Our culture worships attention. We assume that, when we're faced with a really hard problem, the best response is to stay focused, to lavish the dilemma with deliberate thought. And so we order a triple espresso, or chug some Red Bull, or snort some Ritalin. The point of these chemicals is to sharpen the spotlight, to keep us fixated on the task at hand.

But is this a good cognitive strategy? Is distractability always a bad thing? The answer turns out to be quite complicated.

Consider a recent study by neuroscientists at Harvard and the University of Toronto that documents the benefits of all these extra thoughts. (It was replicated here.) The researchers began by giving a sensory test to a hundred undergraduates at Harvard. The tests were designed to measure their level of latent inhibition, which is the capacity to ignore stimuli that seem irrelevant. Are you able to not think about the air-conditioner humming in the background? What about the roar of the airplane overhead? When you’re at a cocktail party, can you tune out the conversations of other people? If so, you’re practicing latent inhibition. While this skill is typically seen as an essential component of attention - it keeps us from getting distracted by extraneous perceptions - it turns out that people with low latent inhibition have a much richer mixture of thoughts in working memory. This shouldn’t be too surprising: Because they struggle to filter the world, they end up letting everything in. As a result, their consciousness is flooded with seemingly unrelated thoughts. Here’s where the data gets interesting: Those students who were classified as “eminent creative achievers” - the rankings were based on their performance on various tests, as well as their real world accomplishments - were seven times more likely to “suffer” from low latent inhibition. This makes some sense: The association between creativity and open-mindedness has long been recognized, and what's more open-minded than distractability? People with low latent inhibition are literally unable to close their mind, to keep the spotlight of attention from drifting off to the far corners of the stage. The end result is that they can’t help but consider the unexpected.

But it’s not enough to simply pay attention to everything - such a deluge of sensation can quickly get confusing. (Kierkegaard referred to this mental state as “drowning in possibility”. Some scientists believe that schizophrenia is characterized by extremely low latent inhibition coupled with severe working memory deficits, which leads to a mind constantly hijacked by minor distractions.) This is why, according to the Toronto researchers, low latent inhibition only leads to increased creativity when it’s paired with a willingness to analyze our excess of thoughts, to constantly search for the signal amid the noise. We need to let more information in, but we also need to be ruthless about throwing out the useless stuff.

I think the same lesson applies to the internet. People bemoan the infinite distractions of the web, the way we're constantly being seduced by hyperlinks and unexpected search results and arcane Wikipedia entries. And yes, that's all true - I just wasted 30 minutes, for instance, searching for that Kierkegaard quote. (I ended up on a Danish culture website, which led me to a photography collection of Danish modern furniture...) But the problem isn't distractibility *per se *- the problem is distractibility coupled with a failure to curate our thoughts, to monitor the relevancy of whatever is loitering in working memory. Think of the internet like an epic cocktail party, filled with chattering 24/7 conversations. Our goal shouldn't be to ignore everything beyond earshot - that would inhibit our creativity, and keep us trapped in a very narrow world. Instead, we should keep on searching for those smart voices, so that we can remix the right data inside our head.

Speaking of smart voices, I'm absolutely thrilled to be part of the new network of bloggers here at Wired Science. I have no doubt that their words will distract me, and that such distractions will make this blog a lot better.