You’re reading something, then all of a sudden, BOOM! Out of nowhere a stray thought flies in and disturbs my concentration. I’ve noticed this happens more as I’ve aged. I’ve heard anecdotally that peak concentration is age 20. That’s the age of many of my students, and they have trouble concentrating. I used to worry that I could no longer focus. But now I think that having stray thoughts is natural. Often the first stray thought is related to what I’m reading (and sometimes relevant and useful), but if left unchecked it daisy chains into other stray thoughts further afield. At some point, I’m distracted and have lost all attention on my original task.
Today’s post is about Chapters 4 of Michelle Miller’s book Remembering and Forgetting in an Age of Technology. It builds on my previous post on how memory works from Chapters 2 and 3. Attention is the key thing I’m trying to marshal in my students when we’re in class together. Marshal is an appropriate analogy; I’m trying to direct students’ attention so they focus on the right things needed to learn the material. The more students can pay attention and be less distracted, the more they are likely to learn, especially if that attention is reflective rather than being like mindless sheep. Thus, I’m a marshal and not a sheepherder. (My apologies to sheep; I’m just using them as a metaphor here.)
What are we trying to do? Help students learn new things. To do this they have to make memories – in particular, semantic memories (see previous post for definition). But there’s a battle for attention. Our ancient brains have evolved to constantly be aware of peripheral changes. You don’t want to be food for the predator hiding in the bushes. Thus, you naturally perk up at distractions. No lions and tigers on my campus, but cellphones abound. Miller writes: “Distraction is kryptonite for memory, and unfortunately, distraction is what personal technology does best. Left unchecked, the alerts generated by the myriad programs that most of us use in the course of a day will inevitably erode memory. This is not because the constant interruptions permanently alter us at a fundamental level, but because they interfere with the process of making new memories when they’re happening. This is a significant threat.”
Let’s get to the nuts and bolts. How does attention work? Turns out if you’re trying to pay attention your brain must do two things simultaneously: shine a spotlight (by directing cognitive resources) at what you’re attending to, while suppressing what is irrelevant. This means your brain will “constantly scan the environment for stimuli what might be important”. Your brain is always multi-tasking. It’s a tricky balance “between letting too much in and keeping too much out”. Miller prefers the metaphor of a bouncer to a spotlight or a gate. The bouncer needs to actively scan for the desired guests (to let in) while keeping the riffraff out and watching for signs of trouble.
Most of the learning we do in school (being biologically secondary) is effortful. My chemistry students aren’t going to be learning by osmosis. (A chemistry metaphor!) So if their attention is elsewhere during class, they aren’t going to be learning in class which is where some of their best learning can happen – when you’re there as a partner to converse in the language of chemistry. Is it true that students can only be attentive for 10-15 minutes at a time? Turns out this isn’t true. Miller debunks this myth along with another that claims there is an attention time-span – there is a “capacity” or “bandwidth” of attention, but it’s not related to time. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t switch back and forth between activities. Well-designed switches and pivots can help to focus attention. And sleep-induced death by droning through Power Point slides is real.
Miller also debunks the idea that “technology is to blame for shrinking attentional capacity” or that it “burns us out mentally and neurologically”. Distractions can be a problem (see quote in the third paragraph) but not because technology use is eroding your brain. I’m not going into the details Miller provides, but I highly recommend Chapter 4 of her book if you’re interested in the evidence she provides. I will however provide one salient quote: “Our ability to stay attentive even when we’re bored or disengaged may not have decreased, but perhaps our willingness has… we may have experienced a global decrease in our tolerance for the discomfort of empty time or activities that aren’t enticing.” Here’s another teaser for her book: Miller also discusses the connection between burnout and “continuous partial attention”, an activity many of us professors engage in when we have our e-mail, Slack, social media, and phone notifications turned on.
Our brains multitask all the time. The integration of different subsystems working in parallel is remarkably seamless; we hardly notice it… until we do. When there are multiple tasks that require significant cognitive resources and conscious attention, that’s when we run into problems. You may have heard about the costs of “task switching” and that’s what the studies show thus far. I’m going to do it right now by mentioning what seems like a tangent. Miller has an interesting discussion on the doorway effect. It’s what happens when you walk from one room into another, get distracted, and don’t remember why you entered the room in the first place. As you walk out past the doorway, you suddenly remember again. It has to do with prospective memory (which is different from episodic, semantic, and procedural memory).
Now back to our main discussion. Miller and colleagues have worked on a project titled Attention Matters! – the title of today’s blog post. It’s a module with three short units. The students watch some short interesting videos about the limits of attention (“The Amazing Color Changing Card Trick” and “The Impossible Texting and Driving Test” are mentioned – I watched both). These videos prompt a discussion about attention and memory and how to get the most out of their learning. But the key at the end is getting students to make behavioral changes. Miller has used the hypocrisy effect to great effect! The idea is “persuading people to change behavior by asking them to take a hypothetical stance on an issue or to articulate a desired point of view. Once they give a hypothetical opinion on a subject, people tend to stick to that opinion, despite the fact that it was only something they said because they were asked to do so.” Basically, Miller asked students to “write down their plan for how they would manage distractions going forward” in concrete terms. I really liked this idea and I think I will try it with my first-year academic advisees in the Fall semester.
My original plan for this post was to also discuss Chapter 5, but you, dear reader, might be reaching your attention capacity so I’m going to stop momentarily. My quick synopsis: Miller provides a nuanced discussion of whether, when and how technology (laptops, tablets, phones) should be used in the classroom. It can both help and distract. There are some very interesting experiments (go read her book!) and she does a particularly nice job summarizing the studies that have looked at the effects of note-taking old-school (pencil and paper), using a stylus on a tablet, and typing on a laptop. I won’t tell you the conclusion to keep your interest piqued. There was also an interesting aside about the effect of taking pictures when you’re on vacation and how that affects your memory of what you photographed.
In looking back at my previous posts, I realized I’ve discussed attention multiple times in my blog from other books I have read, but because my blog is written to offload my thoughts and memories, I couldn’t recall chunks of what I had written. But I knew where to find it! Miller also discusses this phenomenon. But here’s a selected list of my previous posts by title, more for my own use.
· Paying Attention to Attention
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