IT WAS ABOUT THREE o’clock in the morning when I was startled into
sudden consciousness by a small spotlight sweeping across the walls of our
living room.
In the moonlight, I could see the six-foot frame of a young
man in a trench coat, clutching a flashlight and examining the contents of
our house. His other hand held something metallic, glinting in the silvery
light. As my sleepy brain was immediately and violently aroused, it struck
me that my home was about to be robbed by someone younger than me,
bigger than me, and in possession of a firearm. Heart pounding, knees
shaking,
I turned on the lights, went to stand guard outside my children’s
room, called the police, and prayed. Miraculously, a police car was in the
vicinity and came within a minute of my phone call. This all happened so
quickly that my would-be assailant left his getaway car in our driveway,
engine still running. He was quickly apprehended.
That experience lasted only 45 seconds, but aspects of it are indelibly
impressed in my memory, from the outline of the young man’s coat to the
shape of his firearm. My brain fully aroused, I will never forget the
experience as long as I live.
The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more
elaborately the information will be encoded—that is, learned—and retained.
That
has implications for employees, parents, and students. Whether you
are an eager preschooler or a bored-out-of-your-mind undergrad, better
attention always equals better learning. A multitude of studies, both old and
new, show that paying attention improves retention of reading material,
increases accuracy, and boosts clarity in writing, math, science, and every
academic category that has ever been tested.
So I ask this question in every college course I teach: “Given a class of
medium interest, not too
boring and not too exciting, when do you start
glancing at the clock, wondering when the class will be over?” There is
always some nervous shuffling, a few smiles, then a lot of silence.
Eventually someone blurts out, “Ten minutes, Dr. Medina.”
“Why 10 minutes?” I inquire.
“That’s when I start to lose attention. That’s
when I begin to wonder
when this torment will be over.” The comments are always said in
frustration. A college lecture is still about 50 minutes long.
Studies confirm my informal inquiry. Noted educator Wilbert
McKeachie says in his book
Teaching Tips
that “typically, attention
increases from the beginning of the lecture to 10 minutes into the lecture
and decreases after that point.” He’s right. Before the first quarter hour is
over in a typical presentation, people
usually
have checked out. If keeping
someone’s interest in a lecture were a business, it would have an 80 percent
failure rate. What happens in the brain at the 10-minute mark to cause such
trouble? Nobody knows. The brain seems to be making choices according
to
some stubborn timing pattern, undoubtedly influenced by both culture
and gene. This fact suggests a teaching and business imperative: Find a way
to get and hold somebody’s attention for 10 minutes, then do it again.
But how? To answer that question, we will need to explore some
complex pieces of neurological real estate. We are about to investigate the
remarkable world of human attention—including what’s going on in our
brains when we turn our attention to something, the importance of emotions
to attention, and the myth of multitasking.
Can
I have your attention, please?
While you are reading this paragraph, millions of sensory neurons in your
brain are firing simultaneously, all carrying messages, each attempting to
grab your attention. Only a few will succeed in breaking through to your
awareness, and the rest will be ignored either in part or in full. It is easy for
you to alter this balance, effortlessly granting airplay to one of the many
messages you were previously ignoring. (While still reading this sentence,
can you feel where your elbows are right now?) The messages that do grab
your attention
are connected to memory, interest, and awareness.
Memory
What you pay attention to is often profoundly influenced by memory. In
everyday life, you use your previous experiences to predict where you
should pay attention.
Different environments create different expectations. This was
profoundly illustrated by the scientist Jared Diamond in his book
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