Greg O'Hanlon

Distracted from distraction by distraction

T.S. Eliot (1920)

In one way or another I've been pondering the matter of attention for the best part of two years. Our working/studying environments push ever more distractions and interruptions into the path of our attention with the result that sustained focus is extremely difficult. Finding time and space to think is highly important. As Edward de Bono pointed out "some of the best results come when people stop to think about things that no one else has stopped to think about." Competition for attention isn't a new problem; in Brave New World Revisited (1958) Aldous Huxley reminds us of "mans almost infinite appetite for distractions." However, given the rapid proliferation of the network, the contemporary picture perhaps differs in terms of scale - Clay Shirky suggests that abundance creates information overload and this began with Gutenberg and the printing press (circa 1450). Though we may believe otherwise, our attention is like a spotlight with only the directly illuminated areas of our world arriving at perception's door step. Tunnel vision is in fact part of our makeup. You can test this for yourself by visiting The Invisible Gorilla website which is based on research by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.

In a knowledge based economy, information is the commodity and it is in abundance. We consume three times the amount of information we did 50 years ago. In 2011 we created and replicated a stunning 1.8 zettabytes (ZB) of data. That's 1.8 billion terabytes (TB) of data which is roughly equivalent to 200 billion 120 minute high definition movies. By 2020 the amount of data being produced will increase by a factor of 50, driven largely by internet enabled devices. In the UK the internet is now used by 73% of the population with 60% of that number using social networking sites (up from 49% in 2009). In the context of our daily lives, in addition to tracking possibly numerous e-mail accounts, data feeds and social media, there's also the sense that there's even more data out there which needs to be tapped as soon as possible. We are highly social creatures; communication with family, friends and confirmation of individuality sit deep within our psyche. Let's not forget that we follow 150,000 generations (3 million years) of humans who have evolved to live in one world, the physical world. Relatively speaking the web, as we know it today, is a very recent development (circa 1995) and with it came a second, virtual world. Our lives therefore are getting increasingly noisy and research shows that this increasing volume of information can adversely affect both performance and well-being; even causing burn out.

The human sensory system is extraordinary. The eye can detect as few as two photons entering the retina. Our ears are sensitive to changes in air pressure over a staggering range; from just audible to pain represents a difference of over 1 trillion. And yet, despite - or perhaps because of - these abilities, we can find it difficult to navigate with the car radio on and find reasoning a challenging problem almost impossible with the TV on. It appears that we reduce sources of stimuli in order to maximise the amount of attention we can allocate to a specific task. We may believe that our eyes capture everything before them like a video camera and that memories will play back as recorded, however the reality is that you see only a small portion of your environment at any given time. Similarly, we filter sounds continuously by way of identifying what we're interested in. The flow of sensory information into our consciousness is therefore compressed by attention. Which brings us to the subject of multi-tasking*; given the limitations in processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously, it is a complete myth and actually reduces your overall capacity - studies show that switching between tasks can result in a drop in IQ of up to 15 points. See Clifford Nass and Multi-tasking is Bad for Your Brain

Within any creative field focus is crucial. The ability to direct all your attention onto an important matter is the only way to create things of value. It's really very simple, deep thought takes time. Fast responses are driven by intuition and heuristics and though we would not be able to go about our daily lives without them, responses from our more deliberate, reasoning system must be provided processing time. In 2009 John Cleese made a presentation (video below) to the Creativity World Forum where he spoke about the origin of ideas, the unconscious self and how it's important to create "boundaries of space and time." Quiet time yields greater attentiveness and improved cognition. As long as our immediate attention is absorbed in reacting to new inputs we can never realise our fullest creative capacity.

Pico Iyer recently wrote in the New York Times that "the central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual."

To conclude, I'm not suggesting we all disconnect and ignore the profound possibilities of our combined intelligence. That would be silly. Our pre-web environment was relatively scarce in terms of content and hence time for concentration was more plentiful. We neither can nor should return to that state. What I am suggesting is that discipline (read: focus and endurance) are extremely important within the context of a creative endeavour. Evidence strongly suggests that we are more creative when free from interruption. Technological change invariably inspires/necessitates new social structures.

* Multi-tasking in this context refers to undertaking simultaneous tasks which are not automatic. For example, we can all walk and think at the same time; this is multi-tasking but walking is largely an automatic process i.e. we’ve done it so many times that it takes little or no additional processing.