The Evolution of Attention

Some of their observations were not new: We are all splitting our attention more finely than we used to. Younger generations are learning to do this even more finely than ours has, the phenomenon called continuous partial attention, though there seems to be some consensus that this dividing of attention is more a rapid sequential process than a simultaneous one. We seem to become bored more easily if there is insufficient stimulus to demand our constant, full attention, and start to browse the room (physical or virtual), consciously or subconsciously, for more stimulus when our minds and/or emotions are not fully engaged.

Some of their observations were, I thought, novel and provocative: Partly because we’re always fighting for attention, perhaps, the nature of spoken and real-time written (IM) communication seems to have evolved from relatively slow, thoughtful, considered communication to more rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness, iterative, successive-approximation communication. Efficiency and economy are sacrificed for effectiveness. Whereas I think I understood what you used to say, the first time you said it, today I know what you’re saying, because after ten clarifications and restatements there can no longer be any doubt. And maybe it takes longer today for that greater certainty, in the spaces between the clarifications and restatements I also understood what six other people told me on other subjects, interwoven with my conversation with you. If you were the only person I was conversing with at the time, I might well have become impatient with you. But increasingly, we constantly juggle and interleaf multiple conversations.

What is lost in this splitting of attention? When we pay attention to more and more things in rapid succession, we must inevitably stop paying attention to something else. I suspect that successive-approximation communication interferes with our ability to fully listen — there just isn’t time, enough mental cycles for us to do so. We are therefore, I’d suggest, missing nuances in the conversation — the meaning that is contained in silences, hesitation, inflection, tone, and the semi-subconscious awareness of what is implied by the choice of one word over another, by phraseology, by the connotation and implication and what might have provoked a statement, not just its denotation.

Even more, because we are scanning words while we’re listening, we’re missing the important visual clues that accompany a message in face-to-face or videoconferenced conversation: facial expression, body language, and what we can ‘read’ in the eyes of the person we are talking to. In fact, I suspect that some of the discomfort I see in young people engaged in one-on-one, face-to-face conversation is because they’re just not experienced or practiced in such conversation, and find its intimacy alarming and disorienting. At age 55, when I’m speaking with a woman who is looking at me intently as we talk, for example, I don’t think I am likely to misconstrue her attention (e.g. as coming on to me, staring at me because of something peculiar about my appearance, or angry at me). I’ve learned to interpret these signals in context, from practice. I’m not sure many young people who practice rapid sequential language processing have that acuity, and I’m a little concerned that, for lack of practice and attention, they may never develop it. And if so, that’s a shame, not only because some important communication need not or cannot be verbal*, but because I think the intimacy of non-verbal communication is important for our emotional well-being.

But maybe I’m just getting old and nostalgic. Have you noticed any of this in your own conversations? In what other ways are the ways we communicate, and theways we pay attention, evolving, for better or for worse?

*Verbal means oral or written, i.e. using language. This word is often misused to mean just oral, spoken.

Painting “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell