We have all become addicted to our phones, scrolling on social media and constantly checking our emails. We are almost permanently distracted. This is having disastrous consequences for our ability to live the good life. To remedy this, we must treat attention as a skill, and practice at it just like we would any other, writes Wayne Wu.
In 2019, 3,142 lives were lost in accidents in the U.S. due to distracted driving. Yet, this tragic figure is likely to not alter driving behavior. While driving, we constantly glance at our phones, fiddle with the sound system or climate control while speeding along, typically with no negative consequences. We would adamantly attest to keeping our eyes well enough on the road, confident that if something were to demand our attention, we would automatically notice—or so we hope.
The negative costs of distraction have been much discussed in light of the expanding influence of social media. Yet distraction is a symptom of the more fundamental automaticity of attention. Automaticity in behavior, meaning that which is independent of our intentions to act, has a pervasive impact. Take ballistic eye movements - saccades - that occur one to three times a second, what psychologists called overt visual attention. Each saccade is programmed by prior covert visual attention, attention independent of eye movement (a familiar example of covert attention is shifting auditory attention to a more interesting conversation at a party without moving a muscle). During the day, we automatically make between 86 to 250 thousand saccades, so hundreds of thousands of shifts of attention. Try to make similarly rapid eye movements intentionally, one to three times a second. In 10 seconds, you’ll tire of doing so and probably feel dizzy. Thankfully, automatic visual attention flies beneath the radar of awareness. It happens without any effort.
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