Shaping Space to Improve Your Attention

The art of deep engagement

Recently a close friend and I went to see Dune: Part 2 in theaters. While I could sing the praises of this film and the minds behind it all day, there was something in particular that the movie and its predecessor excelled in: moments of silence.

Several scenes in the movie were void of dialogue, score, and sometimes movement. They came in stark contrast to the more thunderous moments that define the film and felt almost meditative in their execution. Oddly enough, what stuck out to me in these scenes wasn’t happening on screen, but amidst the audience.

The entire theater would mimic the scene in its tranquility. No one moving, chewing, or reaching for their popcorn — I was nearly tempted to hold my breath so as not to break the shared stillness. In these moments, the degree of enticement was palpable and our collective attentiveness to the film became most evident.

Several weeks prior to seeing the movie, I had listened to a podcast interview with Psychologist Gloria Mark, an author and researcher at the University of California, Irvine, whose research on attention had suggested the attention spans of modern society were shrinking.¹ The concept remained on my mind up to finally going to see Dune.

As I left the theater, I couldn’t help but think — “How in the world can a group of individuals with the so-called ‘short attention spans’ endemic to modern culture, not only be able to sit through a nearly 3-hour film, but remain both mentally and physically arrested by it?”

Mark’s data had stretched back over 20 years. Her research team measured people’s attention using stopwatches and computer logging data, marking how long an individual spent on a given screen before switching to another — from a Word document to email, for example. In 2003, they found that

“attention spans averaged about two-and-a-half minutes on any screen before people switched. In the last five, six years (2017~2023), they’re averaging 47 seconds on a screen”.²

This data aligns with most of our intuitions about attention spans. TikToks, Reels, and other short media forms appear to dominate the digital space. But if attention capacity is degrading, shouldn't all mainstream media be getting shorter to accommodate this change, including film?

After all, according to a study by The Economist, the average length of movies has actually increased by around 32% over the last century, from one hour and 21 minutes in the 1930s to one hour and 47 minutes in 2022.³

How do we reconcile the apparent atrophy of attention spans with the increase in film runtimes? The success of longer movies like Dune (a 2 hr. 46 min. runtime) or Avengers: Endgame (a 3 hr. 2 min. runtime) suggests we may not have an issue with the spans of our attention at all.

So what’s happening?

Attention, Its Opposite, and Its Enemy

The answer to this question resides in distinguishing between attention, fatigue, and distraction.

We can think of attention as an internal capacity —our brain’s method of curating the vast amount of stimuli we’re assailed with every millisecond, underscoring the salient portions and diminishing the unnecessary; like shining a narrow-beam flashlight into a vast dark forest.

Attention fatigue can be thought of as a temporary reduction in that capacity. Our brain is a costly organ, accounting for 20% of our body’s energy consumption, with glucose as its primary currency. Higher cognitive tasks that require more focused attention also require more glucose.⁴ As our storehouse of glucose is depleted, attention fatigue sets in; like a flashlight dimming from a low battery.

Distraction, on the other hand, can be considered an external phenomenon; the state where stimuli continually steal attention away from another source. This differs from attention fatigue — rather than reducing attention, distraction divides it. These are the other noises in the forest loud enough to spook us into haphazardly shifting our flashlight from place to place.

In this way, attention and distraction are inversely correlated. What we have perceived to be a gradual loss in our capacity for attention may instead be the increase in a distraction-rich ecosystem.

The Attention Economy

While attention has always been a limited and valuable resource, it has never been as profitable as in modern times. The subscription-based model has become a big player on the economic stage, shifting business incentives from selling a product once to selling the engagement of a product ad infinitum. Maximizing engagement and extracting our attention is now a primary means to a financial empire.

The term “attention economy,” coined by polymath Herbert A. Simon in the 1960s, has been used to describe this general state of affairs. The Center for Humane Technology⁵ notes that

Because companies are able to profit from your attention, there is intense competition within the attention economy.

Social media apps are incentivized, or motivated, to develop increasingly persuasive techniques. — notifications, targeted content, personalized feeds, and more — to:

1. Keep you coming back

2. Get your friends to use them

3. Collect more data about you so that they can get better at capturing your attention and influencing your behavior

Companies have to find more and more ways to relentlessly pull your attention away from something else onto their product or service to remain competitive. As far as businesses are concerned, the art of distraction is lucrative.

The all-out brawl for our attention by third parties has turned distraction into an epidemic, starving us of the rich experiences only accessible through intentional and prolonged engagement.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”

-Herbert A. Simon

But does all of this matter? Wading in the Ocean of Distraction has become such a part of the everyday experience as to go, paradoxically, unnoticed. Is fragmented attention simply the new normal, or is it worth the effort to seek out deep experiences?

The Downside of Divided Attention

I would argue most of us have a fairly limited view of distraction. We’re aware of its downsides, but only in narrow circumstances.

When you are studying for an upcoming exam, or hustling to complete a time-sensitive work project, distraction is the obvious enemy. You know you have something to do and are leery of any roadblock. In other words, when the goal is clear, anything that mitigates progress can be easily identified and labeled a threat without question.

But what about times when there isn’t necessarily a ‘goal’? Doom-scrolling on Instagram while you should be contributing to a work meeting is clearly a counterproductive distraction — but would it remain so if you were, instead, just relaxing at home? When there isn’t a particular ‘agenda’ at hand, is distraction still considered an enemy?

The research Gloria Mark and her team conducted uncovered additional data regarding the potential pitfalls of divided attention:

“[…]We know, from lots of laboratory studies, that [attention] switching causes stress. Blood pressure rises, both diastolic and systolic pressure. There’s also a physiological marker in the body, secretion of immunoglobulin A reactivity, that shows that stress increases.

We see a correlation that the faster the switching, the higher the stress is as measured by heart rate variability. Subjective measures of people in the field also indicate that at times when their attention is shifting that psychologically they feel more stressed.”⁶

Distraction, whether during an inappropriate time or not, has undesirable side effects. We have to think of distraction as not simply something that keeps us from our goal, but anything that causes stress by reducing attention and engagement, even if there doesn’t seem to be a goal at hand.

Minor distractions can be okay, and sometimes fun, in small amounts. In times of play or relaxation, it is both easy and desirable to turn your higher brain functions off and just let your mind be pulled by whatever novel media graces your timeline. However, these moments aren’t usually few and far between. Instead, most of us are chronically distracted — at work, at home, in bed, even with our loved ones — and we’re used to it. The persistence of distraction, despite its negative effects, has been normalized.

The Benefits of Attention and Focus

Apart from the downsides of distraction, we neglect to consider the benefits of attentiveness. In the same way that there are certain opportunities only available to those who can afford them, there are certain aspects of life only available to those who are willing to pay the high cost of attention.

For example, our power of observation is greatly increased the more we practice attentiveness. By taking in more, we perceive what others miss, making us more creative and astute. Leonardo Da Vinci called this “sapere vedere” (“knowing how to see”),⁷ to which he attributed his scientific and artistic accomplishments. In her book Visual Intelligence, lawyer and art historian Amy E. Herman states

“The ability to see, to pay attention to what is often readily available right in front of us, is not only a means to avert disaster but also the precursor and prerequisite to great discovery.”⁸

We also improve our relationships when we learn to fully engage with those around us. By giving someone else your full attention you not only signal to them that they are valued, you’ll often improve the quality of the conversation by finding more points of connection. I’ve found that when I find a conversation partner boring it is simply because I haven’t paid enough attention to what they are saying. When I fully engage, I’m gifted the value and insight that was there all along but hidden behind the attention paywall.

Deep engagement also multiplies the value we extract from the greatest means of human communication across time and societies: the arts. The arts don’t merely entertain us, they also have the power to transform us, if we allow them to. Films, plays, paintings, books, etc., the spectrum of human experience, wisdom, and ideas are packaged like hidden treasures across artistic mediums. Their value is available for us to take as our own, but they require our active engagement.

You obviously can’t learn from a book you don’t read. But reading a book without attentiveness, like glancing at art, may cause us to miss important points. To passively engage is to leave behind what the artist worked so hard to pass along. We can’t experience the transformative power of the arts when we’re not fully invested.

By employing our full attention, our experiences in life become more nuanced and dynamic as we learn to recognize and accrue the gems of humanity obscured by distraction.

The capacity to attend is ours; we just forget how to turn it on.

— On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz

Reducing Distraction: Sacred Spaces

Even after we’ve resolved to improve our attention acuity and avoid a distracted lifestyle, we’ll find that willpower alone is insufficient for the task. We can’t merely rely on in-the-moment conscious effort to resist distraction; we have to create and partner with spaces that disincentivize it. Consciously tuning our environment — our attention space — to eliminate distraction and orient our focus is the key to improving our depth of engagement.

There is an incredible amount of wisdom we can pull from religious practices regarding the notion of sacredness that can aid us in curating our attention space — tried and true examples of partnering with an environment to deepen our experience.

Sacred Space: Physical

To call something sacred — an area, an object, a practice, an utterance — is to dedicate it for particular use. Sacredness is purposed, considered, and sidesteps distraction for intense, even emotional, experience. Cathedrals, Temples, Synagogues, Mosques, etc. are all sacred spaces, specially dedicated to religious liturgy. Everything from the main architecture to the interior layout is meant to align your attention. By design, when you enter these spaces you are moved into a different mindset, prepared for religious experience.

This, in part, is what makes long films like Dune so effective in the theater, and why the movie-going experience has persisted even while competing with more convenient forms of film distribution like streaming services.

By engineering an environment exclusively for films, the theater allows each movie to take hold of and transport us into its narrative. The dark room, comfortable seating, and immersive view screen, are all ways the theater enforces a sacred space designed for deep engagement.

Sacred Space: Ritual

In addition to mere layout and design, there is also ritual. Religious sacred spaces are often imbued with codes of conduct, either spoken or unspoken: expectations of dress (like the removal of one’s shoes in a Buddhist Temple), parameters of voice (like silence during Catholic Mass), the use of ritual posture (like sujūd during Islamic prayer), etc. These practices may serve theological functions, but they also contribute to our attention space.

Ritual is a surefire way of forcing our brains into focus. When I practiced Martial Arts in my teens, it was expected that we bow before entering the dojo, every time we entered, even if we stepped out quickly to grab something we left in the car. This was, of course, a sign of respect; but there was an additional cognitive effect. Stopping to take a bow before entering forced us to slow down and leave what wasn’t psychologically or emotionally needed in that space outside the door; similar to silencing our phones before we enter the theater. A minor physical act that causes a mental shift.

Sacred Space: Temporal

Beyond ritual and the physical design of a space, a key takeaway from faith traditions in creating sacred environments (and probably the most important for us to apply today) is the notion of temporal sacredness. Not only do religious practices create sacredness with space, they also do it with time.

It’s common among faith traditions to have multiple hours of the day, or specific days of the week, dedicated solely to religious activity. Portions of time are set aside exclusively for things such as prayer, study, or communal engagement as another means of aligning attention and deepening experience.

Again, we find support in Gloria Mark’s research for the advantages of allocating different times for different purposes in our non-spiritual activities as well. As an example, her work looked at the potential benefits of “communication block periods” for employees. Further on in her interview on APA’s Speaking of Psychology⁹, Mark states:

“I’m a big advocate for changes on a collective level. [Organizations] can, for example, control times during the day when electronic communications are sent. They can create a window of time when no communications would be sent, and this would be a quiet time when people can work. In our research, we find that people check email on average 77 times a day. And if you have this quiet time, at least you can curtail that checking.”

“On a societal level, there’s starting to be what’s called ‘Right to Disconnect’ laws, and there’s one in France, it’s called the El Khomri law. There’s also Ireland and Ontario [that] have policies, so other countries are starting to pick up on this, and it’s the idea that no worker can be penalized if they do not answer electronic communications before and after work hours.”

“So if we have ‘Right to Disconnect laws’, it enables people to detach from work, and that has so much psychological benefit for individuals.”

In Summary

This intentional use of space, ritual, and time evokes a level of engagement our society is in desperate need of. We seem to have lost both the desire and the ability to create sacredness in our day-to-day. Although the colloquial use of the term ‘sacred’ refers to religious practice, carving out sacredness in our lives for non-religious activities is still prudent.

Hustle culture, the great myth of multitasking¹⁰, and the ubiquity of our smartphones (accompanied by their many applications and social platforms) are just a few symptoms of a highly distracted society. We should seek to deepen our experiences and be protective of our attention spaces rather than be satisfied with the ephemeral and surface-level engagement all too common in our waking hours. Experiential enrapture should not be exclusive to movie theaters and religious buildings.

Our generation has to be even more intentional than our progenitors in fashioning sacred space if we wish to retain the art of deep engagement. By doing our best to eliminate distraction and create sacredness in our everyday activities, we slowly but surely reclaim a part of the human experience threatened by extinction.

Sources:

This article was originally published in BrianLabs. Read it on its Medium publication here: