Pay Attention, but Don't Squander It
"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." — Herbert Simon
Attention is the currency of our brain. We need it to complete almost any meaningful task — planning a trip, doing our taxes, or arguing with strangers on Facebook. But as precious as it is, it’s a scarce resource.
English speakers pay attention, whereas Spanish speakers lend it (prestar atención). Most people understand that we have an attention balance from which we debit attention for different tasks and processes.
Linguistic observations aside, psychologists define attention as follows:
Attention is a state in which cognitive resources are focused on certain aspects of the environment rather than on others and the central nervous system is in a state of readiness to respond to stimuli.
Blinded by attention
Much like money, attention poses opportunity costs. You can’t listen to your spouse while scrolling on Subtack Notes. You have to choose. When you choose to focus on a task, you withdraw your attention from everything else. That’s hard. You have to make a conscious effort to direct your attention to a single thing, while rejecting any distraction. This is known as selective attention. Perhaps that’s why French speakers make attention (faire attention).
When you truly manage to focus on a single task, nothing else matters. In fact, you become oblivious to conspicuous stimuli — I really wanted to use that adjective. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons evinced this in their book titled “The Invisible Gorilla”. Published in 2010, it shows that people who are focused on one thing can easily overlook something else.
To prove this effect, they created a video where students pass a basketball between themselves. Viewers were asked to count the number of times the players with the white shirts pass the ball — a task that consumed all their attention. By the end of the test, they were asked if they noticed a person in a gorilla suit who appears in the center of the image. Half of the participants reported not seeing it. The experiment was described as "one of the most famous psychological demos ever". Simons and Chabris were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for it.
The economics of action
The most accepted definition of economics comes from Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics:
Economics is the study of how people allocate scarce resources for production, distribution, and consumption, both individually and collectively.
Attention is one of such resources, though rarely do we see it in economics textbooks. The bridge between attention and action is effort. Studies have shown that the brain activity associated with an action decreases as our skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. The attention cost of an activity gets cheaper with repeated effort. For example, experienced drivers use less cognitive resources than beginners.
Effort is a cost, and learning a new skill is an investment driven by the balance of costs and benefits. When we learn a new language, we make an effort now to save in effort later. The prefrontal cortex is the region of the brain responsible for assessing the value of an action when it is completed. In this neural computation, effort is considered as a cost by our brain. No wonder we’re ruled by the law of least effort.
The asymmetry of attention
Before the telephone, our attention was only available to people around us. We could only speak to our family, friends, and neighbours — and vice versa. In the past, attention was symmetric. But when the internet was invented, everything changed.
Nowadays, tech behemoths like Google or Meta have the monopoly of attention — and they make a lot of money from it. Ideally, we should all be in control of our own attention. But not all attention is selective attention, there’s also involuntary attention — attention you give away involuntarily.
Have you ever found yourself trapped in an endless scrolling spree on social media? Content and algorithms are specifically designed to keep us hooked, to capture our involuntary attention. You can try to quit social media, but it’s hard. Besides that, anyone can email you, call you, or text you, if they have your contact details. In an ideal world, you decide who has access to your contact details. But this is not an ideal world.
This is the current asymmetry of attention, and it has serious consequences.
Conclusion
Attention is one of your most valuable resources. Without attention, you’re not in charge of your own life. You can’t build meaningful relationships, perform well academically, or thrive at work. But it’s not just an individual problem.
In my eyes, the debasement of attention is one of the biggest threats for mankind. Our shrinking attention spans leave less room for critical thinking. Less critical thinking renders societies vulnerable to manipulation. Manipulation, ultimately, makes us give in to the will of governments and big corporations. And this is the perfect breeding ground for totalitarian regimes.
In a nutshell, pay attention, but don’t squander it.
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Love how you’ve used the nuances of languages!
Really interesting piece. I liked the part about how our brain activity decreases with an activity the more skilled we get in it. I never thought about that but it makes a lot of sense. A good testament to keep challenging yourself in life learning new things.