Attention, Focus & Relearning Skills

How ironic is it to discover that the ability to solve a problem for most folks is being able to focus on it, yet then to read this is the very trait that may hinder our success and progress, as well as create blindness in other ways.

As an America citizen born and raised in this country, the first two chapters of Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century have focused my attention on …how Americans learn to focus and pay attention. The Introduction is aptly titled I'll Count—You Take Care of the Gorilla, and Part One is titled Distraction and Difference, the Keys to Attention and Changing Brain. Below I will discuss what I paid some attention to and focused on a bit in these chapters.

Davidson shares in her Introduction, “For over a hundred years, we've been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else. It’s hard for us to believe we're not seeing all there is to see.”

And, as a confident American, yes, the Gorilla experiment described was surprising. How could more than half of the video viewers miss a character standing out with such importance? Davidson's term attention blindness is described as a factor in every action of our lives, including personal, as well as work, school and socially. I was interested to read that this trait plays a role in how we see inanimate objects and each other too.

“It plays apart in our interactions with inanimate objects like car keys or computer screens and in how we value—and often devalue—the intelligence of children, people with disabilities, those from other cultures, or even ourselves as we age. It plays apart in interpersonal relations at home and in the office, in cultural misunderstandings, and even in dangerous global political confrontations,” states Davidson.

Ok. So if this is the case, and if our lives and brains have changed so dramatically paralleling with the societal, technological and environment changes described in this text, my question is how do I/we harness this power in the best way possible? Davidson’s answer is through multitasking and relearning focus and attention skills. Multitasking she says, mimics the world wide web and the internet in the way that all things become connected – it is the ideal mode of the twenty-first century. Although I can relate to Davidson’s backstory ...as an artist myself, a visual person and someone whose creativity has been misunderstood at times, I’m not sure if multitasking has been more productive than focusing on one task at a time for my brain makeup. Of course everyone is forced to multitask in these times because of hectic lifestyles, but I probably produce a higher quality of work when I focus on one project at a time, it seems. Hmm, more attention required here.

Anyway, Davidson describes it in this way: “Our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything and all of it is available all the time, at any time. The Internet is an interconnected network of networks, billions of computers and cables that provide the infrastructure of our online communication.”

She writes that it is our attention blindness that keeps us connected, in tune, tethered. Unlearning how we focused and relearning a new type of attention is the key. Okay, I’m going with it and will write more on this I promise …gotta run to school now and I'm a little distracted. I look forward to reading more deeply into this text because proper focus is a priority.

Multitasking may be a little like building a spider's web ...this guy was focused on my camera lens.