When you’re awake, your attention is always on something, which makes it easy to take for granted. That’s because when you’re paying attention, you’re focused on the object of your attention—not on the attention you’re paying. In fact, you’re more likely to be aware of attention, or the lack of it, when you’re having trouble maintaining your focus on something. Or when you want to focus on one thing, but find yourself focused on something else instead.
Attention is like behavior in that we expect our conscious intentions to be able to exert more control over it than they do. That isn’t just an unrealistic expectation, it isn’t even a good idea. Conscious intention uses a lot of System 2 brainpower. System 2 is limited and it’s slow. If you want to imagine what it would be like to move through the world at the speed of System 2, check out this clip from Zootopia of sloths operating the DMV.
Red Alert!
If you had to rely on System 2 to figure out what to focus on and determine your behavior, there’s an excellent chance you wouldn’t have survived to read these words. While System 2 does play a role in focusing your attention, it generally waits for System 1 to get the party started.
Your brain actually has three attentional systems or networks that help you determine where to direct your attention and decide what actions to take:
- the alerting network
- the orienting network
- the executive network
Both the alerting network and the orienting network are System 1 (automatic) functions.
The alerting network is always doing surveillance, monitoring the environment for unusual activity. Unusual activity is potentially threatening, so the alerting network is on duty 24/7, scanning for danger.
If the system detects something unusual, it can sound an alarm heard brain-wide. –John Medina, Brain Rules
The orienting network responds to the alarm generated by the alerting network by directing our attention to the source of the alert. This helps us gather more information so we can decide what to do about it.
Under ideal circumstances, the executive network then takes over as we decide what action, if any, to take next. Alert, alarm, and orientation all happen spontaneously without System 2 input or effort. But in order for the executive network to function well, it has to expend effort to suppress background information and initiate actions that may be contrary to our habits or expectations.
An Unexpected Visitor
Let’s say you’ve gotten into your pajamas and you’re curled up in bed with your cat enjoying a book before turning out the light and going to sleep. You hear a noise outside your bedroom window. You and your cat both startle and freeze momentarily. You look in the direction of the window. You hear some scuffling sounds. Your cat slinks over to the window to see what’s going on. You turn off the bedside lamp and sit still, listening for any other sounds. When your cat growls, you realize there’s probably an animal outside. The noise is more likely to indicate an annoyance rather than a danger. You take a flashlight out of the drawer of your nightstand, go over to the window, and shine the light outside catching a lone raccoon in its glare. The sudden, bright light sends the critter on its way. You return to bed after making a note to address the situation tomorrow. You try to get back into the book, but give up after a few minutes, still distracted, and take longer than usual to fall asleep.
Unless you have a family of raccoons living nearby and your property is attractive to them, you aren’t likely to have your brain’s alerting network aroused by a raccoon on a regular basis. But there are all kinds of other things that activate the network, such as electronic device notifications.
The reality is that all day long, your brain responds to unusual activity by sounding an alarm and turning your attention toward the source of the activity—which means away from whatever you were focused on at the time. You then have to decide whether or not to respond to this stimulus, and if so, what to do about it, thereby expending precious System 2 attention.
Unfortunately our brains are highly sensitive to such interference, which makes it difficult for us to find a signal amidst the noise, to maintain our focus, and to follow through on accomplishing our goals. But we’re not completely at the mercy of prowling raccoons, real or metaphorical.
At the next Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain), we’ll take a look at why our brain is so sensitive to interference, what the effects of that sensitivity are on our daily life, and a few ways to get around it.