February 2014: Attention

Hey.

HEY!!

Are you paying attention? Our culture values attention as a commodity, meant to be invested wisely, and remitted in full at the proper moment. Within an economy of thought, attention finds a place in all manners of transaction; it can be possessed, stolen, given, taken, craved, demanded, denied, held, lost, indebted.

Paying attention to something in particular—conversation, traffic, nature, this page—is, at the very least, regarded as a conscious effort to be mindful. That is, we go about our days choosing to make our minds full of something on purpose; we double-click on what we'd like to put foremost in our focus. As intellectual creatures, we at once fetishize and moralize attention with cult-like zeal. Attention is desirable; distraction is a perpetual predator to be evaded at all costs.

Attention is defined by its very context: the environment in which our human brains engage with the world, where our senses are continuously stimulated. The stimuli which we identify as more important are chosen and attended to, while the rest fall out of our perception. Attention to one particular thing often means that we must neglect others, and so we are constantly sifting and selecting. How often have we heard someone call for our attention when our mind has wandered elsewhere? How often have we forced ourselves away from distraction, back to that ever-elusive condition that we call focus?

Alas, we inhabit the internet age of hyper-awareness, hyperactivity, and hyperlinks. Our minds encounter an exponentially increasing number of stimuli during our daily activity, more with each advancement in communications technology. We are immersed in a state of multitasking. To what are we to attend? Last month, TED published a talk by scientist Nicolas Perony entitled: "Puppies! Now that I've got your attention, complexity theory." Do our brains need a gimmick to regard something?

We have also an idea born from modern psychology: that of the attention span, which many say is growing collectively shorter as our time spent internet browsing grows longer. This would mean that our attention is quantifiable, that its measure can be fixed, allotted, and finite.

Attention follows another, arguably more basic human tendency: attraction. What do we find engaging enough to give it our attention in the first place? Why do certain things electrify our intellect and prod us to devote our powerfully evolved brains to them? And, so very often, attention and excitement follow the same sleight-of-hand as the other: now you see it, now you don't.

Attend (or not) in this month's musings.