Can You Hear Me Now?

I am willing to bet you twenty dollars that you can count the number of people who you know that don't have cell phones on a single hand. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article says that the number of cell phone users in the United States has increased from 34 million ten years ago, to 203 million today. With cell phones quickly becoming a "necessity" to some, or a "necessary evil" to others, it is no surprise that they have found their way into the classroom. Yet another agent for disruption and distraction is here, and according to the statistics, the cell phone is here to stay.


I have broken down cell phone disruptions into three common categories:


1. The texting neighbor - In the process of taking notes in class, you notice a glare in the corner of your eye. The source is the glow of the cellphone that belongs to the kid sitting next to you. He attempts to hold it below his desk so the professor won't notice his transgression, but it is blatantly obvious that he is not paying attention. He is staring at his phone so hard that he is practically burning a hole in the display. The subtle clicking of the number pad, accompanied with the fluourescent glow of the LCD display are more than enough to distract you from the notes which you are trying to take. The texting neighbor has a limited range of disruption, usually limited to the people sitting on either side of the perpetrator.



2. The vibrating pocket - Whats that pleasant buzzing feeling in your pocket? No, its not some sort of adult toy, its your cellphone. Your mind is jarred from the task at hand when you recieve an unexpected call and your pocket turns into a holster for a phone-sized jumping-bean. Your hand instinctively dives into your pocket in an effort to squelch the vibration as rapidly as possible. In the heat of the moment, you hang up on whoever was trying to call. You switch your phone to silent, and place it back in your pocket as you try to catch up to the rest of the class.


3. The unexpected ring - Compared to the previous two categories, the unexpeted ring is an infrequent occurance. However, it is a weapon of mass disruption. While minding your own business, your ears sharpen at the sound of an unfamiliar ringtone, muffled by the fabric of a pocket, backpack, or purse. A moment of panic sweeps across the class as everyone checks to make sure that their phone is not the source of the disruption. The panic subsides for all but one, the perpetrator, who now quickly ruffles through his or her backpack to find the source of the ring and to terminate it at all costs. An awkard and sheepish apology is surely soon to follow. Following the incident, everyone in the class retrieves their phone from its unique resting place to make sure that it is set to silent.


Technology is both our friend, and our enemy. In these cases, the cell phone shows its mischevious side. The major appeal of a cell phone may be to be available at any time, but in these class scenarios, that is also what makes the cell phone such a frustrating piece of technology. But hey, you know what they say : "Can't live with it, can't live without it."

Magnetron!

I share a room with another RIT student whose name is Bobby Brown. Bobby is studying microelectronic engineering, and is in the process of growing a pretty awesome beard. He has short hair the color of black shoe-polish, and round gold-rimmed glasses. When I run into Bobby around campus, I usually hear him before I see him.

"Hey Evan! Evan! Over Here!!" he shouts, while waving his arm enthusiastically from his shoulder all the way through the tip of his fingers. If Bobby spots you from across a room, hallway, or even across a parking lot, he makes sure you know that he sees you right then and there.

I told Bobby about this blog and explained that I was going to be posting some doodles from my classnotes and talking about attention span. Yesterday he stormed into our room and proclaimed "I have an AMAZING doodle for your blog-thingy!"

He pulled out a three-subject notebook and flipped through the pages until he found the one he was looking for. "Behold, the Magnetron!" he announced, as he showed me this:

When I asked Bobby about the origins of his Magnetron doodle, he said it was a case of word association.

"I was sitting in my Thin Films class, and my professor was talking about ways to create sputtering systems. He said one way was to use a magnetron. Immediately I thought to myself 'Magnetron?! That sounds like some sort of awesome robot!' I spent the next five minutes of class completing my masterpiece and not paying attention."

It really is a great sketch. It looks like some sort of rejected misfit Pokemon.

Before Bobby explained what caused him to lose focus in his class, I hadn't thought of word association as a possible cause for a lapse in attention. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, word association can reveal information about a persons subconscious thoughts. Perhaps the association that Bobby saw with the word Magnetron and robots was so strong it pulled him away from his class.

Or perhaps Bobby just thinks about robots far too much. For those of you who are interested, a real magnetron is pictured below.

Go HERE for more information on magnetrons.

Why Today?

Every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday for the past seven weeks, I have woken up at approximately 8:30 AM in order to make it to my 9:00 AM Electromagnetic Fields class on time. My alarm clock is set for 8:12 AM, allowing for two satisfying whacks of the snooze button before I must officially wake up for the day. Since I shower before I go to bed at night, my morning routine consists of getting dressed and grabbing a pop-tart (preferably strawberry, with frosting) before snatching my backpack from the foot of my bed and heading out my apartment door on my way to class. 

After climbing three stories to the top floor of RIT's Kate Gleason building, I make my way to room 3149, and claim my seat. I habitually slouch into the fifth seat on the right, in the second row from the front of the class. Lucky for me, the hard blue plastic seats are just rigid enough to prevent me from drifting back to sleep in the middle of my fifty minute lecture. 

Surprisingly, I don't often find myself distracted or tired in this class, despite it being my earliest class of the quarter. A lot of this has to do with my professor, since she presents difficult and bland material, like "the magnitudes of complex reflection coefficients in matched transmission lines," in a way that keeps my attention. She uses a good mix of step-by-step variation and worked out examples which thankfully keep me from zoning out.

Last Tuesday, while in Electromagnetic Fields, I lost all concentration. My professor had started a new topic, dealing with the input impedance in a transmission line. I took down about a half-page of actual notes, before I found myself drawing this: 

What made me drift into doodles on this day, but not any other? I did some research, and come up with two separate answers. The first explanation is a lack of sleep. According to Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D and Director of the Chesapeake ADHD Center of Maryland, simply one night of inadequate rest can "give you symptoms that resemble ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), such as forgetfulness and difficulty maintaining concentration."

The second possible cause of my drifting attention that day has to do with the material being presented. As I noted before, my professor was beginning a new topic, and was presenting a lot of theory. She kept writing what seemed like an endless stream of formulas on the whiteboard without stopping to summarize or to do a numerical example. Since the lecture failed to switch gears to an example, or some other way of presenting the material other than flatly lecturing on generic formulas, my attention wandered.

Perhaps a combination of the bland theoretical material, and a lack of a good night's sleep prior to the lecture led me to doodling that morning, or maybe I just felt like drawing a dinosaur. Either way, the potential causes for this lapse in attention are worth taking note of. Maybe acknowledging these things will help to keep me from drifting off in class as often as I do.....or maybe it will just make my doodles that much more interesting!

Quote courtesy of CNN.

Do I Have ADD?

When I was a young child I was, in a word, a spaz. I learned last year that my brother used to sneak up on me with our family camcorder and record me while I danced to Michael Jackson songs and talked to myself. I rarely stayed in one place for more than three minutes, and used to fidget constantly. Unfortunately, my parents have the videos to prove it.

Since then, I have grown up quite a bit. I have a beard now instead of a six-inch rat-tail, and have contacts instead of glasses. One thing I haven't grown out of is being a spaz. I routinely make incoherent noises just to fill those awkward silences in the car with my friends. I don't hesitate to break out with a completely goofy dance when a weird song comes on the radio either. But do these things, in addition to my short attention span in class, point towards a medical disorder?

When people think of attention span, most immediately think of Attention Defecit Disorder, or ADD. In recent years the number of children who have been diagnosed with ADD has risen sharply. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 4.5 million American children between the ages of five and seventeen have been diagnosed with the disorder since 2006. Thats up from only 500,000 in 1985. Was I one of these 4.5 million?

If my Mom had taken me to a doctor and described my behavior as a problem, would I have been diagnosed with ADD? It is impossible to know, but I am very glad that this didn't happen. I believe that the types of psychostimulants prescribed to treat ADD, while effective in many children with legitimate hyperactivity disorders, fundamentally cahnge a person's personality. This is the main reason why it is so disturbing that the criteria for diagnosis of this disorder are so vague.

Let's take a look at some common symptoms courtesy of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

• "Impulsiveness: someone who acts quickly without thinking first.

• Hyperactivity: someone who can't sit still, walks, runs, or climbs around when others are seated, talks when others are talking.

• Inattention: someone who daydreams or seems to be in another world, is sidetracked by what is going on around him or her."

According to the above description, I am in the clear. I don't act without thinking, and can remain in my seat for hours at a time. Occasionally my mind wanders in class, resulting in doodles or daydreams, but I still manage to take notes and come away from class with a good understanding of the material presented.

But does this description really outline a true mental disease? Much of the criteria for diagnosing ADD seems subjective. This could potentially be dangerous. Imagine if the criteria for diagnosing a brain tumor were similarly vague and subjective.

• If a growth on the brain seems to be abnormal, or resembles a walnut, the growth may be a tumor

• A greenish-yellow color usually indicates a malignant tumor, while a blueish-green color may indicate a benign tumor

These criteria for diagnosis are so vague, that a real risk of misdiagnosis presents itself. Medications used to treat ADD, such as Ritalin and Adderall are powerful psychostimulants which can be addictive and have side effects such as siezures, strokes, and heart-attacks. Placing someone who is does not truly have ADD could lead to serious troubles, including the abuse of their medications.

Perhaps ADD isn't a true disease at all, merely a fabrication of modern society in an effort to compartmentalize today's kids into categories of "normal" or "disruptive."

"In The Myth of the ADD Child, Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D. disavows the existence of ADD as a disparate medical condition. He refers to the fact that child can be distractible and hyperactive because he's bored, anxious, depressed, allergic, because his temperament is conflict with his environment, because he's been hyper-stimulated by the media, or for any number of other different reasons. He indicates the negative effect that the label ADD has on the way people view children. He states that it causes people to see the disorder and not the child. As a result the child is treated as if he were the disorder, and not the vibrant individual he really is. " - Quote from The Autism and ADD Epidemics: Just a Case of Misdiagnosis by Jennifer Claerr

Whatever the case, I'm convinced my lapses of concentration in class aren't caused by ADD. Hopefully I can dig up some more information regarding what affects the attention span of adolescents like myself in an effort to shine some light on this common problem. Even though I was a spaz as a kid (and still am today) that does not automatically mean I have ADD.

A Hint of Whats To Come

This isn't really a legitimate post, but I would like to share some class doodles from other people that I found by scouring Google Images. I am in the process of getting my personal doodles scanned, and will begin writing about them shortly. For now, enjoy this taste of what is to come.

Hello World

Welcome to my blog, "Must...Pay...Attention...!" Within this space, I aim to chronicle what happens when the attention span of a twenty-something college student runs out during class.

Attention spans are reducing over time, and with the evolution of the internet in recent decades, the attention span of my generation is shorter than any of those before it. A 2008 study performed by British sociologist David Moxon indicates that the average human attention span is 5 minutes and 7 seconds, which has decreased from the nearly 12 minute attention span of humans 10 years ago. Studies also show that the attention span for students in a 50 minute lecture tops out at around 18 minutes, before most students lose complete focus.

As a college student myself, I feel the pull of a short attention span every day. This usually results in countless doodles and drawings in my class notes. Some of them directly convey frustration with course material, or a distate for the professor, while others seem to have no connection at all to the material being presented at the time. My blog will focus on the products of this short attention span. I will display images and insights from my own notes, as well as those of close friends, and will encourage readers to send in their own doodles. Hopefully this blog will offer an insight into what happens in the mind of a college student when it wavers from its primary objective of paying attention in class and absorbing the lecture material being presented by the professor.