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.
These automatic (unintentional) saccades are not random, as the Soviet scientist Alfred Yarbus demonstrated over half a century ago. By developing precise ways to track eye movements, Yarbus observed unintentional saccadic patterns in his subjects’ free viewing of pictures: in viewing a face, they automatically focused on specific features such as the eyes, and in viewing a scene filled with people, their eyes lingered on faces. Saccades reflect an implicit prioritization of different visibilia. They allow us to unthinkingly gather relevant information in a glance and in doing so, promote the success of our actions.
Attention is often automatic but must integrate with our intentional actions. How can this be when automaticity contrasts with the intentional?
Attention is needed in action because action is often dependent on perception. Perception presents us with an overwhelming amount of information, much of it irrelevant to our concerns. Without attention, we would be paralyzed by wave after wave of information. Through attention, we selectively respond to aspects of those waves that are relevant to our actions. Think of the directedness of mundane acts like preparing lunch, driving to the store, undertaking a conversation or of portentous events such as life changing decisions or split-second responses to the pedestrian who appears before our hurtling car. In each case, attention picks out what we need to deal with and allows us to do so. When we fail to act, it is often due to a failure of attention.
Issue 95, 31st March 2021
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