"The mind does not pay equal attention to everything it perceives. For it applies itself more to those things that affect it, that modify it, and that penetrate it, than to those that are
present to it but that do not affect it and do not belong to it."
~Attention: Theory and Practice, p4,
quoting Malebranche
"When we are reading an interesting book, twenty people may converse round about us without our hearing one word they say; when we are in a crowded playhouse, the moment we become interested in the play, the audience vanish from our sight and in the midst of various noises, we hear only the voices of the actors."
~Practical Education, p99
For this week, we were assigned the first chapter of Attention: Theory and Practice by Addie Johnson and Robert W. Proctor. The chapter is divided into five parts, each detailing a particular era in the field of research on attention. First, the philosophical period, when psychology is first growing into a science: quite a bit of theory and analysis, but relatively little experimentation. With the 1860s came the first practical experimentation on attention, mainly by measuring reaction time to gauge the speed of mental processes. At this point, attention was at the center of the field of psychology, but the focus was mainly on the effects, and not the mechanism. In the period from World War One to the 1950s, research in the field of attention waned, but did not quite die out. The famous "Stroop Task," where a test subject is presented with incongruent color words and is asked to name the ink color (ex: for blue the answer would be red), arose at this time. From the 1950 to 1974 interest in attention burgeoned, and focus shifted to the actual mechanism of attention. Models of information processing began to arise at this time, beginning with Broadbent's filter theory. From 1975 to the present day the focus has been on different models of attention and their applications in ergonomics and neuropsychology.
Just four pages into the chapter, the above quote from Malebranche caught my attention. Naturally we do not constantly and consciously perceive everything around us, as that would drive you crazy, but it is interesting to consider how we filter information and how far away "the back of your mind" really is. Later in the chapter Proctor and Johnson reference Cherry and his "cocktail party phenomenon," which lead to the first models of attention as a filter.
Even more interesting to me are the times when we seem to completely block out stimulus from the world around us in favor of one single thing. Hasn't everyone experienced this at one point or another in their lives? The book example from Practical Education has happened to me personally. What goes on in our brains when we create these little worlds for ourselves, and when we're startled out of them? Is it different if we're concentrating on different sensory forms of stimuli, such as reading a book when compared to listening to music? What about when there is no sensory stimulus at all, and the brain is simply "lost in thought"?
An interesting case study in this field from the world of literature would be Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. He is an expert at narrowing his attention down to the most minute detail, seeing everything. When working on a case this focus becomes so acute that Holmes can forget to eat for days on end. The downside of this attention to detail comes when the great detective is temporarily out of work: he must either lose himself in personal experiments (focus on a single source of stimulus) or lapse into lethargy, retreating into his mind ("lost in thought"). What would science discover with Holmes hooked up to an EEG in these periods? We can only speculate.
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