What Attracts Our Attention?

There is so much going on around us all the time that we can't be aware of all of it. What we don't notice can't figure into our choices. And what grabs our attention may sway our decisions with its influence.

Noticing the dramatic

While watching storm coverage on television, I noticed the repetition of scenes of blowing rain, and flooding next to a parking garage. There's not much you can safely do to show the power and enormity of a hurricane as it's happening.

The storm moved relatively slowly for broadcast TV timescales. As the light faded, the repeated scenes became less immediate and impressive. Yet the announcers tried mightily to keep their audience interested in the stagnant scene reduced to two dimensions on the television.

Media companies know the power of drama to capture attention, and use this to attract and hold audiences. Those audiences are valuable for their advertisers, who are also experts at grabbing your attention. The dramatic still captures our attention even when dialed down to relatively mundane situations.

Many years back, I had a girlfriend whose mother had a portable washing machine in the kitchen. To do the laundry, she would wheel it over to the sink, hook up the inlet hose to the faucet, and hook the outlet hose over the edge of the sink. Then she settled down at the kitchen table to play solitaire and listen to the radio while the clothes washed. As the washing machine reached the rinse cycle, she would hop up and look in the sink. "Look at how much dirt came out of those clothes!" she often exclaimed with an air of triumph and amazement.

I think I've heard something similar in a detergent advertisement.

Social Categorization and Selective Attention

We also notice events that relate to us. That seems pretty natural, doesn't it? The sticky part is noticing the relationship to us. Relationships with people we've met are easy to notice, but relationships with strangers we've never met? That's harder. Often the ones we notice are akin to a granfalloon, as described by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle, "If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

When some international disaster happens, the American news will note how many Americans were involved. A plane crashes, killing 125 people, 3 of whom were Americans. The news goes onto a tangent about those three. The British news will highlight the British victims. Don't all the victims deserve our attention?

There's probably some short name for this phenomenon of paying more attention to what happens to "people like us" even if we don't know anything else about them. If you know it, please let me know.

Overcoming Habituation

Sometimes it's worth looking for what we're overlooking. When we become accustomed to something in our surroundings, it can become invisible to us, like the proverbial fish not noticing the water in which it swims. As Joni Mitchell sang,

"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?"

Her point was that if we pay attention sooner, we might take action before we lose the things we value. That requires noticing it before the moment of drama.

One day I was visiting the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, and was feeling overwhelmed by all the great artwork around me—far too much to see in the afternoon that I had available. What art was the most important for me to see?

I stood in the crowd, frozen for a moment pondering this, and noticed a guard keeping an eye on the throng milling about the room. I walked up to him and asked him if he ever got bored with all the artwork that filled the museum. "No," he replied, "Every day I look at one piece, coming back to it throughout the day."

What a great way to escape habituation! You don't have to see it all at once to see it all.

Seeing What's Missing

Seeing more of what's around you, and seeing it more clearly is a great advantage for making better choices, but it's not everything. One of the hardest observations is to see what's not there. What might you expect to see, but don't? What might you hope to see, but don't? What could be, but isn't there?

There's more to choosing than the possibilities in front of you. The possibilities within you also count. Take a look at those, too, from time to time.

P.S. What are some other things you might notice or not notice as a matter of course? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this? How might that affect the choices available to you and the choices you make?

And if you'd like to talk further about this topic, you could schedule a Zoom Session with me to talk about it.

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