A spate of recent articles on the impact of technology on humans' ability to focus illuminates what many people have told me: they sense a profound change in the manner in which they acquire and process the increasingly amount of information readily available to them.

The net result of hyperlinks, wikis, blogs (yes, even ours), and other Web 2.0 tools is an ongoing stream of information that must be absorbed and processed by brains that are already inundated—with information availability "increasing at an increasing rate." The result? Search engines like Cuil, which was announced on July 28th, 2008, with a claim of being able to index 120 billion Web pages during a search. That means Cuil claims to be the first search engine that can index a number of web pages that exceeds the number of neurons in the average brain (generally estimated at 100 billion).

What is our response? I liken it to a VM Ware approach, where brains create "suspended" virtual thoughts as new information is brought into the conscious mind in real time (from the next clicked hyper-link, for example), suspending an existing thought and embracing the next one. The sum of all these real-time inputs is aggregated into a phenomenon known as Continuous Partial Attention.

How will this phenomenon affect customer interactions? One possibility is that any specific interaction will become "flatter," or more focused at the exact point of interaction (which is the actual customer moment of truth, anyway). Companies will need to understand they are dealing with increasingly time-starved customers who are likely less interested or able to engage in deep interactions, even for products that lend themselves to depth, content, conversation and reflection. They also should expect millions of new Gen X, Gen Y, and Millennial customers whose brains are wired for flat interactions—and expect customer interaction experts’ brains to be wired the same way.