Your brain on e-mail

A new study has found that excessive day-to-day use of "always-on" communications technologies like e-mail and IM can be more distracting and and lower your IQ more than smoking marijuana.

Researchers from the University of London found that "an average worker's functioning IQ falls 10 points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails ... more than double the four-point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana."

Not only that, but checking in constantly is actually a form of addiction, they said, dubbing the condition "info-mania" -- and 62 percent of adults suffer from it. (See the complete press release PDF.)

Sounds alarming, doesn't it? Stowe Boyd, president of Corante and self-described "media subversive," argues that this is actually a good thing:

Continuous Partial Attention, which most think of as a disorder ... is a reasonable strategy for dealing with a sped-up world, but it requires shifting the measurement of productivity away from the individual -- like 'IQ' tests -- and looking at the productivity of connected groups. Time in today's world is yet another shared space: your time is truly not your own. We constantly monitor communications -- email, IMs, blogs -- to keep ourself situationally aware of what is going on around us.

The shift in focus is profound: you need to accept interrupts from others so that they can make progress on their activities, even though this decreases your personal productivity. But it increases the productivity of your contacts, and those dependent on their activities, and so on. It's a form of social altruism.

Incidentally, if you're wondering whether info-mania is any more addictive than marijuana, the San Francisco Chronicle consulted the experts to find out. Ryan Montana, a director at the Love Shack, a medicinal marijuana dispensary in San Francisco, put it in perspective thusly: "You can literally be spending hours a day checking e-mail. A person who is using prescription marijuana is not spending hours a day medicating."

In any event, Hewlett-Packard, which commissioned the study, offers a helpful guide on avoiding info-mania (PDF). The advice given is useful and practical -- e.g., write meaningful subject lines, set aside dedicated e-mail time each day -- although you've probably heard it all before. It also includes a concise, self-scored quiz to help you determine if you're an info-maniac.