Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn by Cathy N. Davidson

Author:Cathy N. Davidson [Davidson, Cathy N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9781101517727
Google: vcgbNxO5BosC
Amazon: B004IYIJ98
Barnesnoble: B004IYIJ98
Goodreads: 11987787
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2011-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Gloria Mark knows more about how we pay attention in the information-age workplace than just about anyone. Professor of informatics at the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California–Irvine, she studies the many different ways we work effectively and the ways we don’t. With an army of students, she’s been clocking the work habits of employees, especially those who work in the information industry, measuring their distractions in hours, minutes, and even seconds. She’s discovered that the contemporary worker switches tasks an average of once every three minutes.5 Often that change isn’t just a matter of moving from one job to another but requires a shift in context or collaborators, sometimes communicating with workers around the globe with different cultural values and who do not speak English as a first language. Perhaps not surprisingly, once interrupted, the workers she’s studying take nearly twenty-five minutes to return to their original task.6

The high-speed information industry may be an extreme case, but that’s her point. If we’re going to understand attention in the contemporary workplace, why not dive into the belly of the beast and see how those who are designing the information age for us are managing? If they can’t stay on task for more than three minutes at a time, what about the rest of us? Are we doomed? That is certainly a central concern of our era.

Mark’s research doesn’t stop with measuring multitasking but looks more deeply into how our attention is being diverted from one thing to another. She finds that, even in the most high-speed, high-tech, multitasking, app-laden, information-intensive workplaces on the planet, 44 percent of workplace interruptions come not from external sources but from internal ones—meaning that almost half the time what’s distracting us is our own minds.

That is really interesting. Think about it. If I leave the office and don’t feel that I’ve had a productive day, I might blame too much e-mail, annoying phone calls, or coworkers bursting into my office unannounced, but almost half the time I’m actually distracting myself, without any real external interruptions to blame. I need no goad for my mind to wander from one job to another or from work to something that isn’t work—surfing the Web, gaming, checking out my Facebook page, or simply walking down the hall to the water cooler or staring blankly out the window.7

Mark’s emphasis on different forms of mind wandering, including those I instigate all on my own, is far more consistent with the modern science of attention than the more instrumental arguments about what or how the Internet “makes” us. Biologically speaking, there is no off switch for attention in the brain. Rather, our attention is trained in one direction or another. If we’re paying attention to one thing, we’re not paying attention to something else—but we are always paying attention to something. That’s the way the brain is structured. Even when we’re sleeping, our brain pays attention to its own meanderings. While awake, in a given moment,

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