How is it possible to concentrate on football scores, or even Nobel results, in the face of small or large tragedies?
It all has to do with what you pay attention to.
This blog post discusses papers that did research into attention and distraction, describing the balance between
top-down, controlled attention towards current goals and goal-relevant stimuli [and a differently wired network that] interrupts or “circuit-breaks” [the former].
In other terms, it’s what happens when you return home from a choir rehearsal, intending to revise your student’s paper, and you sit down and make the grave mistake of picking up the TV remote.
Current goal: Finish revision.
Circuit breaker: Hugh Laurie.
So when I pick up the free newspaper left on a train seat, and I dawdle over the last-ditch efforts to find Indonesian survivors, is this attention or distraction? Is this morbid curiosity and sensation-seeking, or guilt and gratitude that I’m not there (and not even helping, except for periodic donations to some non-governmental organizations that step in regularly under such circumstances)?
Of course, I’d rather think the latter, but we’re all aware that is a great example of bias.
My favorite way of having the ventral attentional network step in, is when a colleague brings up a new problem based on an interesting patient. This happened earlier this week. A novel stimulus from an unexpected angle – then my brain gets to work on, what experimental approach in developmental biology would allow my geneticist friends to get an extra handle on this problem?
I think you have nicely articulated my daily battle with distraction. Just imagine what life must be like for a patient with ADHD or something similar, if those of us who are (allegedly) clinically healthy have such problems.
P.S. Kudos to the telomere crowd and of course the CCD and optics physicists (there’s a Canadian in there, woo-hoo).
I also suffer from enjoying and prioritising a new problem shared by a colleague, over my own pile of unfinished business. I also tend to find almost the entire interweb is a circuitbreaker. NN, hang your head in shame.
Ho hum, back to work I suppose.
Didn’t someone find out that micro-breaks are good for us? That we work better in the long run if we can focus on something else for a minute? Or is that just something I invented to justify being distracted :)
Yes, me too, back to work now…
…is this attention or distraction?
I figure as long as you’re paying attention to something, then you’re fine, right?
I should also add, that the frequency of my blogging is certainly directly correlated to whether it a post is considered to be a goal or a distraction.
Right now I’m paying attention to an episode of bursitis in my knee, so should probably be able to get that revision done today, as I’m house-bound.
Ouch. I had bursitis in my right knee many years ago (in grade 8, i.e. at about 13 years of age). I remember it as being painful… :P
Yeah, it stinks. And it’s back, a week later. Grr. A good time to do a self-study on the effects of non-steroid anti-inflammatories.