Attention Matters: Understanding How Attention Works Can Help Us to Make the Most of a Powerful Resource
Let’s face it, our ability to attend to the things that we choose to focus on is one of our most powerful and important superpowers. But when it comes right down to it, how many of us really know how our attention and perception work? How might research that illuminates how it works change the ways that we think about and deploy attention? …what we expect of others?
The Next Level Lab has just launched a set of modules focused on the nature of attention and how we engage our attentional resources towards our best performances at school, work, and home. Here are some highlights from those resources.
Key Takeaways
Attention is one of the most important resources that we have. Its impact is ubiquitous in our lives and interacts with every aspect of learning and work performance.
Our beliefs about the nature of attention impact how we attempt to deploy it and how we feel about our efforts, and subsequently, ourselves.
While attention is certainly a deployable resource, outdated ideas about how attention and perception work often lead to untenable practices by educators and by learners.
Understanding how human cognitive architecture engages attention helps us to work with its limitations and affordances to offer the best strategies for deploying attention.
1) Humans have built-in “Attentional Blink.”
We cannot take in all the stimuli around us. It would be overwhelming. We must attend selectively. In the case of visual stimuli, our optic nerve would need to be much larger to handle more information. Further, our attention is spotlight-like. We take in pieces of a scene and stitch it together. During the process of shifting our eyes, we lose information with each shift. When we are focused on something—cognitively busy—we cannot take in the other surrounding information. Humans can miss big things going on in their visual field when cognitively busy with something else. Ask any teacher who has tried to monitor a whole class while trying to help a student with a task that involves thought and focus.
The idea that human perceptual architecture results in missing stimuli is not what most people think about how their attention works. Most of us believe that the mere choice of deciding to attend yields a video-like record of what happened. But everyone misses information. There is no “record-like” version of “what happened.” Realizing this changes how we interpret events, our sense of humility about different perspectives on “what happened,” and what we expect of ourselves and others in terms of the uptake of information.
2) Knowing about different types of distractions can help us to decide what we should try to suppress, control, or work around—for maximal focus.
Human attention is limited, and distractions can impact our ability to focus, especially when engaging in complex tasks. We grapple with internal and external distractions, and sometimes, an interaction of the two. While we often work hard to suppress distractions around us, there’s a cognitive cost in terms of our mental energy in doing so. Furthermore, certain external distractions are not suppressible. We are hard-wired to attend to certain types—very loud noises, rapid movement, and so forth, and one might argue that these can have adaptive functions—helping us to attend quickly as needed. Other stimuli can work in a positive sense, distracting us from non-suppressible stimuli that would otherwise constantly grab attention, thus working to support our task focus. Picture working in a coffee shop and listening to music that drowns out the variable hubbub of sounds around us. This contrasts with the common notion that distraction is merely a deficit or due to a lack of effort. Deep concentration or “flow states” can pull us into problem spaces—allowing for highly productive work. Viewing attention as both a push away from distractions and a pull towards that which we find interesting or compelling can motivate additional strategies. Understanding the distinctions above supports our ability to generate moves that work with our human perceptual and cognitive architecture to get the most from our attentional assets.
3) Mind-wandering can detract from our learning and performance, but it can also be an asset.
We often admonish ourselves when we find that our mind has wandered off task when we are trying to focus. Mind wandering can harm task performance, especially in tasks requiring tightly focused attention such as timed tasks. However, not all mind wandering is bad. It can also be the source of creative thoughts, assist in planning for the future, generate meaning through reflection on past and future experiences, relate to personal goal processing, and reduce boredom during monotonous or simple tasks. Getting the most out of mind-wandering without harming performance involves mental management of when to allow oneself to wander and when to suppress the thoughts that pull one’s attention away. Taking time to jot down insights that one had when mind wandering can harvest the benefits of this mental process. If one’s mind always wanders in a certain direction, it may be time for dedicated reflection on what is compelling about those thoughts. Openness to mind wandering combined with mental management, reflection, and mining/deploying insights can support maximal performance.
4) We use many attentional structures (thinking routines, meeting protocols, advance organizers) to guide how we deploy our focus every day. Some fit better than others with how our minds work and some can be redesigned for better fit.
Implicitly or explicitly, we employ structures in our work and everyday lives to facilitate certain types of attentional focus. Knowing the parameters of the structure can help us to respond to its requirements and best deploy our attention. Visualize watching a TED Talk or engaging in an update “Round-Robin.” These structures quickly communicate expectations for how we will attend and engage.
While such structures can be helpful, others don’t fit well with what we know about how our minds work and about higher-order thinking. For instance, cross-functional teams often brainstorm on virtual whiteboards in a type of “free-for-all” process that involves many moving parts that distract from deep focus, invite free-ranging ideas (a good thing) but that don’t necessarily build from the contributions of others, and lose the cross-disciplinary value of the varied expertise contributing to the board. With minor tweaks to the process, the attentional structure could better accommodate the assets and goals of the group. Analyzing the characteristics of the tasks that we need to attend to can help us to find the most effective ways to structure our attention. Further, acquainting ourselves with the rationale behind certain practices helps us to know when to best use them to support our thinking and leads to continued use of them.
This is a sampling of the content represented in the course Attention Matters developed by NLL team members Tina Grotzer, Lydia Cao, and Chenxu Gao. For those who are interested in exploring attention in greater depth, the course can be found on the Next Level Lab website. The self-guided modules in the course can be done individually, or they can provide the basis for group sessions and discussions.