Column: I remain reluctant to embrace society’s shift toward constant distraction

My husband and I were walking our dog around Newport Dunes recently when a bicyclist approached. She was traveling fast, wearing headphones and looking at her phone — in other words, she wasn’t paying attention to what was right in front of her.

I made certain to stay clear of her path because she didn’t appear to see us.

We all witness similar scenes every day:

• The annoying shopper who blocks the supermarket aisle with her cart because she’s too engrossed in a phone conversation to notice she’s inconveniencing others.
• The person crossing the street who appears oblivious to oncoming cross traffic.
• The distracted driver who doesn’t realize that the light has changed.

Much of the concern, quite rightly, stems from the situations when our distracted states pose a danger to ourselves and others, such as when we are walking, riding bicycles or driving a car.

But distraction has now permeated our society so deeply that we often give mere passing notice to the other ways it has become a hallmark of our modern culture.

We barely bat an eye when people text and read emails during meetings, listen to audiobooks while driving, ask Siri to do an internet search while cooking dinner and check social media feeds when they’re meant to be studying or working.

Distraction isn’t just a side effect of our increasingly technology-driven world anymore. In many ways, it is now the purpose, the main attraction itself.

Case in point: the Lot at Fashion Island in Newport Beach.

This flashy new movie theater/restaurant/sports bar takes the concept employed by the previous tenant, the upscale Island Cinema, and raises it by several degrees. Consider this description on the company’s website:

“The Lot is a luxury lifestyle entertainment destination that offers a dining, drinking and cinematic experience unlike any other. The Lot features a luxury cinema with multiple auditoriums, each outfitted with the latest in comfort, audio-visual and cinematic technology; a dedicated, sophisticated-yet-approachable restaurant, well-appointed bars spotlighting craft cocktails, beers and wines, and dedicated craft cafés serving locally roasted coffees and house-made pastries.”

Whew! That is a lot.

On a recent visit to the Lot, I was fully prepared to turn up my nose in disdain and grow annoyed at the food deliveries inside the screening room. I wanted to devote my full attention to the cinematic masterpiece “Deadpool 2.”

But, I have to admit, the reclining theater chairs were really comfy, the food looked yummy — I’ve a hankering to try the lobster salad and the asparagus and pancetta flatbread — and the wall-sized split-screen television in the bar might be a great place to watch sports. I was reluctantly won over by the Lot’s slightly frenzied, but undeniably seductive, atmosphere.

Yet I remain reluctant to fully embrace this societal shift — toward embracing the idea of the more distractions, the better, as I believe we all should be.

Keep in mind that there is ample research providing solid evidence that the notion of multitasking is misguided at best, even detrimental.

Indeed, a decade ago, a book titled “The Myth of Multitasking: How ‘Doing It All’ Gets Nothing Done” generated a lot of buzz by challenging a common misconception. A similar line of thinking has also been covered extensively in news reports and Ted Talks.

The findings they outline are clear. Our brains are incapable of focusing on more than one activity at a time.

Yes, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, because the gum-chewing part is so deeply learned that it becomes automatic. Our brains don’t need to think about moving our jaws to get the job done.

But we can’t, say, text a friend and listen to the person standing directly in front of us at the same time. And our kids, hard as they might try to convince us otherwise, can’t chat with friends and simultaneously do their homework.

For tasks that require conscious thought, it’s one or the other, not both at once.

What we can do is what some refer to as task switching — we quickly move our attention back and forth, to and fro, among various activities and then trick ourselves into thinking we’re conquering multiple objectives at the same time.

Task switching has also been studied, and research shows it to be a highly inefficient, time-wasting use of brain power that damages productivity, increases the risk of errors and compromises personal relationships. Yet this is how most of us increasingly operate.

Fighting the cognitive clutter is probably futile at this point. I might yearn for a simpler time, when the biggest distraction was my own interior monologue, but the truth is there’s no going back. We’re living in a world that is growing exponentially more complex, confusing and distracting.

So it comes down to each of us to do our best to try to manage the chaos, focus on one thing at a time and most importantly ...

Oops, sorry, I just got a text. What was I saying?

PATRICE APODACA is a former Newport-Mesa public school parent and former Los Angeles Times staff writer. She lives in Newport Beach.