been fascinated by the concept of attention for a long time, although
it’s now enjoying a resurgence in our age of distraction, or what Paul
Atchley has called “the attention economy.”
Attention is our currency, and it’s precious. William James, the
philosopher, pioneering experimental psychologist and brother of
Henry James, devoted an entire chapter of his classic The Principles
of Psychology to attention, published in 1890. In it, he writes, “Every
one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind. .
. .” and “My experience is what I agree to attend to . . . Without
selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” Notably, James
divided attention into two basic types that continue to define the way
we think about it: voluntary, active attention (such as when we attend
to tasks) and involuntary or reflex attention, as when something
demands our focus, like a noise or sound or play of light or even a
wayward thought. Decades before text alerts, philosophers were
concerned by what James refers to as the “confused, dazed, scatter-
brained state which in French is called distraction.” (Before I leave
James, I can’t resist mentioning that he suffered from depression and
experienced a transformative experience while hiking in the
Adirondacks in 1898. As he wrote to his wife, he “got into a state of
spiritual alertness of the most vital description.” Emerson was his
godfather, so perhaps he was primed to attend voluntarily to this
possibility.)
James knew that staying on task was hard, hard work, and that
without this ability, as Nass confirmed, we become dumber, at least
by certain measures (by other measures, the distractions of the digital
age may be a reasonable trade for what our brains gain in access to
more information and more memory storage). But interestingly, we’re
also limited in our ability to take in our surroundings, because
otherwise our brains would be overwhelmed by stimuli. Our field of
vision is surprisingly narrow; our hearing isn’t great either, and most
of what we hear and “see” we don’t actually process at all. We get on