Interest and attention
How does interest relate to attention? Can most people choose to pay attention to things that they’re not particularly interested in for long periods of time? I wouldn’t think so. And yet many descriptions of ADD and ADHD (especially, it seems, those geared toward children with the disorder) say that “it much easier … to sustain attention in … work … when tasks are interesting, meaningful, or in some way motivating …”, as if this were something unique to individual afflicted with ADD. But that just sounds like bullshit to me. Even Wikipedia says that “[those affected] face some of their greatest challenges in the areas of self-control, self-motivation, as well as executive functioning”.
On the contrary, it seems more likely to me (and I speak as someone medicated for the disorder) that most people who have these problems have them because they work on very abstract and complicated subject with very little immediate emotional or adrenal influence. And, for humans, that’s a recipe for those problems.
Oooh, shiny. Humans have a “propensity to focus on emergency situations to the exclusion of background phenomena which may be more significant.” They “respond more readily to novel objects and fast changes.” The problem is that our attention allocation system is very poorly calibrated to with the level of complexity that our modern environment has. So many of the stimuli that we have to attend to over the course of the day is so far removed from its eventual impact on our lives, even when that impact is certain and substantial, that we cannot allocate it the amount of attention relevent to its actual importance to us.
But surely “colorful and moving” aren’t the only things that grab our attention. Obviously, people are fascinated by and spend countless time on many things that are quite bland. For instance, crossword puzzles. What draws our attention to crossword puzzles?
I’m going to have to read more about this.
UPDATE: I read a little more about this. (I’m going to the good library tomorrow.) Dopamine reinforcement probably has a lot to do with all this. Which is quite discouraging.
