The Problem with Adults these Days

 The Attention Test Video

Cathy Davidson’s introduction and part one of Now You See It challenge linear models of cognitive development, asserting that the learning process involves refining our intake of information and focusing our attention, rather than simply absorbing facts. Interestingly, according to Davidson, this involves the human brain actually shutting down neurons it no longer needs to ignore information that we’ve learned we do not need (48). I found the example of infants picking up on cues from parents or others to focus their ability to produce sounds helpful in this case, as it traced this influence to before birth. Ultimately, Davidson delves so deeply into the topic of cognition in order to show that while a significant shift to the way we receive and process knowledge, namely the Internet, is occurring, humans have an opportunity to collaborate and share information. This allows us to fill in the informational gaps required to focus attention, creating a more complete picture.

Davidson begins by describing an experiment in which a philosopher asked her and a group of academics at a conference on the science of attention to watch a video with six people tossing basketballs back and forth, some wearing white and others black. The goal was for the audience to count how many times the people in white threw and caught the ball. That sounds confusing and awful. While the people threw the ball, a young woman in a gorilla costume appeared in the frame, and only a few of viewers saw this. Most were too busy counting tosses. Davidson saw the gorilla because she also thinks counting tosses is awful, plus she is dyslexic, which made the request impossible (1, 2). Davidson acquires knowledge differently than most of the others in the group, and while she was unable to say how many times the people in white tossed the ball, she did see the gorilla.

That is because the other people in the group focused their attention so completely on the ball-tossing that they failed to see the gorilla altogether. Attention blindness, the phenomenon where one cannot see one thing because of paying too much attention to another, affects us all. In fact, it allows us to operate or avoid being labeled mentally handicapped. Davidson notes that children born with Williams syndrome cannot attain a specific level of focus. Their neurons have not atrophied and they are “bombarded with too much information and [have] not efficient way to sort it all out” (51). Attention blindness is so pervasive, so elemental in our conception of how we ought to process knowledge that physiological conditions which preserve neurons (that should have atrophied from underuse) make navigating our society difficult.

We begin cultivating this attention blindness from pre-infancy, and this is where I found Davidson’s example of language acquisition helpful. As we learn a language, that language (or languages) becomes the normal series of phonemes and morphemes we hear, and we lose the ability, not only to produce, but to perceive certain sounds (47). Even children raised multilingual, though they retain the ability to recognize more sounds than the monolingual, find themselves unable to recognize sounds from languages foreign to them. 

This is because repetition focuses our attention, and language works by repeating and combining sounds to make meaning. This repetition has effects that create neurological changes in the mind, “coordinating impulses and activities across parts of the brain and nervous system that might be quite distant from one another” (46). These connections allow us to perform combinations of activity like walking and talking or chewing gum and breathing. These connections become so physically manifested in our neural makeup that we no longer think of them as combinations of action; walking, though it requires massive muscle cooperation, appears one action to us rather than many. 

This effect makes combining actions that we have not repeated nearly impossible, such as positioning the tongue in such a way as to pronounce the letter “R” if that’s not a native sound. And this familiarity with sounds begins earlier than we might expect. According to Davidson, we begin picking noticing sound in utero (36). Hearing voices outside the womb focuses our attention to certain inflections or tones that we will most likely hear when we come out. After birth, we slowly begin performing combinations of action that produce what we perceive as single actions, like talking or walking.

So what? Knowing this will make me super interesting at my next dinner party, of course, but there is also a practical application for attention blindness and its impact on how we perceive not only combinations of actions but the “naturalness” of those actions. The discussion of how the advent of Internet technologies affects us circulates largely around the question of whether or not this technology makes us less capable of thinking the way we used to. Davidson notes that critics worry about the Internet hindering children’s cognitive development (56), but that the question of whether or not hyperlinks and pop-up windows distract children from learning they are supposed to be doing is flawed. We should worry more about whether or not our approach to education will give them the tools to navigate online arenas (56).

Distraction creates intellectual growth. We see something as normal, then something happens that disrupts that normalcy, then we learn. In other words, that disruption distracts us from the focus that allows for our attention blindness. Therefore the distractions mentioned above can create opportunities for learning, because they both provide information from sources who may not share our attention blindness (at least the perspective isolated in that blindness) as well as interrupt attention that can lead to such blindness. Epistemology must change in order to reflect the type of knowing the Internet facilitates.

“What? No! Kids today are just ignorant! They can’t fix cars or remember phone numbers!” They can’t hunt bison with sticks and rocks, either. Nor do they have experience dodging the draft. They don’t need this knowledge or experience. The perspective above is informed by an attention blindness that does not allow the speaker to see intelligence outside of the realm of what is useful to him or her. Increased connectivity might just help overcome the comfortable myopia of attention blindness to form a more complete picture of epistemology, as well as the world we attempt to perceive with knowledge and knowing.