Hooked

Part 2

Section 1Invite attention

Source: © 123rf.com (spider, rock, rose); © Andrey Starostin (mushroom)

Which picture did you look at first? Chances are it was the spider.

There are certain stimuli which will automatically catch our attention. There are evolutionary reasons for this – if we didn’t look at spiders straight away, we probably wouldn’t have survived as a species.

Recall that our brain’s ‘doorman’¹ processes an estimated 11,000,000 ‘bits’ of sensory information every second, but our conscious brain only has the capacity to attend to 40 of these,² so the ‘doorman’ directs this limited attention to that which is most important – like ...