Here's How the Brain Science of Attention Really Works

So, here I am, with a week to turn around the copy edited ms for Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Change the Ways We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking Press) and the sun is finally up and I realize I need some coffee after being at this since 4 am and I put on the tea kettle and then return to my study to tackle Chapter Two.  Fall is finally here, and I smile at the smell of someone burning the leaves.   I notice a garbage truck churning outside and assume that's the source of the burning rubber smell as I try to figure out where that footnote went, the one that was supposed to be attached to the concept of "scaffolding" and then look up and there is dark, acrid smoke in the air.  OMG, the teakettle!   No water.  Burner on high.   The handle and spout, both rubbery plasticy black stuff courtesy of Alessi, is now puddling all over my stove top and the normally silver stainless steel tea kettle is glowing r-e-d.   I'm smart enough, thankfully, to turn off the stove, use an oven mitt to rescue the teapot, and am thankful that (a) the fire alarm hasn't gone off yet and (b) that I didn't burn down the house.

I am now on a-l-e-r-t.  My remarkable, wonderful, undivided attention to my copy edits could have caused one of those melodramatic Mad Woman in the Attic conflagration moments (except not quite so dramatic since my study is on the first floor).  But here's the interesting part.  Since I'm writing on attention, I now know to pay attention when I'm not paying attention.  I'm not shouting that the Internet has made me dumber, that I'm all overwrought and distracted.  I'm aware that, when my attention is in one direction, it is always (this is how the brain is constructed) not attending to something else.   There is no such thing as not paying attention, it's just sometimes we are not paying attention where we need to be.   Our attention isn't always productive, we may be daydreaming, for example.  Although, personally, I believe the function of day dream is to distract us enough so we can be more creative and productive later . . .

But the bit with the teakettle reminded me that, with my obsession now with copy edits, this last chance to get it right, the whole house could practically burn down and I wouldn't notice.   So when I went to the farmer's market this morning, I very carefully took a Zen moment of introspection, to remind myself that, as much as I might think I was paying attention to the road, unless I was hypervigilant, my mind would be back on that scaffolding footnote or a dozen other such details, not on the road.   How much danger does a gal need in her life?  I started the car engine with mindfulness as my principle, even though I was driving only a mile.

That's when the black and the tan dogs ran into the road.  I was only going 34 miles an hour (according to the huge speed detector near my house), but the black dog was right there, at my front bumper.  Mindfully, I slammed on the brake, laying rubber, and the car behind me slammed on hers, laying rubber, and then the black dog scampered away, unharmed, with the frisky golden retriever.

The simple-minded accounts of how the Internet is ruining our attention would not connect the teakettle with the stray dog.  But the new neuroscience of attention says that itemizing attention is wrong. Interconnection is all.  Because the trauma of the fiery red kettle caught my attention and almost got me in trouble, I was able to recalibrate, very consciously and self-consciously, my attention level and make adjustments.   I'm not sure I would have done so before starting this book because we tend to think of attention passively, as if it is out of our control or only controlled outside of ourselves, by the world around us.  That is not true.   We can track our own attentional pathways and learn from them. 

We learn attention as infants and that means we can unlearn attentional patterns and relearn new ones.   Lost the teakettle, saved the dog . . .   that's the lesson of the book, to spin a metaphor. 

If you want to know more, about how that lesson can transform school and work and everything else, well, Now You See It  will be out next summer if I turn my attention away from this blog, dear readers, and back to the copy edits on Chapter Three!