessed the chilling sight of another driver in the next highway lane who appears to be texting while driving? A Harvard study in 2003 estimates that 2,600 traffic deaths and 330,000 accidents annually are caused by cell phone distractions. 24 A study in 2009 of professional long-haul truck drivers who equipped their cabs with video cameras for eighteen months claims that the collision risk became twenty-three times greater when the drivers texted.25 University of Utah researchers found that drivers who talked on a cell phone-just talked, not texted-were as impaired in driving simulation tests as subjects with blood-alcohol levels close to the legal limit.26 Although there are more subtle dangers to consider in this chapter, texting while driving kills; that's all that needs to be said about it. I'll only add that the fact that anyone would risk life and limb for an LOL is a clue that something about texting hooks into the human propensity to repeat pleasurable behaviors to the point of compulsion.

This phenomenon, known as "selective inattention," is dramatically illustrated by the online video of the "awareness test" conducted by Dan-iel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christo-pher Chabris of Harvard University.18 Subjects were asked to watch a short video of two groups (distinguished by black or white T-shirts) passing basketballs and count passes by one team, or keep track of bounce versus aerial passes. While the basketballs were passed, an actor walked through the scene wearing a gorilla suit, paused, turned to look at the camera, and walked on. When asked whether anything out of the ordinary occurred, around 50 percent of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla. The assigned task created a frame for the subjects' attention, filtering out dis-tractions that didn't fit, to the point where a gorilla on a basketball court escaped notice.

While I was writing this book, my friend Duke University professor Cathy Davidson was also working on her own book about attention. 13 In her blog, Davidson recounts an incident that happened when she was tracking down footnote references requested by the editor. She was working at her desk, got up to put a teakettle on the stove, and went back to her writing. Hearing a garbage truck outside, she assumed it was the source of the burning rub-ber she was beginning to smell. When she started to see smoke, Davidson realized that the water had boiled out of the teakettle and the plastic handle had been melting. She had forgotten to pay attention to the stove while concentrating on her book.

Each week, I introduce a new attention probe to the classroom. I told a cohort of fifty students, for instance, that five of them could have their laptops open at any one time. "In order for somebody else to open their computer," I stipulated, "one of the current five will have to close theirs." This was not only an attention probe but also a collective action problem. It forced the current five to be aware of their own attention in the context of other students who were waiting to Google my lecture (or slay monsters in a role-playing game). Each class session, I reminded students that the objec-tive was "to get you to start paying attention to the way you pay attention. 1