Instinct says there's a link I can make between the embodied cognition literature (exemplified for me by the work of Andy Clark) and firsthand accounts of distraction, partial attention, eroded capacity to concentrate– a package of things that I've come to think of as "fracture."

Fracture is the opposite of flow. If flow is characterized by the feeling of operating at the peak of your abilities, of things being at once hard and effortless, of becoming one with your tools and ideas (or teammates, instrument, rhythm, etc.), fracture is a break in attention, time, the connection between ourselves and our tools, in the order of ideas or tasks. Flow is an experience of order and calm; fracture is, what Csikszentmihalyi describes as "psychic entropy," as a state in which "psychic energy is… fragmented in conflicting actions and desires."

How is this embodied? or how does the embodied cognition argument fit in here, or enhance our understanding of fracture? I think of Nicolesis' work giving monkeys control of robotic arms, and how their brains eventually incorporated those arms into their models of their body. Clark argues that we naturally want to make these kinds of connections, and are constantly offloading cognitive tasks onto external objects, ranging from notebooks to computers and beyond. An environment in which we have computers, smart phones, and other objects all competing for our attention is a bit like being wired to several arms: when it all goes well you might be able to use them well, but at first it's very confusing, and your body is likely to struggle to maintain a sense of itself.