Please, Pay Attention
Why it is so hard to stay focused these days—and what to do about it.
By DAVID G. MYERS
With so many things now demanding our attention -- emails, Web sites, BlackBerry alerts, incoming text messages, Twitter tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, stock updates, and old- fashioned meetings and phone calls -- many of us . . .
[Bookshelf]
What was I saying? Right: Many of us fret about losing our train of thought. "Life," says Winifred Gallagher, "is the sum of what you focus on." In "Rapt," she concentrates on what science has to tell us about the mind's capacities for paying attention.
Some people, she explains, are badly prone to distraction and need to be treated for attention deficit disorder. Others, like increasing numbers of us multitaskers, are merely plagued by bad habits and technology overload, darting from one mental activity to the next. So what can we do to recover the sustained focus that fosters creativity and quality?
Ms. Gallagher has some answers, but first she helps us to understand the problem better. Mental attention, she notes, is selective. Like a flashlight beam, we aim our consciousness on but a thin slice of what surrounds us. At a party, for instance, we hear only one voice among many until another voice speaks our name and our attention suddenly shifts.
Some clever experiments show just how inattentive we are to most of what we experience. Daniel Simons, at the University of Illinois, working with Christopher Chabris, asked viewers to watch people tossing a basketball around, some wearing a black shirt, others a white, and to count the number black-shirt tosses. Amazingly, half of the viewers, focusing on their toss counting, failed to notice that someone had sauntered through the middle of the scene wearing a gorilla suit.
Rapt
By Winifred Gallagher
(The Penguin Press, 244 pages, $25.95)
Another experiment, measuring "change blindness," asked each of its participants to give directions to a construction worker. Half failed to notice that, after an obstruction passed between them, blocking the view, another worker wearing different clothes had taken the first construction worker's place. The costs of shifting attention can entail coping delays, too, which helps explain the association between cellphone use and accidents in both real-life driving and laboratory traffic simulations.
What to do? To expand our capacity for focused attention, Ms. Gallagher suggests choosing activities "that push you so close to the edge of your competence that they demand your absolute focus." She cites Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, at Claremont Graduate University, who argues that between the anxiety of being overwhelmed (and stressed) and the apathy of being underwhelmed (and bored) lies a zone of engagement in which people experience "flow." He arrived at the flow concept after studying artists who spent hour after hour painting or sculpting, working as if nothing else mattered.
Such intense focus, Ms. Gallagher says, is central to "peak" or "optimal" experience. She also touts meditation: It calms the body, she says, soothes the spirit and shifts focus away from the past or future so that we can "pay rapt attention to the present and experience true reality." She quotes a meditation proponent who talks about achieving "a state of pure attention that occurs before thinking."
If such ideas sound a bit mystical, Ms. Gallagher offers simpler ones. Pause to savor life's delicious moments. Cultivate willpower. (Experiments confirm that self-control is like a muscle: It gets stronger with each effort.) And, most obviously, separate yourself from distractions. "Aware of our limited focusing capacity," Ms. Gallagher says, "I take pains to ensure that electronic media and machines aren't in charge of mine."
Good advice. To preserve my own mind from electronic takeover, I spend an hour alone each afternoon, without a computer or phone, in a local coffee shop, and I ask my assistant to forward messages from my public email address only near the end of each day. I've noticed that I prefer long plane rides to shorter ones, thanks to the extra time for uninterrupted thinking or reading. A University of Michigan research team led by Marc Berman recently observed that students who took an hour-long walk in the serenity of the Ann Arbor Arboretum, rather than through downtown Ann Arbor, showed an increased capacity for attention.
It is good to increase your capacity for attention, as Ms. Gallagher argues, but is it true that life is the sum of what you focus on? Actually, there is much more to our mental life. Researchers are finding more and more evidence that our minds also operate beneath our conscious awareness. As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has said: "Consciousness is a small part of what the brain does." Experiments reveal that we all have both "explicit" (conscious) and "implicit" (unconscious) memories, attitudes and perceptions -- each mediated by distinct brain areas. To take but one example: Patients whose brain damage has destroyed their sight may still display implicit "blindsight," by slipping a card into a mail slot that they cannot consciously see.
Thinking without conscious awareness can be primed, too. In a recently published experiment, Yale psychologist John Bargh, working with Lawrence Williams, found that people holding a warm rather than iced coffee mug are more likely to perceive another person as "warm," or friendly. In an earlier study, he and his colleagues asked people to complete a sentence containing words such as old, wise and retired. Soon after, the researchers observed these people walking more slowly to the elevator than others who had not been primed with aging-related words.
"Rapt" is a fascinating discussion of how consciousness works, and Ms. Gallagher offers much helpful advice on how to lead a "focused life." We should remember, though, that there is a realm where the mind functions not only beyond the reach of chirruping cellphones, BlackBerrys and laptops but also beneath our own awareness.
Mr. Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., is the author of "Intuition: Its Powers and Perils."
Please, Pay Attention - WSJ.com
Why it is so hard to stay focused these days—and what to do about it.
By DAVID G. MYERS
With so many things now demanding our attention -- emails, Web sites, BlackBerry alerts, incoming text messages, Twitter tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, stock updates, and old- fashioned meetings and phone calls -- many of us . . .
[Bookshelf]
What was I saying? Right: Many of us fret about losing our train of thought. "Life," says Winifred Gallagher, "is the sum of what you focus on." In "Rapt," she concentrates on what science has to tell us about the mind's capacities for paying attention.
Some people, she explains, are badly prone to distraction and need to be treated for attention deficit disorder. Others, like increasing numbers of us multitaskers, are merely plagued by bad habits and technology overload, darting from one mental activity to the next. So what can we do to recover the sustained focus that fosters creativity and quality?
Ms. Gallagher has some answers, but first she helps us to understand the problem better. Mental attention, she notes, is selective. Like a flashlight beam, we aim our consciousness on but a thin slice of what surrounds us. At a party, for instance, we hear only one voice among many until another voice speaks our name and our attention suddenly shifts.
Some clever experiments show just how inattentive we are to most of what we experience. Daniel Simons, at the University of Illinois, working with Christopher Chabris, asked viewers to watch people tossing a basketball around, some wearing a black shirt, others a white, and to count the number black-shirt tosses. Amazingly, half of the viewers, focusing on their toss counting, failed to notice that someone had sauntered through the middle of the scene wearing a gorilla suit.
Rapt
By Winifred Gallagher
(The Penguin Press, 244 pages, $25.95)
Another experiment, measuring "change blindness," asked each of its participants to give directions to a construction worker. Half failed to notice that, after an obstruction passed between them, blocking the view, another worker wearing different clothes had taken the first construction worker's place. The costs of shifting attention can entail coping delays, too, which helps explain the association between cellphone use and accidents in both real-life driving and laboratory traffic simulations.
What to do? To expand our capacity for focused attention, Ms. Gallagher suggests choosing activities "that push you so close to the edge of your competence that they demand your absolute focus." She cites Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, at Claremont Graduate University, who argues that between the anxiety of being overwhelmed (and stressed) and the apathy of being underwhelmed (and bored) lies a zone of engagement in which people experience "flow." He arrived at the flow concept after studying artists who spent hour after hour painting or sculpting, working as if nothing else mattered.
Such intense focus, Ms. Gallagher says, is central to "peak" or "optimal" experience. She also touts meditation: It calms the body, she says, soothes the spirit and shifts focus away from the past or future so that we can "pay rapt attention to the present and experience true reality." She quotes a meditation proponent who talks about achieving "a state of pure attention that occurs before thinking."
If such ideas sound a bit mystical, Ms. Gallagher offers simpler ones. Pause to savor life's delicious moments. Cultivate willpower. (Experiments confirm that self-control is like a muscle: It gets stronger with each effort.) And, most obviously, separate yourself from distractions. "Aware of our limited focusing capacity," Ms. Gallagher says, "I take pains to ensure that electronic media and machines aren't in charge of mine."
Good advice. To preserve my own mind from electronic takeover, I spend an hour alone each afternoon, without a computer or phone, in a local coffee shop, and I ask my assistant to forward messages from my public email address only near the end of each day. I've noticed that I prefer long plane rides to shorter ones, thanks to the extra time for uninterrupted thinking or reading. A University of Michigan research team led by Marc Berman recently observed that students who took an hour-long walk in the serenity of the Ann Arbor Arboretum, rather than through downtown Ann Arbor, showed an increased capacity for attention.
It is good to increase your capacity for attention, as Ms. Gallagher argues, but is it true that life is the sum of what you focus on? Actually, there is much more to our mental life. Researchers are finding more and more evidence that our minds also operate beneath our conscious awareness. As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has said: "Consciousness is a small part of what the brain does." Experiments reveal that we all have both "explicit" (conscious) and "implicit" (unconscious) memories, attitudes and perceptions -- each mediated by distinct brain areas. To take but one example: Patients whose brain damage has destroyed their sight may still display implicit "blindsight," by slipping a card into a mail slot that they cannot consciously see.
Thinking without conscious awareness can be primed, too. In a recently published experiment, Yale psychologist John Bargh, working with Lawrence Williams, found that people holding a warm rather than iced coffee mug are more likely to perceive another person as "warm," or friendly. In an earlier study, he and his colleagues asked people to complete a sentence containing words such as old, wise and retired. Soon after, the researchers observed these people walking more slowly to the elevator than others who had not been primed with aging-related words.
"Rapt" is a fascinating discussion of how consciousness works, and Ms. Gallagher offers much helpful advice on how to lead a "focused life." We should remember, though, that there is a realm where the mind functions not only beyond the reach of chirruping cellphones, BlackBerrys and laptops but also beneath our own awareness.
Mr. Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., is the author of "Intuition: Its Powers and Perils."
Please, Pay Attention - WSJ.com
updown: jon)
