Humans have always had difficulty attending

In the age of the smartphone, we have a vast amount of fun and entertainment right at our fingertips. Tech-companies and influencers alike are fighting for our attention by developing ever more attention-grabbing platforms and content.

We are often told that digital technologies are ruining our ability to concentrate and diminishing our attention span, because they present too much information that calls for our attention.

This kind of argument suggests that once upon a time, before the information-age, people didn’t have trouble attending for long periods of time. But I don’t think this view of attention is plausible.

Humans have always had trouble attending for long periods of time, which makes good sense if we acknowledge that we are animals with many different needs, some of which can only be met in rare encounters.

Like scratching an itch

The average smartphone user picks up their phone 58 times per day. 70 percent of these pickups last for less than 2 minutes. It is not just smartphones: tablets and laptops similarly provide opportunities for briefly checking news, e-mails and social media.

But why do we have the urge to check?

Sometimes notifications draw our attention, but often moments of checking are self-initiated: I feel an urge that can only be resolved by checking an app.

And just like scratching an itch, giving in to the urge only leads to more urges: 50 percent of phone pickups start within 3 minutes of the previous one.

Why can’t we control our attention better? Many people point to an important idea cognitive scientist Herbert Simon presented in the 1960’s.

The idea of Information overload

Simon’s idea was that our current environment contains too much information to process, and that as a consequence, our attention has become scarce.

Simon wrote before people had smartphones and in a time where even desktop computers were still quite few. What he had in mind was an office worker who receives more reports on his desk than he has time to read.

As a consequence, the office worker is overburdened and might fail to attend to things that are important for his work (there might be a crucial bit of information at the bottom of the stack!).

The challenge then is to design organizations in which such information overload does not occur.

Simon’s idea has been taken up by researchers thinking about the influence of technologies on human cognition. Like the office worker, one might say, the average smartphone user is overburdened with information. As a result of information abundance, we might even lose the ability to allocate our attention altogether.

Attending has never been easy

Following this idea, it seems obvious what we need to do: reduce the amount of information in our environments and we can all attend to those things we need to attend to.

But the story is not so simple. For one, the idea of attention scarcity due to information abundance suggests that at some point in history information was scarce and attention therefore abundant.

A recent book by the historian Jamie Kreiner shows how monks in Late Antiquity were obsessed with the topic of distraction and how many of their complaints sound surprisingly modern: daily duties, other people and even their own thoughts were all described as distractions standing in the way of leading a quiet and attentive life.

By any standard, these monks lived in times and circumstances of information scarcity. This suggests that controlling your attention has never been easy.

I think it is another, much less known, idea by Herbert Simon that helps to better understand what is going on.

Dividing time to meet our needs

The idea is the following: humans, like many other animals, have a whole range of different needs. They need oxygen, food, sleep, and care from others... The list is endless.

Most of these needs can only be met in particular situations, and sometimes only at particular times. Most of the activities that we do to meet those needs are mutually exclusive. You can not eat and sleep at the same time.

We therefore need to divide our time throughout the day over the activities that meet our needs. That is easier said than done. Let me illustrate what the problem is with an example.

Suppose you feel hungry and decide to go to the bakery. On the way there, you recognize a friend on the other side of the street. You stop for a chat and after a few minutes are on your way again. What just happened?

From one perspective, in which your goal was to go to the bakery, you got side-tracked. From another perspective, you recognized a ‘now or never’ opportunity that meets one of your other needs. In 10 minutes the bakery will still be there but your friend may not.

We scan our environment for opportunities

This is a general feature of everyday attention. We interrupt what we are currently doing to pursue a more relevant or time-sensitive opportunity related to a different need.

We also notice things that are, or might be, relevant for other plans and needs we have (I see that shop has a sale going on, I might check it out later).

This means that everyday attention is directed at much more than is strictly necessary to accomplish our current goals. Why were you looking to the other side of the road in the first place?

The answer is that we continuously scan our environment for potentially useful information, and for time-sensitive opportunities for action.

Interruption is not necessarily problematic

In many cases, checking involves interrupting what you are currently doing.

A bunny eating carrots will have to stop eating every once in a while to check for the absence of predators. The bunny is not distracted in any sense of the word, it is just making sure that what it is currently doing is still the right thing to do.

Just like the bunny we also interrupt what we are doing sometimes, in order to make sure we are spending our time the right way. Nothing wrong with that!

We are, by design, opportunistic creatures, sensitive to opportunities for action related to all of our different needs and projects. Therefore, it is perfectly natural to shift attention sometimes to consider whether we should attend to something that can fulfill a different need instead.

Of course, we do sometimes need to focus. If you are studying for an exam, you might plan to spend a particular morning on reading for three hours straight.

You do everything you can to keep your attention to the words on the page, but sometimes you find yourself mind-wandering about what you should cook for dinner or what you should get your mom for her birthday.

This example does not give us any reason to think that there is something wrong with your attention. But it might be annoying nonetheless.

Fortunately, there are Contemporary methods to help focus, like the Pomodoro method. They do not aim to prevent these moments of checking and mind-wandering from happening, but to treat them in the right way.

Users are invited to write the contents of their wandering down in order to get it ‘out of the system’ and pick them up at a later moment: note to self, think about what to get mum for her birthday.

Do digital technologies compromise attention?

So it is not as if we were once able to pay attention and now not anymore.

It is actually not so clear whether our attention is so compromised. We can still lose ourselves in books, in video games and on TikTok. We do pay attention, perhaps just not to what we ourselves, or our society, cares about.

Moreover, scanning, checking and mind-wandering are characteristic of the way humans, and many other animals, attend to internal and external surroundings.

This is not to say that all is well: we might scan, check and mind-wander too much. There are activities that do require focal attention, this is true for a lion stalking its prey, having a vulnerable conversation with your best friend, or trying to solve a complicated maths problem.

When you get disrupted, the prey, the moment with your friend, and the thought process are gone, and you will have to start all over again. The way current technologies are integrated in our lives might make such focused activities more difficult to obtain.