Learning to Pay Attention

Why is it that we have have to teach adults to do something that every child knows how to do from birth? Is attention deficit a learning disability we acquire as we get older, and if so, why?

In business cultural anthropology, according to Conifer Research, you need to focus your attention on:

• Confusion: employees and customers who are conflicted or unclear about what to do or how to do it
• Barriers: obstructions that get in the way of people doing their job
• Wear Patterns: lingering signs of stress in the use of products and tools
• User Torture: obvious discomfort and struggle in making the tools, environment or process work the way it is supposed to or needs to
• Duct Tape & String: workarounds that employees and customers have devised to solve problems

They argue that, if you interview people about their wants and needs, they will tell you what’s on the top of their consciousness, but miss the very real wants and needs that would be obvious from direct observation. But they also say you need to ask questions, through interviews, after or during observation, to understand what you’re really seeing and hearing, why it’s happening, and what could be done to make things better, instead of jumping to conclusions. In the process, the subject may learn as much as the observer. They suggest a process to map the experience of your employee or customer, as a means of archiving and focusing on improvement opportunities.

Paying attention is also a recurring message of environmentalists. The celebrated environmental writer and story-teller Barry Lopez says:

Perhaps the reason we no longer pay real attention is that we no longer have much opportunity to see and hear things that inspire a “state of awe” — we are surrounded by mediocrity and sameness and efficiency and noise that exhibit no integrity, dignity, subtlety, or respect for the sacredness of life and nature. And at the same time we are constantly barraged by assaults on our senses — sights and sounds that rudely compete for our attention until we become numb to all but the loudest and most violent and most outrageous — the brightest red light, the flashiest billboard, the thinnest waist, most defined abs and largest breasts, the most provocative lyrics and videos and special effects.

When I was in Orlando recently at the Disney Institute I was frequently distracted from the astonishing and brilliant details of the Disney ‘customer experience’ by wonderful natural sights that no one else seemed to notice in the Disney World of sensory overload: Baby goslings chasing insects around a lamppost, ducks in the grass enjoying the constant spray from the nearby flume roller coaster ride, squirrels perched on the top of benches staring at the parades of costumed characters with great curiosity. If I had visited there back before I moved to the country and took up nature-watching, would I have been as oblivious to these simple joys as all the people around me?

In an earlier post entitled Stand Still and Look Until You Really See, I suggested six exercises to practice paying attention, designed especially for the left-brain-heavy:

• Move in close, so you divert attention from individual objects and start to see instead colour, texture, shape, shadow, reflection, pattern
• Find an unusual perspective from which to look — get down on the ground and look up, look at something through trees, through a microscope, or by candlelight, anything that will let you see things differently from usual
• Look at things under unusual conditions — in the fog, at night, right after a heavy rain, just at dawn or dusk
• Stimulate your other right-brain senses — get your nose up close to things, listen to birds, or insects, or train whistles, or music, walk in your bare feet
• Walk or bicycle without a pre-determined destination, direction or time limit
• Study something — birds at your bird-feeder, time-lapse of a flower over the course of a day or a week, a spider-web, how moving or dimming the lights in a room changes its character, how a bottle looks different when viewed from different angles

One of the most interesting theories about why we lose the ability to pay attention is related to the chemical dopamine, which occurs naturally in the body and is our body’s way of telling us that something we have just sensed or experienced is important and needs to be remembered. Here’s a theory from Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse:

Are we, perhaps, all increasingly addicted to the rush of dopamine as we get older? Does the sheer constant noise and sensory barrage of messages competing for our attention eventually dull our senses to the point we cease being able to really pay attention to anything that isn’t the dopamine equivalent of a 200-decibel jet engine roar? And if so, does spending time in nature, or in meditation, help us begin to kick the dopamine habit, and open up our sensory palate to awareness we had ceased to be capable of? Are television and video games and junk food and driving in traffic and all the other high-stimulation events of modern life actually numbing us to awareness of who we are, of the importance of place and of nature, of the damage we are doing to the world, and of the messages our instincts and the rest of our Earth-organism are sending us?

And if this is so, how can we overcome this addiction, especially those of us who cannot still the din by walking through nearby wilderness or refocusing through meditation? Especially those of us who really like the stimulation that the dopamine rush gives us? Are we doomed to a life of numbness, and inability to pay attention to things that are really important?

Photo from my own collection. Sketch by Canadian artist Pierre Surtes.