This episode of Uno Dos of Trace was graciously
supported by Skillshare.
Are you paying attention right now?
Are you sure?
Because research says you're actually not.
But according to a study--
You know what?
This is actually kind of weird.
So what exactly is attention?
Like, when you're looking at something,
what is happening in your brain to keep you focused?
It might not be as simple as you think, and I have questions.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey there, friend fam.
I am Trace.
Thanks for giving your attention to me
just for a few minutes on Uno Dos of Trace.
But right off the bat, you need to know you're not actually
paying attention to me at all.
Yeah, attention is an illusion.
It's not even real.
I find attention interesting for a couple of reasons.
One, I have ADHD.
I was diagnosed in middle school, and at the time,
it was pretty new and people didn't really
know what to make of it or how to treat
little kids who had it.
And what's horrifying to me now is that they actually
taught us to distract ourselves rather than
to learn how to pay attention.
They were worried about disrupting other kids.
I spent the better part of my life learning
to manage my own levels of attention,
and I still struggle with it.
But I find the topic fascinating, nevertheless.
Number two-- internet culture trains us to try and multitask.
I say try because we cannot multitask.
There is no such thing as being a multitasking human being.
Hi, friend.
I know what you're thinking.
You're typing that comment right now
about how you multitask all the time and you're so great.
You don't.
Let me quote Earl Miller, neuroscientist--
when people say they can multitask,
they're deluding themselves.
I'm going to go back over here.
Multitasking is funny because even though we can convince
ourselves that we're doing two things at the same time,
we're actually not.
What we do is serial task.
We do one task for a few seconds or a few milliseconds,
then we switch to another, then back to the first.
And you can see this in the brain.
It's like we have one graphics card, one sound card,
and one CPU in there and they can only
do one thing at a time.
We've never done this before on Uno Dos of Trace,
but let's try a test real quick.
Performance is going to be on the honor system,
so say as many colors aloud as you can in the next 10 seconds.
Go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That's called the Stroop test.
OK.
Now, let's go again-- round two.
Say as many colors aloud as you can in the next 10 seconds.
Go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Yeah, that second one is way harder, right?
It's a cross modal task.
Your brain has to work in two ways--
to process written word recognition and visible color
recognition-- and it has to complete both of those tasks
before you can spit out the word things because our speech
centers are pretty good at word recognition
and slightly faster, which makes this task difficult.
Another thing that makes it hard is your brain
can only do one thing at a time.
Hi again, friend.
Yeah, I know you did so great at the test.
You're a wonderful little boy.
But it's not about how great you are.
It's about how the task was more difficult the second time,
wasn't it?
I know it was.
Yeah.
OK.
I'm going to go back to everybody else.
Serial tasking requires a little bit of attention, too,
and since we are biological, that task switching
does cost energy, and that's important.
So back to attention.
The Stroop test requires that cross modal selective
attention.
You have to decide what to pay attention to when presented
with only two stimuli.
But when you're out in the world,
there is way more stimuli--
even here in this frame.
There's me and my face and my hands and the shirt
and the bookshelves and my new pretty butterfly,
the music that's going really quiet,
and your brain is tapping into all of that.
And that's why it's hard to watch a thing
and do something else at the same time.
There's a lot going on.
You hop back and forth.
Your brain makes assumptions to fill in the details,
and you miss things.
This stimuli problem is compounded for people
with autism, schizophrenia, or other attention disorders
including, of course, my ADHD.
And we didn't even go into the mention of notification-- turn
away.
It's my turn.
Go.
Get out of here.
Generally speaking, we all have experienced
a period of intense focus, whether we're reading a book
or watching TV.
It's just wonderful, isn't it?
You're just enthralled.
It feels so encompassing.
It's one of my favorite feelings.
It's like you turn off parts of your brain.
But that's actually not it at all.
Apparently, according to researchers,
that level of focus is a complete illusion.
Instead, our attention is coming in pulses.
Every 250 milliseconds, or about four times a second,
about every six frames of this video-- your attention
is pulsing.
Four times every second your attention wanes.
It's like we're wired to be easily distracted.
And if we choose to look at something else,
well, we're out of it.
Studies with mice show the thalamic reticular nucleus
works as the switchboard.
It helps control the amount of information
the brain receives, limiting and filtering out
sensory information that we don't want to pay attention to,
like the fact that my butterfly just changed color.
Haha.
Yeah, you still can't multitask.
In reality, you sample little bits
of the environment around you, and your brain assembles that
into one stream of attention.
It's fictional.
The sampling is that cycle-- tiny waves of more attention
and then less attention, more attention, less attention.
That's the reality.
The brain activity comes in pulses
which is related to those brainwaves
that you see on EEGs in movies and television.
But that bit of knowledge is actually new.
A Princeton study was the first to connect
these specifics of our behavior to those pulses.
Amazing, right?
If we break down the mission here,
it seems like evolution was trying
to solve a very specific problem related to living in the wild,
and that is that you never know what's about to happen.
So you got to be ready.
This attention system lets our brains pay attention
to one thing, but it also lets us
choose to shift our attention to something else rapidly,
and it does this all the time.
Since we are biological and literally cannot pay attention
to two things at the same time, we evolved to pulse our level
of attention, like twisting a flashlight to the focus beam
and then the wide beam over and over and over and over and over
and over again really fast.
So when you're staring at a book or a sunset or a baby
or whatever, your ancient brain is constantly
paying you to make sure you do frequent check-ins
with your environment as a holdover
from our ancient primate antecedents.
We're not getting shorter attention spans.
We're just worse at controlling these impulses.
The illusion that our mind creates
is that our attention is wide and also focused,
but in reality it's a cycle.
So next time you're bathing in a single story, just soak it up.
Let all that focus wash over you.
Be present because it's rare.
Your attention is pulsing constantly.
And luckily, our brains trick us into believing
we are not weird biological robots, but we are.
I firmly believe the more we know about ourselves
and our experiences, the better that we are all
going to be at humaning.
What do you think?
Before you tune out, share this video
with a couple of friends who think that they can multitask.
This episode of Uno Dos of Trace was graciously
supported by Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning community
for creators with more than 25,000 classes in design,
business, technology, photography, marketing,
or film and video-- which is my favorite, of course.
You should try out The Art Of The Story--
Creating Visual Narratives.
Debbie Millman is a delight.
Skillshare is the perfect place to keep you
learning and thriving in 2019.
So because you're here with me on Uno Dos of Trace,
you can get two months of Skillshare for free,
and after that, it is still super affordable.
An annual subscription is only $10 a month.
The first 500 of the nerd fam to use the magic link
and join the more than seven million creators learning
with Skillshare will get two free months,
and you support Uno Dos of Trace.
It's a win-win.
Fun fact about this story.
It was mostly done thanks to two studies.
Researchers at Princeton were studying macaques
and discovered this attention cycle,
so they pinged researchers at Berkeley
to see if the same thing happened in humans,
and our brains turn out they work the same way
and this never, ever, ever happens.
Most of the time, scientists assume
there's a human analog for primate behavior,
but in this case, they actually tested it
and published both papers in the same issue of the same journal,
which is amazing, and to be honest,
requires a lot of focus and attention
to timelines and details and all sorts of stuff.
Thank you so much for watching, everyone.
I put a couple of links to the Stroop test
in the description in case you want to quiz your friends.
The time code link's down there as well if you just
want to send the video.
And thanks for watching Uno Dos of Trace.
Let me know if you have questions about stuff.
I love hearing ideas from you all.
Congratulations to us all on getting 20,000 subscribers.
It's so exciting.
And this journey is just getting started.
All right, humans.
I love you.
I'll see you in the future.