Numb. Charles R. Chaffin

of these different scenarios highlight the nature of attention. In the first example, you were familiar with the road and the conditions were ideal for driving. You did not have to concentrate too heavily on the path ahead so you had attention to devote to the meeting on Monday. You were able to develop some concrete plans for the presentation in your mind that will be useful when you return to your desk. In the second scenario, you had attention to devote to your friend's breakup story because the drive was not overly taxing. However, between the drive and your friend, you had little attention to devote to the planning of the Monday presentation. In this scenario, you were compelled to allocate whatever attention you had left over from driving to your friend. Because the road was clear, you could devote attention to your friend's breakup story. However, in the third scenario, when the conditions of the road became dangerous with the storm, you had to prioritize your attention towards driving and limit how much attention you could devote to your friend with almost none dedicated to your Monday presentation.

What Is Attention?

      Attention is one of those terms that we throw around often. We ask for others' attention. It is asked of us and, in some cases, it is taken away from us through a variety of means. If you ask 100 people the meaning of the word “attention,” you are likely to get dozens of different answers. You would hear words like “concentration” and “focus” but also words that associate attention with the senses such as seeing, hearing, and feeling. Even among psychologists there are a number of different perspectives regarding the actual meaning. William James, in Principles of Psychology wrote, “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought… . It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state.”

At a more basic level, attention is how we select information in the environment around us. Many visualize attention like a highlighter on the page, where you are focusing mental energy on particular words. Jason McCarley, a cognitive psychologist at Oregon State University, describes attention as “the thread through all of our awareness.” As he puts it, if we do not attend to something, we don't perceive it. Thinking back to the driving example, if we are focused intently on driving the car in a heavy rainstorm, we may be able to perceive that our friend is talking but not really have any comprehension of the details of her story. (We might even ask her to wait for the story until the storm clears.) As McCarley puts it, “attention is the gateway to our consciousness. Without attending to something, whether a sound, sight, or other, we cannot be conscious of its existence.” One of the most famous experiments to illustrate this effect was the Invisible Gorilla experiment. Chris Chabris and Daniel Simons asked viewers to count the number of times players passed a basketball among themselves. In the meantime, a person dressed in a gorilla suit appeared in the center of the image. Viewers often failed to see the person in the gorilla suit because their attention was focused on the students passing the basketball. This study, one of the most famous in psychology, demonstrated focusing on one thing can come at the expense of focusing on other items. In this case, the viewers' attention was concentrated on the players and they were not conscious of the existence of the person in the gorilla suit. We see this manifest itself in many parts of modern life. Magicians manipulate people's attention from one location to another, asking audience members to focus on one location at the expense of elsewhere (usually their other hand) where objects are hidden and reappear elsewhere.

We only have so much attention at any given time. Where we allocate it is of vital importance. As you read this chapter, you are devoting your attention to the words on this page, making meaning out of the string of the text that makes sentences and ultimately paragraphs of thoughts and ideas. But what else is happening while you are reading? Are you sitting on your couch reading while the TV or stereo is playing? Are there voices around you that you are tuning out in order to make sense of what you are reading? If you began to focus on the sounds around you while reading, your comprehension would likely decrease dramatically. Your eyes may move along the words, but you may not get any meaning out of what is written. Attention, therefore, is as much about what you tune out as what you focus on. As James stated, attention “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” Our smartphones are a prime example. Whether we are texting while driving (please don't), during meetings, or while on a date, we are allocating attention towards our phone at the expense of what is occurring around us. We may think that we are successfully focusing on both items at once, but engaging our environment in any substantive way while focusing on whatever you are texting is almost impossible. You can give a few grunts to your dinner companion while they are sharing a story with you during your texts, but it is unlikely that you have enough attention to really focus on and comprehend what they are saying. Of course, if you continue texting (phubbing, if you will), you may find yourself spending the rest of the evening alone with your phone. Our ability to control our attention is invaluable in this information age. Each of us is trying to do our jobs, run errands, maintain relationships, and experience all of the other chores and joys of life while we are inundated with information and technology designed specifically to distract us. As we will discuss throughout this book, this technology is designed to steal your attention for as many hours as possible. Whether smartphones, TV, or radio, technology is vying for our attention with the goal of redeeming it towards advertising revenue. Apps and tech developers employ a number of strategies to maximize our attention and keep us engaged on their app, site, or device. There is a very real battle for our attention and, given its importance in our daily lives, the stakes are high.

      In 1997, Michael Goldhaber suggested that the global economy was shifting from a materials‐based economy to one that was attention‐based. The currency in this economy is attention. In the digital age, there is no shortage of information. It is everywhere, with everyone contributing to it. There are obviously varying degrees of utility for some of this information, but as Goldhaber suggests, economy is based upon what is scarce and information is not scarce in the least. What is scarce is attention. There are times when we need attention and times when we decide to give attention. As babies, we need attention from our parents for basic survival because we are not yet able to take care of ourselves. As adults, we strive for attention as we attempt to navigate a job or career to support our basic needs. As Goldhaber puts it, with attention from others comes all of the material items that we normally associate with elements of success. For example, with the attention of a community, you can encourage park rehabilitation or voter registration. It isn't that your message or whatever product you are designing and developing is not important. Rather, it's that none of that matters if attention from others is not paid. We pay with our attention on our smartphones every day. We sit through advertising on apps if we do not want to pay an extra fee (that's me when it comes to Words with Friends) and at a more fundamental level, we dedicate our attention to technology at the expense of many other aspects of our lives. Given that attention is a valuable commodity that each of us possesses (with only a finite amount available), attention is being paid – and it is a high price.

Jason McCarley suggests that technology impacts our attentional focus for two basic reasons. First, it compromises our performance. As he describes it, cognitively demanding tasks, by definition, place heavy demands on working memory. Imagine preparing a meal and having to follow a new recipe. During each step of the process, you are constantly checking the ingredients and instructions and then holding that information in your working memory while searching for the ingredient in the pantry or refrigerator. Interruptions displace information from our working memory. So once we are done responding to the interruption, we have to remember what we were doing and recover the information we were holding in our working memory. This is called a resumption lag, which is the time between when the interruption ends and when the primary task resumes. This is a time cost. In addition, as he describes it, these interruptions can also cause errors in our primary tasks. In a worst case, we may entirely neglect to complete some component of the primary task after interruption with potentially dramatic consequences. Interruptions during a preflight checklist increase the risk of pilot error, and interruptions to physicians in emergency rooms can lead to medical error.