Section 3.1. Hacks 34-43

3.1. Hacks 34-43

It's a busy world out there, and we take in a lot of input, continuously. Raw sense data floods in through our eyes, ears, skin, and more, supplemented by memories and associations both simple and complex. This makes for quite a barrage of information; we simply haven't the ability to consider all of it at once.

How, then, do we decide what to attend to and what else to ignore (at least for now)?

Attention is what it feels like to give more resources over to some perception or set of perceptions than to others. When we talk about attention here, we don't mean the kind of concentration you give to a difficult book or at school. It's the momentary extra importance you give to whatever's just caught your eye, so to speak. Look around the room briefly. What did you see? Whatever you recall seeinga picture, a friend, the radio, a bird landing on the windowsillyou just allocated attention to it, however briefly.

Or perhaps attention isn't a way of allocating the brain's scarce processing resources. Perhaps the limiting factor isn't our computational capacity at all, but, instead, a physical limit on action. As much as we can perceive simultaneously, we're able to act in only any one way at any one time. Attention may be a way of throwing away information, of narrowing down all the possibilities, to leave us with a single conscious experience to respond to, instead of millions.

It's hard to come up with a precise definition of attention. Psychologist William James,¹ in his 1890 The Principles of Psychology, wrote: "Everyone knows what attention is." Some would say that a more accurate and useful definition has yet to been found.

That said, we can throw a little light on attention to see how it operates and feels. The hacks in this chapter look at how you can voluntarily focus your visual attention [Hack #34], what it feels like when you do (and when you remove it again) [Hack #36], and what is capable of overriding your voluntary behavior and grabbing attention [Hack #37] automatically. We'll do a little counting [Hack #35] too. We'll also test the limits of shifting attention [Hack #38] and [Hack #39] and run across some situations in which attention lets you down [Hack#40] and [Hack#41]. Finally, we'll look at a way your visual attention capacity can be improved [Hack #43] .

3.1.1. End Note

1. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good biography of William James (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james).