Reddit mentions of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (The MIT Press)

In the book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, the authors point out that we forage for information when our anxiety is high, boredom is high, meta-cognition about the danger of foraging are low, and /or when accessibility to information is high.

​

So my guess is exams naturally increase anxiety. Anxiety is defined as "a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome"... Sounds a lot how I feel about a upcoming exam :).

​

So I think the best way to fight this anxiety is to write down everything you are worried about, make a list of everything that's in your control, and do everything possible to master the stuff that's in your control. Make a plan to reduce the uncertain future. There will always be things out of your control (questions on the exam). Accept that fact and try to move forward.

Are you asking about why certain people appear more motivated and/or take pleasure in learning and seeking information and others care less, are bored by educational activities and have little patience for learning? Or do you mean literally suffering from thinking and assimilating new information, which would suggest a pathology?

I am not entirely convinced the answers provided until now actually reply your question, unless I am misreading/misinterpreting it. Not that the information provided is necessarily false, although there are elements I would contend do not actually concern what you have in mind/have observed, and some other elements I would consider to be unnecessarily pathologizing and/or to concern other behaviors.

---

For example, we could talk about the relationship between technology and attention spans or the ability to focus, which are required to learn. True, multitasking is an overstated ability and that humans tend to lose efficiency when multitasking.

Having cell phones and internet-connect computers might not help to remain focused on a single task, but that also depends on or interacts with other factors such as motivation and self-control. Cell phones do not have agency in the matter. However, these are general considerations, especially when considering the democratization of technologies such as smartphones and the Internet: if they have an effect on attention spans, these effects should concern more than "some" people around you and us. Quoting Gazzaley and Rosen:

>It should be clear that if you are having trouble keeping yourself from constantly being interrupted by technology, you are not alone: you are a typical modern-day high-tech user.

Now, are our attention spans getting lower because of technology? Actually, does the question actually make sense and therefore answerable as is? The thing is, there are different kinds of motivation (e.g. avoidance vs approach), different kinds of attention (e.g. selective, sustained, focused, ...), different contexts and tasks, and then we also have to consider also working memory, etc.

For illustration, Gazzaley and Rosen argue the following:

>We have shown how our brains, despite their highly evolved goal-setting abilities, are ancient in some fundamental ways: our information-seeking behavior is an extension of primitive food-foraging behaviors, and our limitations in cognitive control are comparable to that of many other animals. It is our high-level goal-setting abilities, coupled with our drive to seek information, that lead us to engage in interference-inducing behaviors that put pressure on those limitations in our cognitive control. This conflict results in goal interference, which in turn leads to a broad array of negative consequences that we experience in our daily lives. But cognitive abilities are not the only factors that influence real-world behavior. Behavior is contextual; it is a product of not just how we think, but also what is going on around us. Our environment interacts with our cognition in complex ways to yield our behavior.

Calcott and Berman have the following to say about the interaction between attention and motivation depending on context:

>Attentional shifts are pervasive in our everyday lives, and are important for adaptively responding to a changing environment. How people attend to environmental stimuli can depend, in large part, on their current motivational state. These studies are important because they underscore the importance of considering the context when studying motivation-related attentional shifts, both in a broader sense (in terms of the whole block) and a narrower sense (in terms of the previous trial).

Relatedly, is our self-control a limited resource or not? Ego depletion is an influential concept when talking about self-regulation, however there have been recent challenges to the existence of such a phenomenon or to its strength. The idea is the following, as explained by Friese et al.:

>First, self-control is a domain-general construct. People who failed in self-control in one domain often appeared to do so in other domains as well. Second, exerting self-control has a psychic cost that increases chances of self-control failure in further attempts [...]

>Ego depletion refers to the phenomenon that people perform poorer on a self control task after having already engaged in a previous task requiring self-control.

However, for now, the question remains open:

>Whether or not ego depletion is real is subject to great debate. Our analysis suggests that the critical evidence is unlikely to convince proponents that ego depletion does not exist. Likewise, the supporting evidence is unlikely to convince skeptics that ego depletion does exist. Better empiricism and better theory are needed to move the field forward and find more conclusive answers to the question whether, when, and why ego depletion does (not) exist.

I will not comment as much on the concept of demand resistance, which I am not aware being a concept with much scientific literature behind it. I would suggest that the idea appears to translate observations related to the well-documented psychological phenomenon of reactance, which occurs when people perceive some sort of limitation to their "freedom", such as when they receive an order, but not only (even "suggestions" can trigger reactance), and to certain personality traits (there are, for example, people who are more or less reactant, neurotic, etc.).

---

I would suggest reading what I have described in the past regarding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the context of learning. To quote Ryan and Deci (as I do in that thread):

>In Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985) we distinguish between different types of motivation based on the different reasons or goals that give rise to an action. The most basic distinction is between intrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, and extrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it leads to a separable outcome. Over three decades of research has shown that the quality of experience and performance can be very different when one is behaving for intrinsic versus extrinsic reasons.

Motivation is important for many of our behaviors and mental processes, such that unmotivated people are likelier to treat information heuristically rather than systematically (see the elaboration likelihood model).

Putting motivation aside, certain people have more or less self-control, have better or worse working memory, better or worse attention. However, there is evidence that allow to argue that these capacities can be trained and are, at least, in part developed throughout childhood (and life) and depend not only on parenting, but also other environmental factors - such that self-control can also be understood in relation to social control, and that personality traits are not entirely fixed). Therefore, we still have to take into consideration motivation.

---

Bottom line: Not everyone share the same motivation to learning, and not everyone has developed "autonomous" motivation and associated values, such as learning for the pleasure of learning or valuing learning to achieve a desirable goals (e.g. becoming a doctor to help people), and therefore some people have less interest in devoting time and resources to learning. And, of course, certain people can have less self-control, weaker working memory, less patience, whatever. Lacking motivation to improve these capacities, the ability itself to sustain attention on learning is reduced, making learning unpleasant or making distractions more attractive. All of this interacts, and perpetuates itself (e.g. frustration, demotivation, etc.).