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.
Second, there is a great deal of stress involved in ignoring all of the distractions that we receive from technology. Think about all of the push notifications, sounds, and vibrations that come from texts, apps, email, and a host of other sources. If you are focusing your attention on a task, there is a great deal of stress in ignoring your smartphone while working on a project or even during a conversation with a friend over coffee. The stress in ignoring the sights and sounds around us can impact performance in a big way. In 1982, students at Public School 98 in New York were subjected to the daily noise of a nearby subway train. The train rumbled past 15 times per day, causing disruptions to the class. After numerous complaints, the Transit Authority cushioned the rails with rubber pads while the Board of Education installed sound‐absorbing materials in the classrooms. All of these efforts limited the distractions from the train, and in the years that followed, students' reading levels improved one full grade level. This is by no means a profound revelation: Students do better in school when there are not loud noises occurring throughout the day to distract them. However, the same can be said of all of us as adults: We perform better in our work and social lives when we are not constantly disrupted throughout the day. It may not be as consistently loud as the 1 train to the Bronx, but a distraction is a distraction.
Technology and Our Attention
There is a relationship between technology and attention spans as well. In 2015, Microsoft examined the attention spans of hundreds of volunteers through both EEG scans (electroencephalogram, used to track and record brain waves) and survey data. Microsoft determined that the average attention span was approximately eight seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000 (Perhaps more shocking, that eight‐second average is one second less than the average attention span of a goldfish). Subjects who had digital devices tended to have more difficulty in focusing their attention, particularly those who are constantly switching their attention between short activities. These short activities could be texting while responding to work emails as your attention is switched back and forth between two devices and two distinctly different topics. Many of these attributes are similar to those diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), where individuals have difficulty focusing their attention for long periods of time.
The impact of regular distractions certainly adds up. A study from the University of California‐Irvine found that after an interruption, it takes on average 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on task in a natural work environment. That is, of course, assuming there are no further distractions
