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Chapter 1
The Three Stages of Attention
Stanfordâs Jon Krosnick, a political science professor and the director of Stanfordâs Political Psychology Research Group, has studied hundreds of election results in Ohio and California. In almost every single race he and his colleagues studiedâfrom local alderman elections to the 1996 and 2000 presidential electionsâif a candidateâs name was listed first on the ballot, it increased the amount of votes that candidate received by an average of 2 percent, sometimes more. Two points may not seem like much, but with a two-point swing, we would likely be talking about how President Mitt Romney would have handled Edward Snowden.
Krosnickâs research doesnât show voters are lazy. Instead, it demonstrates just how limited our attention truly is. When we are juggling a job, a family, social and community activities, work e-mails and meetings, we might have enough attention left to learn about presidential or parliamentary candidates but probably not enough time or concern to learn about the candidates for, say, a school board election. With limited information, the human brain automatically looks for shortcuts to help it make decisions.
Being first has a positive association in our cultureâfirst place, first in line, and so on. Thus, we unconsciously ascribe the positive quality of being first to the first name listed on the ballot, even though the candidateâs placement on the ballot has nothing to do with his or her qualifications for office.
These mental shortcuts are known as heuristics. They are the quick general rules that guide our attention, consciously and unconsciously, both in the immediate moment and over the course of years or even decades. How do I find Waldo? Search for red-and-white stripes and ignore everything else. Which movie should I watch? Rely on the reviews from Rotten Tomatoes. We only have so much attention to give, and so we look for shortcuts to help us allocate that attention.
Not all attention is created equal, though. Some attention, like the kind you pay when somebody is shouting at a party, is fleeting. Think about what happens once the person shouting at the party stops: everybody simply directs their attention back to their previous conversations. People will turn their heads toward a disturbance, but their focus will fizzle out once the disturbance is gone. We shift our attention from one thing to the next.
For the purposes of this book, there are three types of attentionâimmediate, short, and longâand the shortcuts we use for each type of attention are different. For example, when we hear a person shout, we quickly (and often subconsciously) determine whether the person is just throwing a temper tantrum or having a medical emergency. If we determine itâs the former, our attention quickly shifts away, but if itâs the latter, our attention will ratchet to the next level as we focus and decide what to do next to help.
How does our brain help us manage our limited attention? And what role do the three types of attention play in our lives? To answer those questions, we need the help of some hookworm eggs.
Immediate Attention, or How to Analyze a Piece of . . .
At the most fundamental level, attention is our first line of defense against danger and threats. Maintaining an alert state is hardwired into all animals, including humans. Weâre especially adept at detecting moving people and animals, the most likely threats to our survival.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found evidence to support this notion. They asked subjects to look for changes in complex scenesâimages of forests, groups of people in parks, etc. The images would appear, disappear, and reappear over and over again in 250-millisecond bursts until the subjects either identified changes or determined that nothing had changed.1
What was surprising was how much quicker and more accurate subjects were at identifying changing animals and people than plants or inanimate objects. After ten seconds of viewing the images, approximately 95 percent of subjects detected changes to people and 81 percent detected changes to animals. In contrast, subjects could detect changes to plants less than 60 percent of the time after ten seconds. Thatâs a significant decrease in our ability to detect changes to people and animals versus changes to plants. This may not be surprising, actuallyâweâre far more likely to be threatened by a pack of wolves than a clump of ferns.
One lesson we can take away from this study is that if you want to blend into the background, you should dress up as an oak tree. But perhaps the more important lesson here is that we are hardwired to search for and identify important changes to our environment. We are constantly shifting our attention from object to object, looking for anything that is dangerous, interesting, or novel until we decide to focus our attention on something. This is the point at which we shift from immediate to short attention.
Immediate attention is a bottom-up processâattention driven automatically, driven by the stimulus instead of by our consciousness. We will instinctively panic and duck at the sound of a gunshot, look up at a sky filled with bright-colored balloons, or gag at the smell of six-month-old rotting eggs, even if itâs just for a brief moment. These reactions are controlled by our bodyâs automatic responses and by sensory memory, a system that helps us store sights, sounds, smells, and other sensory inputs for a short period of time. This type of memory lasts no longer than a couple of secondsâjust long enough for a smell or sound to be forgotten or moved into working memory.2
It isnât just sounds, colors, and smells we automatically react to, thoughâitâs also our near-instantaneous mental and emotional impressions and gut reactions that help drive our immediate attention.
Take the case of Dr. Stephanie J. Krauth and a team of Swiss epidemiologists at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. They were researching ways to improve the diagnosis of helminth infection and better understand the growth and disintegration of hookworm eggs in human stool. Helminth infections (parasite infections) are rare in Western countries like Switzerland or the United States but are an especially serious problem in Africa and Southeast Asia. The researchers found some tricks for making more accurate diagnoses such as, among other things, icing stool samples, which they wanted to share with a wide audience of practitioners. But they knew that simply publishing the results of their study wouldnât receive much attention outside of the small group of scientists interested in tropical diseases. They needed to do something to captivate the attention of practitioners who could make a difference in affected areas.3
So how did they get people to immediately notice their work? By titling their paper âAn In-Depth Analysis of a Piece of Sh*t,â of course. The provocative and unconventional title alone was enough to get the studyâs findings published in Smithsonian, RealClearScience, VICE, and io9.
The novelty and emotional resonance of the paperâs title captured attention immediately. Perhaps itâs because the research shows that negative emotionsâfear, anger, hatred, etc.âtypically trump positive emotions when it comes to capturing immediate attention. Immediate attention is biased toward the perception of threats and novel stimuli.4
In the big scheme of things, immediate attention is the simplest type of attention to capture, which is why itâs the âignitionâ of attention. We are conditioned, for example, to react when somebody calls out our name. You canât control your reaction unless youâre already aware somebody is about to call out your nameâthen you can think about it and ignore it or react consciously. Conscious focus and reaction, however, require a greater level of attention.
Short Attention and Novelty
Clive Wearing, a seventy-six-year-old gray-haired musician from the United Kingdom, may have the shortest attention span in the world.
In 1985, Clive was a successful conductor and keyboardist. He made music for the BBC Radio 3 and was a leading expert on Lassus and other Renaissance composers. That would all be taken away from him when he contracted herpes encephalitis. The disease attacked his brain, literally boring holes through the temporal, occipital, parietal, and frontal lobes of his brain. It completely destroyed his hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that coordinates the transfer of short-term memory into long-term memory.
âClive really only has less than thirty seconds of memory, and sometimes itâs as little as seven seconds,â his wife, Deborah Wearing, states in a BBC documentary about his life and his condition. âItâs as little as a sentence.â
Clive now suffers from irreparable retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He canât form new memories, and his past is cloudy. He will forget what you asked him during his answer to your question. Every time he sees his wife, he jumps up, lifts her in the air, twirls her around, and kisses her. Itâs as if heâs seeing her for the first time after a long trip, every single time.
His conversations go something like this:
Clive: How long have I been ill?
Deborah: Four months.
Clive: Four months? Is that F-O-R or F-O-U-R (ha-ha!)?
Deborah: F-O-U-R.
Clive: Well, Iâve been unconscious the whole time! What do you think itâs like to be unconscious for . . . how long?
Deborah: Four months.
Clive: Four months! For months? Is that F-O-R or F-O-U-R?
Deborah: F-O-U-R.
Clive: I havenât heard anything, seen anything, smelled anything, felt anything, touched anything. How long?
Deborah: Four months.
Clive: . . . four months! Itâs like being dead. I havenât been conscious the whole time. How longâs it been?5
Wearing is a famous case among memory researchersâheâs the man without working memory. Without it, he is capable of only quick sensory and emotional reactions that last for a few seconds before he essentially resets. He is unable to move to the second stage of attention. He is unable to focus.
Short attention is all about focus. Itâs when we, at some conscious level, decide to allocate some of our time and concentration toward something. It is often triggered when we want to fixate on something new or novel; itâs how we learn about our world, whether itâs in the classroom, the conference hall, or the forest. This span of attention can be as short as a YouTube clip or as long as a Lord of the Rings movie. Most of the time, however, our short attention only lasts until the next distraction makes its appearance.
Why the focus on novelty? The answer may be as simple as dopamine, the neurotransmitter that controls the brainâs reward centers, especially as it pertains to achievement or completing tasks. In a study on the role of dopamine in motivation and learning, Dr. Kent Berridge and Dr. Terry Robinson of the University of Michigan found that blocking dopamine in rats didnât stop them from âlikingâ something, but instead stopped them from âwantingâ something. When Berridge and Robinson suppressed the dopamine of their rats, they found that the rats could still feel pleasure from eating a tasty snack, but they had zero motivation to do so. Dopamine is so vital to motivation that, without it, the rats didnât even want to eat and began to starve.6
In other words, a lack of dopamine doesnât inhibit pleasure, but instead affects motivation. This indirectly leads to less pleasure, of courseâyou can still enjoy chocolate without dopamine, but you might not be willing to leave your house and drive to the store to get it. Thatâs why itâs no coincidence that our brains release dopamine whenever we are exploring anything new or novel. It is absolutely necessary to our survivalâwithout dopamine, we wouldnât be motivated to learn anything new. Short attention is the direct result of motivation. Without dopamine, the motivation to focus disappears.
âWe seek novelty because noveltyâand that type of exploratory behaviorâallows you to find resources and mate and not be stuck in a rut,â said Dr. Adam Gazzaley of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center.7 âThat type of behavior presumably confers survival advantage.â
To understand short attention, we have to understand the cognitive system that manages it. To do that, we have to explore one of the most fascinating aspects of our brain: working memory.
âAttention is the way we direct working memory resources,â Dr. John Sweller of the University of New South Wales, a leading researcher in education psychology and cognitive load, told me. âThe way you direct working memory, thatâs what youâre attending to.â8
Working memory is the cognitive system that manages short-term memories. It does this through a decision-making âcentral executiveâ that 1) chooses where to focus attention and 2) decides which short-term memories become long-term memories.
Under the central executiveâs command are three âslave systemsââauditory memory, visual memory, and an episodic bufferâthat process and store short-term memories until the central executive can decide what to do with them.
The first two slave systems are dedicated to helping us temporarily remember what we hear and what we see. The first makes it possible to remember a phone number you heard until you have a chance to write it down. The auditory slave system is also called the phonological loop because remembering a ...
