Attention, Please
What is Attention? Tuesday's Dose
“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”1
Today’s big takeaway: When an ADHDer needs to complete a task, preparing their attention to that task will help them to succeed.
Attention Has Two Stages
There are two stages to attention:
Expectation of attention (cueing)
The use of sensory organs to attend (attending)
This idea dates back at least to the 1890s and it seems to prevail today, as long as we include the brain as a sensory organ. Much of our attention—especially for we daydreamers—is expended on what’s going on in our imaginations.
How Does Your Brain Organize Its Attention?
Your brain is triaging several million stimuli vying for your attention this very instant. I’ve compiled an incomplete list of the stimuli fighting to get my attention right now:
My leg is falling asleep
What just moved out that window?
My eye itches
There is music playing
Are those crickets chirping?
My dog just breathed
My tea smells pungent today
What am I teaching tomorrow?
Did I make lunch yet?
I have to pay my credit card bill before I forget
and so on
So how does your brain decide what to give your attention to and what to block out?
Preparation
Back to that video. Did it “get” you?
The narrator instructs you to prepare your attention to watch one of the balls. Research has shown time and again that this sort of preparation helps a brain to filter out certain inputs (called Filter Theory, Broadbent, 1958).
That is, your eyeballs still saw the dancing bear in the periphery, but your brain dismissed it as extraneous information. You’re probably doing something similar right now, say with the digital clock in the corner of your device’s screen.
Interestingly, psychologists think that preparation can happen even when other sensory channels are occupied.
“Waiting in a car at an intersection for a green light with loud music in the background will produce high activity at acoustic projection areas of the brain, but one can still build anticipation for the green light, while not anticipating any acoustic event.” (LaBerge, 1990)
This can’t be true of all sensory channels at all times, though. For example, many people, myself included, can’t write while holding a conversation with someone, even though writing is primarily visual-tactile and conversing auditory. If there is overlap for non-sensory regions of the brain, as there certainly is between writing, reading and speech, then the brain generally can only do one at a time.
Key Takeaway
How does preparation work differently in ADHDers? I have yet to find a clear answer in the literature. I will update you when I can. But for now, here’s our takeaway:
When an ADHDer needs to complete a task, preparing their attention to that task will help them to succeed. Preparation can be as simple as:
A verbal cue that directs a sensory organ
“eyes on the whiteboard”
“listen carefully to this part of the song”
“you’re going to feel something in a moment”
A hand on a shoulder
A routine or predictable next step
Bedtime routine
Get ready for school routine, etc.
And as with the example of the video, by gamifying the task, an ADHDer is much more likely to attend. More on this in the future, too.
LaBerge, D. L. (1990). Attention. Psychological Science, 1(3), 156–162. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062628
Broadbent, D.E. (1958). Perception and communication. London: Pergamon Press