66Attention Overload
Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be conscious of, and therefore plays a part in the coming into being of whatever exists for us.
—Iain McGilchrist
On a scouting trip in one of Utah’s national parks, I stopped at a roadside pullout to rest for a bit and to retrieve a cold drink from the ice chest in the back of my truck. I turned the engine off, thinking this would be a good place to perch on the tailgate for a bit and appreciate the beauty of the day and the scenery.
As I was rummaging through the ice for the last can of iced tea, a car parked behind me. With the motor still running, the driver’s window slid partly down to reveal the top half of a tablet computer aimed at the view across the road. The scent of air freshener wafted out of the narrow slit, and I could hear the loud booming of music I did not recognize. A second later I heard the synthesized sound of a fake camera shutter; the window slid back up, and the car continued on down the road, its passengers never knowing the silence left in their wake, never feeling the grit of the sandstone, never smelling the aroma of juniper and desert brush, never hearing the mocking laughter of pinyon jays, never feeling the warm breeze on their faces—never experiencing the place beyond what they could see from the car’s windows.
In the book The Master and His Emissary, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist correlates events in Western history and art with the evolving dominance of certain brain functions. According to McGilchrist, different parts of the brain generate different kinds of attention: some parts pay focused attention to details, and other parts generate a more general kind of attention to perceive context. The balance between these types of attention makes up our perception of the world.
The experience I describe above made me think about this separation between focused versus holistic attention. The photographer in the car was entirely interested in one focused task: to capture a photograph he could bring back, perhaps as a memento, or perhaps as a means to future social interaction having little to do with the context out of which the image was taken (which the photographer never experienced). In the process, he was completely oblivious to the sensory and emotional aspects of the greater experience of being in a grand place: the sounds, scents, and sensations beyond the narrow view out of a slit in the window. He was physically in a place of astounding beauty and infinite complexity, but, in a sense, he was never actually there, having never left the environment he brought along with him.
This reminded me of a passage in the book Beauty in Photography, by Robert Adams. Adams writes, “Our discouragement in the presence of beauty results, surely, from the way we have damaged the country, from what appears to be our inability now to stop, and from the fact that few of us can any longer hope to own a piece of undisturbed land. Which is to say that what bothers us about primordial beauty is that it is no longer characteristic. Unspoiled places sadden us because they are, in an important sense, no longer true.” These words were written in 1996. I believe they were as untrue then as they are today. They do, however, painfully and faithfully represent our collective Stockholm syndrome when it comes to natural beauty: accepting as characteristic (to use Adams’s term) a perception manufactured by those who seek to exploit the wild. If we believe that natural beauty is “no longer true,” we may fail to appreciate it even when it is right in front of our eyes.
It’s not that unspoiled beauty is “no longer true”; rather, it is that we choose to believe so. We’ve bought into the idea that the wild is no longer, and we seem to be in too big a hurry to write it off and to plan a future without it. But in truth, the United States today has nearly a million square miles of mostly undeveloped lands. Legal designations aside, there still is wilderness—natural wild beauty—to be found in relative abundance here and elsewhere on this planet. The problem is that we stopped paying attention to it, considering instead the manufactured reality of cities, gadgets, mass entertainment, the internet, and so on, not only as characteristic (a quality I find curious as a measure of worth or as a reason to photograph), but as inevitable.
Attention is the currency of the mind. It is the cost we pay for having awareness, perhaps even consciousness. What we don’t pay attention to, we are not aware of, and may as well consider untrue or nonexistent.
Although many are quick to suggest that modern society suffers from a deficit of attention, I think the opposite is actually true. We are capable of the same amount of attention we always had. We are just spreading our attention too thin, and not always on the right things. In other words, the problem is not that we have a deficit of attention; but that we have an overload of alluring minutiae to spend (or waste) our attention on, and are lacking the cognitive mechanisms to properly prioritize this spending.
From an evolutionary perspective it’s easy to suggest that we are designed to pay attention to distractions: exceptional sounds, colors, shapes, and sensations that may suggest social or existential threat or reward. Imagine prehistoric humans roaming their quiet world. A movement in the grass may suggest a predator or enemy; a sharp call may indicate the presence of other humans, or perhaps edible or dangerous wildlife; a burst of color may be a tasty piece of fruit or a poisonous snake; regular geometric shapes stand out from the fractal geometry of nature and may be manufactured, indicating the presence of unknown people. These were exceptions in an otherwise uniform world. In contrast, today we are bombarded with unnatural sounds, bright colors, manufactured structures, and other objects of obvious human-made origin. Our attention is constantly hijacked by a plethora of things specifically designed to distract us.
Attention is crucial to experience. The less of it we assign to any one activity, the less capable we are of appreciating it, of being aware of its finer nuances, and, ultimately, the less significant and satisfying our experience of it is. A meal eaten in a rush while watching television will not be as rewarding as a meal being a primary focus of attention, savored slowly and deliberately. A virtuous violin performance among the clamor of a subway station will not be as moving as one experienced in the quiet darkness of a concert hall. The same is true for experiencing the wild: the more distractions we bring into it—artificial sounds and scents, preoccupations and social interactions—the less of the wild we’ll experience and the more prone we’ll be to dismiss the experience as a whole as lacking or unworthy. This is not attention deficit; it’s attention overload. We invest our attention in too many things and, not surprisingly, we get little return from each of them.
The solution is no secret. We know it from medicine, from financial planning, and from any number of other disciplines dealing with scarce resources: stop the bleeding, close the loopholes, pool the resources, plug the drain.
Turn off, tune out, drop in.