Unbundle Your Attention
Close-up study from River Mist by Romare Beardon
Thank you for reading these words. Your choice has significant personal and economic consequences. You’re paying attention to this article instead of one or more of the many other things vying for your attention–especially the siren calls coming from the apps and services on your digital devices. Presumably, you’re satisfied with the return on investment (the “exchange rate”) metaphor provides. I’m sincerely grateful.
Attention is a commodity–mined, aggregated, processed, and sold like other commodities. But it’s both a commodity and a currency, because we are active, willing participants in the attention economy. We willingly exchange our attention for free access to the content and services provided by the companies that we give our attention to. We tolerate the advertisements in the content we pay for in exchange for reduced pricing, instead of paying the full cost of the content we consume and the services we use. None of this is new or necessarily bad, provided that the exchange of value is truly fair. Unfortunately, the deal is becoming increasingly one-sided.
Johann Hari’s recent book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again is an extended meditation on the reasons we are losing our ability to focus—and what we can do about it. Some of the reasons Hari identifies, like the flood of information we now grapple with daily, are a by-product of digitization which has made it far easier to create and instantly distribute information. Other reasons, like multitasking, are due to our current illusions about our biological and cognitive capacities.* But humankind has been grappling with information overload and the constant pressure to produce more and more for a long, long time. Even Socrates warned about the cost of trying to do too much when he urged “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” What’s new is the effectiveness of the devices and techniques used to capture and redirect our attention, and the pervasiveness of the monetization of our attention. It’s not an overstatement to say that our attention is under siege and we are losing—losing our ability to focus. But Hari’s book is not a simple demonization of technology. He writes:
The arrival of the smartphone would always have increased to some degree the number of distractions in life, to be sure, but a great deal of the damage to our attention spans is being caused by something more subtle. It is not the smartphone in and of itself; it is the way the apps on the smartphone and the sites on our laptops are designed. . . . The way our tech works now to corrode our attention was and remains a choice—by Silicon Valley, and by the wider society that lets them do it. . . . The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?
Our struggle to focus is both a personal and a cultural problem. Individual and legislative action can mitigate it, but taking action requires a cultural change—one that begins with the development of a more nuanced understanding of attention itself. Once we better understand the nature of attention, we can decide how and when we want to share it and protect it.
The Many Facets of Attention
In his book The Principles of Psychology (1890), the influential psychologist and philosopher William James defined attention as “the taking of 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, he adds, “withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” James’ definition is still relevant, but it’s only one of the many facets of attention as we now understand it. These are the five most commonly discussed types of individual attention:
Focused attention - This is the type of attention we apply when we are suddenly drawn to something in our environment. It’s often associated with our sense of immediate or impending danger and usually leads to quick action. Focused attention is very difficult to sustain over long periods of time—it usually demands the immediate engagement of both the mind and the body.
Sustained attention - Sustained attention, also known as “concentration,” is the ability to focus on one thing for an extended period. Sustained attention has three stages: it begins with focusing your attention, which leads to keeping (or sustaining) your attention, and ends when you conclude your task, your allotted time has elapsed, or you can no longer maintain your focus. This full cycle makes up one “attention span.”
Selective attention - This is the type of attention we apply when we’re trying to focus in a distraction-filled environment. Selective attention requires focusing on the target of your attention while filtering out everything else going on around you. It may also involve tuning out internal distractions, such as thoughts, physical sensations, and emotions.
Alternating attention - Alternating attention is the ability to switch between related tasks while maintaining your awareness of the larger context. A good example of alternating attention is taking notes while you’re in a meeting—you need to listen, process, and write quickly and fluidly to keep pace with the meeting. Alternating attention is not the same as multitasking. You’re not switching your attention between different tasks, you’re shifting your focus between related aspects of a single task.
Limited attention - Limited (or “divided”) attention is attention that’s split between two or more discrete tasks. When we try to juggle tasks in this way (“multitask”), we are in fact actually switching between tasks in rapid succession. When we multitask we pay “task switching costs” that make us more distractible and less efficient.
Our conversations around attention are often based on the idea that attention is focused on one thing or it’s not. This one-dimensional, binary approach makes us more susceptible to having our attention diverted by others—we aren’t able to distinguish between good and bad diversions, or consciously choose between the types of attention we want to apply in a given situation.
No matter which type of attention you're applying, the application of attention always begins with some sort of stimulus—from the environment, your thoughts, your body, or your emotions.
Mind the Gap
The American psychologist Rollo May wrote:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.**
Everything that preys on your attention attempts to eliminate the space between stimulus and response. Whether a social media feed, or shopping site, or an advertisement, the goal is always the same: short circuit your power to choose your response. If you go back and review the types of attention listed above, you’ll notice that certain types of attention are easier than others to short circuit. For example, selective attention requires mental and physical energy to eliminate distractions and maintain focus. If you increase the frequency and intensity of the distractions, it’s easier to interject a new stimulus and suggested response. Limited attention is also easier to disrupt because of the opportunity that every context switch presents.
Differentiating between the different facets of attention enables you to unbundle your attention–you can move from a binary application of attention (either you’re paying attention or you’re not), to a more nuanced deployment of your attention–one that enables you to consciously direct your focal point, to change its direction, bandwidth, and depth.
In his book The Ecology of Attention, the French cultural theorist Yves Citton explores novel forms of group oriented attention, such as collective and joint attention, as well as several alternative forms of individual attention, including background and reflexive attention. He also explores a form of attention that’s particularly relevant to the creative process: free-floating attention. This concept, drawn from Freudian psychoanalysis and literary interpretation, is a form of active attention that requires us to suspend our traditional habits of reasoning and instead allow ourselves to be “carried away by the effects of resonance.” Free-floating attention gives us permission to explore non-linear relationships between ideas and overcome “the dead end of situations” where traditional logic presents us with unacceptable binary alternatives. It’s a close relative of the most important catalysts of creativity: curiosity.
Attention must be captured and redirected to be monetized. But curiosity can’t be monetized because its value is its lack of focus. The moment it’s captured and redirected by someone else, it disappears.
True Attention
Attention has different facets and also distinct qualities. I’ve already touched on attention as the driving force behind productivity and attention as a precursor to transactions, but there’s another type of attention that’s essential to the creative process: true ( or “pure”) attention. The nature and purpose of true attention is beautifully articulated in the short book 12 Theses on Attention*** by Friends of Attention, "a gentle coalition of activists, artists, and others who cultivate, theorize, and share forms of attention resistant to commodification."
True attention does the work of bringing forth. It is the aperture through which the latency of things, beings, and persons becomes present.
In contrast to the types of attention that consume, true attention nourishes. It’s generative.
True attention takes the unlivable and makes it livable. It is a lung that replenishes the air it breathes. If suddenly you feel that you can live and breathe in the place where you are, you or someone around you has committed, enacted, or bestowed attention.
In contrast to the types of attention that separate us from the world around us, true attention reconnects us to the physical world.
This attention-which-seeks often takes the form of an intense and near-devotional expectation and anticipation that refuses to know what it expects and anticipates.
In contrast to the types of attention that are transactional, true attention is given freely and open-ended—a gift.
Free-floating attention, true attention, curiosity, organic form, the adjacent possible, idea gardening… The forms of attention and approaches to creativity are forms of resistance to the pressures of the attention economy. The Friends of Attention write:
An attentional path is the trace left by a free mind. To submit to the attentional path of another, to retrace it, is a form of attention. Retracing the attentional path of a free mind is one of the keenest pleasures we can take in each other and in the world.
I write this newsletter because the joys of creating an attentional path and retracing the attentional paths of others are two of the greatest pleasures in my life—and because I believe both help make the world more liveable.
And there’s one more thing… True attention is contagious. This is from the artist and writer Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy:
One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention. To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.
There’s hope.
Footnotes
* Hari believes the following twelve factors are causing our increasing inability to focus:
The increase in speed, switching, and filtering
The crippling of our flow states
The rise of physical and mental exhaustion
The collapse of sustained reading
The disruption of mind-wandering
The rise of technology that can manipulate you
The rise of cruel optimism
The surge in stress and how it is triggering vigilance
Our deteriorating diets
Rising pollution
The rise of ADHD and how we are responding to it
The confinement of our children, both physically and psychologically
He dedicates a chapter to each of these causes in his book Stolen Focus.
** This quote is often attributed to Viktor E. Frankl, Steven R. Covey, Rollo May and several other writers. You’ll find a thorough investigation of the quote’s authorship here. I attribute it to May since he is now presumed as the quote’s most likely author.
*** The 12 theses, from the Friends of Attention website (without the accompanying illustrations in the book).