Your Attention Please

Continuing my tour through Mind Wide Open... In chapter three, I talk about the question of attention and focus, trying out a number of neurofeedback devices designed largely to treat ADD. I also take a suite of attention tests called the Comprehensive Attention Battery, created by a neuro-psychologist named John Rodenbough. What follows are a few of my impressions from taking the test, which turned out to be a kind of reverse-Advil in its ability to make your brain hurt in a matter of minutes.

My tour through the CAB may not have been the most fun I've ever had at the computer, but it left me with a strangely precise awareness of the different tools as I was utilizing them in real-life. I'd memorize a phone number, and think: "right, this is auditory encoding." Or at I'd switch back and forth between watching CNN and reading my email, and think, "This is supervisory multiprocessing." Before, I would have simply said that in each case I was trying to pay attention. Now the two acts seemed as different as doing pushups and running on a treadmill. They exercised different cognitive muscles, and taking the CAB had allowed me to perceive those muscles as distinct entities for the first time.

Unlike Rodenbough, I found that my visual encoding -- for faces, and environmental details -- was the weakest link in my attention chain. Having isolated this property by taking the test, I started to notice confirmation of it in ordinary life. Around the time that I was investigating the CAB, my wife and I were in the middle of a complicated renovation of a new house we'd bought. We'd take trips out to inspect the progress, and on return, my wife's brain would be filled with dozens of seemingly photo-realistic details from the house, while my brain would have a few meager scraps of images and general impressions. We had looked at the same objects, but I had failed to encode. I started to think about it in the language of computer software: my default settings are visual encoding turned off. For my wife, I suspect, it's the opposite: just walking around a room fills her head with details that she can recall days later. It doesn't mean that I'm not capable of remembering visual information. In fact, now that I've located the problem, I've improved a little, because I now consciously switch on the encoding routine when I'm in an environment I want to remember. Instead of scanning a room passively, I break it down into component parts: "Okay, notice the moulding over the doorway -- there's a crack there. Now look at the electrical panel here…" It still doesn't compete with my wife's skills, but at least I'm in the game now.

Jettisoning the idea of attention as a Single Unified Thing leaves you with two primary implications. The first we've already seen: if the art of paying attention is actually divided between several different modes, it's helpful to learn which of those modes are working for you, and which ones aren't pulling their weight. But the second insight operates one level up: if your attention is an interacting system of different modes, then one of the most essential high-level functions that your brain performs is switching modes. You can be the most brilliant auditory encoder in the world, but if you can't switch into auditory encoding mode when it's appropriate, your talents will be wasted. Part of having an effective brain is possessing good tools, but an equally important part is being able to pull the right tool out at the right time.

Comments

[Rikard Linde]

Ohh attention, a favourite subject. Do you get into the subject of training your attention in different ways? Yunno like a surgeon having developed attention skills that the rest of us don't even know about. What kind of attention is that anyway?
And btw, there's more on the issue of expertise in this document which I found quite fascinating.

Rikard

[Tanya]

Reminds me of "The Mind's Eye" by Oliver Sacks in the July 28 issue of the New Yorker. He explores the rather varied experience with mental imagery of those who have lost their sight. It ranges from total loss to greatly enhanced possibly due to the individual's resolute effort to not lose it along with his sight. Conclusion seems to be that as you've "jettisoned the idea of attention as a Single Unified Thing" so we should our common perception of sight.

[Fernando]

I just finished reading your "Emergence" book: fascinating!. One of the best books I've read this year.

[hansi]

just wanted to say hi