Normally, if we don’t know the gist—the
meaning
—of information, we
are unlikely to pay attention to its details. The brain selects meaning-laden
information for further processing and leaves the rest alone.
One simple way to harness this tendency is to present information in a
logically organized, hierarchical structure. (Rain gear:
umbrella, raincoat,
boots. Beach gear:
sunglasses, swimsuit, sandals.) This allows people to
derive the meaning of the words to one another. Words presented this way
are much better remembered than words presented randomly (raincoat,
sandals, sunglasses, umbrella, swimsuit, boots)—typically 40 percent better.
John Bransford, a gifted education researcher,
has spent many years
studying what separates novice teachers from expert teachers. One of many
things he noticed is the way the experts organize information. “[Experts’]
knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their
domain; instead, their knowledge is organized around core concepts or ‘big
ideas’ that guide their thinking about their domains,” he cowrote in
How
People Learn.
If you want people to be able to pay attention, don’t start with details.
Start with the key ideas and,
in a hierarchical fashion, form the details
around these larger notions. Meaning
before
details.
The brain cannot multitask
Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth.
The brain
naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might
sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and
talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a
book. Pianists can play a piece with left hand and right hand
simultaneously. Surely this is multitasking. But I am talking about the
brain’s ability to pay attention. It is the resource you forcibly deploy while
trying to listen to a boring lecture at school. It is the activity that collapses
as your brain wanders during a tedious presentation at work. This
attentional ability is, to put it bluntly, not capable of multitasking.
As
a professor, I’ve noticed a change in my students’ abilities to pay
attention to me during a lecture. They have a habit of breaking out their
laptops while I’m talking. Three researchers at Stanford University noticed
the same thing about the undergraduates they were teaching, and they
decided to study it. First, they noticed that while all the students seemed to
use digital devices incessantly, not all students did. True to stereotype, some
kids were zombified, hyperdigital users. But some kids used their devices in
a low-key fashion: not all the time, and not with two dozen windows open
simultaneously. The researchers called the first category of students Heavy
Media Multitaskers. Their less frantic colleagues were called Light Media
Multitaskers.
If you asked heavy users to concentrate
on a problem while
simultaneously giving them lots of distractions, the researchers wondered,
how good was their ability to maintain focus? The hypothesis: Compared to
light users, the heavy users would be faster and more accurate at switching
from one task to another, because they were already so used to switching
between browser windows and projects and media inputs. The hypothesis
was wrong.
In every attentional test the researchers threw at these students, the
heavy users did consistently worse than the light users. Sometimes
dramatically worse. They weren’t as good
at filtering out irrelevant
information. They couldn’t organize their memories as well. And they did
worse on every task-switching experiment. Psychologist Eyal Ophir, an
author of the study, said of the heavy users: “They couldn’t help thinking
about the task they weren’t doing. The high multitaskers are always
drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things
separate in their minds.” This is just the latest illustration of the fact that the
brain cannot multitask. Even if you are a Stanford student in the heart of
Silicon Valley.
To understand this conclusion, we must delve
a little deeper into the
third of Posner’s trinity—the Executive Network. Let’s look at what your
Executive Network is doing as you, say, compose a long email and then get
interrupted by a text message from your significant other.
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