What Are You Paying Attention To?

What's your most valuable resource?

Give this a little thought and you might say it's your time.  But it's not time--it's attention.

True, we consume time when we pay attention to something.  But we can free up more time by doing fewer things, or by doing some things faster, or just by stopping sooner.  In a sense, time is elastic.

But attention is far less malleable.  We're either focused on something or we're not.  And we focus--I mean truly focus--on just one thing at a time.  Don't talk to me about multitasking--it's a myth.  Having lots of things in the background, occupying our "peripheral attention," isn't true multitasking any more than using our peripheral vision is true "multi-seeing."  It just means that our focus is shifting more frequently--which can substantially decrease our efficiency as we cycle in and out of various tasks.

I spent 2005-06 as the Executive Director of AttentionTrust, a nonprofit that aspired to educate people about the value of their "attention data," i.e. the mountains of data generated by what we pay attention to (and what we ignore), while providing them with the means to actually capture and make use of this data by means of a Firefox plugin.  I was reminded of that experience and of the crucial importance of attention by Sam Anderson's recent "In Defense of Distraction" in New York.  Anderson interviews psychologist David Meyer, Director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan:

I begin, a little sheepishly, with a question that strikes me as sensationalistic, nonscientific, and probably unanswerable by someone who's been professionally trained in the discipline of cautious objectivity: Are we living through a crisis of attention?

Before I even have a chance to apologize, Meyer responds with the air of an Old Testament prophet. "Yes," he says. "And I think it's going to get a lot worse than people expect." He sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic--a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. He compares it, in fact, to smoking. "People aren't aware what's happening to their mental processes," he says, "in the same way that people years ago couldn't look into their lungs and see the residual deposits."

Anderson goes on to discuss the "cognitive plague"--all the devices and channels that clamor for our attention today--in greater detail, as well as the increasing prevalence of "neuroenhancers" like Adderall that many people--particularly students--are using to improve their ability to focus and be productive, before circling around to suggest that distractions can actually be good things:

The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction. Unwavering focus--the inability to be distracted--can actually be just as problematic as ADHD. Trouble with "attentional shift" is a feature common to a handful of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and OCD. It's been hypothesized that ADHD might even be an advantage in certain change-rich environments... It's possible that we're all evolving toward a new techno-cognitive nomadism, a rapidly shifting environment in which restlessness will be an advantage again. The deep focusers might even be hampered by having too much attention: Attention Surfeit Hypoactivity Disorder.

I find Anderson's argument here compelling: the ability to let go and move on in a highly dynamic environment can be a valuable adaptive trait, and dogged determination in the same environment can be a sign of fatal inflexibility rather than laser-like focus.  But I'd emphasize two points before embracing that idea fully.

First, sometimes we're distracted for vitally important reasons, as Anderson's conversation with productivity guru Merlin Mann makes clear:

For Mann, many of our attention problems are symptoms of larger existential issues: motivation, happiness, neurochemistry. "I'm not a physician or a psychiatrist, but I'll tell you, I think a lot of it is some form of untreated ADHD or depression," he says. "Your mind is not getting the dopamine or the hugs that it needs to keep you focused on what you're doing. And any time your work gets a little bit too hard or a little bit too boring, you allow it to catch on to something that’s more interesting to you."

When I'm distracted because I'm demotivated or unhappy, my distraction is neither a symptom of the "cognitive plague" nor a badge of honor befitting a "techno-cognitive nomad."  Rather, it's an early warning sign of a deeper issue that needs to be addressed directly.

And second, what we pay attention to matters.  In Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin wrote:

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

What we pay attention to matters, because we pay for what we pay attention to, and we pay for it very simply; by the lives we lead.

Photo by hellosputnik.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Comments

[Dan]

This reminds me of a favorite conversation with a stranger -- an older man named Abel -- who happened to sit next to me on a flight down to Puerto Rico. Abel talked about his life, his mystical experiences, his ultimate judgment about what makes a person worthy or not. In conclusion, as we were in the pattern to land, he said to me: "Many people say they want to know the truth. But the truth isn't that easy a thing to find out. If you want to know the truth, you have to make your whole life the truth." That, to me, is attention.

[Ed Batista]

Great stuff, Dan. An unusually rewarding flight companion, in my experience. And it makes me think that in some cases we gain wisdom through age and experience, and in other cases we just feel freer to speak our minds.