Hack #39. Avoid Holes in Attention
Our ability to notice things suffers in the half-second after we’ve just spotted something else.
A good way to think about attention is as the brain’s way of paring down the sheer volume of sensory input into something more manageable. You can then concentrate your resources on what’s important (or at least perceived to be so on first blush) and ignore the rest. If processing capacity weren’t limited, perhaps we wouldn’t need attention at all–we’d be able to give the same amount of concentration to everything in our immediate environment, simultaneously.
Attention isn’t the end of the chain, however. There’s conscious awareness too. The difference between the two is subtle but important. Think of walking down a street and idly looking at the faces going by. Each face as it passes has a moment of your attention, but if you were asked how many brown-haired people you’d seen, you wouldn’t have the slightest idea.
Say somebody you recognize passes. Suddenly this semiautomatic, mostly backgrounded looking-at-faces routine jumps to the foreground and pushes ...
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