Transcription
Hey, all righty. Uh, lecture six five. Uh, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about attention today. But to try to make you pay attention to the lecture, um, I will, I will tell you a little bit about attention, a little bit of research about, really, the two different ways our attention is, is attributed or brought onto it, to certain objects and such. But then I'm going to bring this all back to the issue of how to study effectively and, and what this all means for that. Okay?
Um, so, um, you know, battling distraction is, is what we'll ultimately call it in terms of studying. So there's a payoff at the end. If, if you think about what I'm talking about as we go through, um, I guarantee you, you'll learn something that will help you get better grades. All right. So with that, let's jump to lecture six five, attention, passive versus active. Yeah. And this is the real goal of this lecture is, is to give you a sense that, you know, I said in my earlier lecture, when we attend to something, it's more likely to get into awareness. The question we'll focus on now is, well, who decides what we attend to? How does that happen? You know, how, wha, and, and what you realize is there's sort of two ways it happens. So let's do the first way. You ready? Boom. Where's Waldo? This is an example of active attention. Oh my goodness, I just see him. That's kind of interesting. I'll let you look around a little while. What's interesting is I, um, circled somebody that was as close as I could find a Waldo, but he wasn't really Waldo, but it was the closest I could find. So I circled him. I'll show you that circle, but I now realize I was wrong. I've now found the right Waldo. So I'm going to have to move my circle for you. But I'll let you look a little bit before I do that. Here's the important point. Who is in control of your attention right now? Who? And by who, I guess I mean the frontal lobes or the limbic system again. Remember, we've talked about those two sorts of, um, different influences on your behavior. Uh, this is more frontal lobes, right? This is you, your consciousness, if I may say, in charge. You have a goal. You're looking for a specific, um, well, you're looking for Waldo, and Waldo is defined as sort of having these features, but of course, not necessarily in this orientation. He's a human being. We could see him in any orientation, but he'll always have these pants, this shirt, and this hat. That was the hat that was bugging me in my other example. And I guess he always has a cane as well. And so you now are intentionally moving your attention around the scene, trying to find something that matches that. And this is what we're going to call active attention. Okay? So again, I thought, hey, here he is. That's not him. Um, I know where he really is. Uh, and, and let's do that right now. Um, shall we? So I'm gonna get out of here and I'm gonna move my little active attention because, in fact, I put the active attention right on top of Waldo, which is crazy. Here's the real Waldo. All right. So let me do, bring this back up. Boom. Where is he really? He's right there. Okay. So now we see, um, the real Waldo, and we go, ah. But that's active attention. And in fact, you know, to give you even a sense of the geekier terminology that researchers use, we actually call what you just did serial self-terminating search. And what we mean by that is search. You're searching for Waldo. Serial, you probably felt like your eyes were just kind of going around, you know, looking at one and then the next and then the next. It certainly wasn't the case that Waldo just stood out. You had to kind of look around, and you keep looking around until you find him. And once you find him, the search is over. That's the self-terminating. So serial self-terminating. Once you're looking for something, once you find it, it stops. The search stops. Okay. Fancy jargon, um, that we use. Just why not? Why not introduce it to you? The core point here, though, is that you are the one controlling your attention. Your frontal lobes, your goals, your, your conscious mind is the one controlling the attention here. Okay?
Now, let's compare that to passive attention. So passive attention is when a sudden onset of lighter sound, oh, what was that? A sudden onset of light, um, or, uh, other stimulation can automatically pull our attention to that stimulation. When something just pops up and pops away, we tend to look at it. Now, you know, keep in mind, so, so we're now going back to limbic system, right? This is a very primitive, um, system. And if something suddenly popped up in our world, you know, it might be a predator. If we talk the ancient world, and we'd better get our attention over to it. We don't want something just to pop up and we're like, blase, and the predator comes up and eats us, right? If something new suddenly enters our world, it makes a lot of sense to attend to it. And let's talk evolution here a little bit. You know, the idea here would be, well, maybe some people attended to things that popped up, and other people didn't. Well, yeah. So the ones that didn't probably got eaten, eaten before they could reproduce and have children. Because, you know, the people who are attending to those things are more likely to survive and therefore reproduce and have children. And therefore, we are the descendants of individuals who attended to things when they suddenly appeared and disappeared in our environment. Um, okay. I mentioned here that salient stimuli can also grab our attention, pull our attention. We talked about this a little bit in the cocktail party phenomenon, that our name, for example, can pull our attention. So I'm using the word pull here. And, and this is the real difference. You know, with active, we are moving our attention around, and we are in control of the movement of the attention. With passive, it's the environment that pulls our attention somewhere, whether we want it there or not. Okay? So we just automatically look at these things as they pop up. They kind of pull us around. Okay? So, cool. You get the idea here. I want to tell you about a research project that tries to get at this and, and tries to sort of, this is one of the fun things we sometimes do. Fun, geeky, fun, but it's fun nonetheless. We will say, okay, so there's this process that pulls attention certain places, and there's this ability to sort of consciously control attention. What if we put these two in competition with each other? Who would win? Okay? So how do we do that? Well, we do that using something called the anti-sakad task. So let me come to the anteced code. Let's start with the proceed code. In the process version, people would be told, start by fixating your eye on the center, and then either to the left or the right. This is a case where it's to the right. A dot will appear, and when that dot appears, what we want you to do is move your attention to the dot. So in a pro-sakad, your, your goal, oops, sorry, your goal is to move your attention towards the thing that just appears, which is the same as your natural tendency, right? So your active and your passive attention are both doing the same thing in this case. They have the same ultimate effect. They pull, they bring your attention to here. They either pull your attention, the passive forces, or, you know, you guide your attention over there because that's what you're, you're supposed to do. Okay?
Um, now, in the anti-sakad task, this is where we oppose them, and this is kind of cool. What you're told is, focus here. A dot will appear on one side or the other. What we want you to do is to move your attention in the direction opposite of where the dot appears. So we see here, the dot appears to the right, and this person is shifting their attention to the left. Okay? So they're going anti. So a sakad is an eye movement, by the way. And so they're doing an anti-sakad, meaning moving away from the stimulation, where here they're moving towards the stimulation. Okay? The passive attention will always try to pull you to that stimulation. That onset will always try to pull you there. And in this condition, your task is to try to overcome that. No, no, don't look over there. Look the opposite way. And so this is, we're now giving you a conscious goal, look the opposite way. That goes against your natural tendency. Okay? And we're really interested in how you do with respect to that. One second. All right. T, T, delivery, very civilized. Um, okay. So what can we now do with this anti-sakad task? Well, so let me show you these diagrams and let's work through it slowly. So we're going to look at these two conditions, what we call a pro-sakad, you've seen that on the left, the correct, and an anti-sakad error. Okay? So let's go through these slowly. So first of all, if we just do that pro-sakad thing, so here, you know, you start in the middle, but then something pops up, and you're supposed to look there. And what, and what we're seeing is it takes you a little while to sort of process that something popped up. This is how many milliseconds, but after like about 400 milliseconds, four tenths of a second, something like that, you move your eyes over where they should be. Okay? You move your eyes over here. So, so this is going towards. Anytime it's positive like this, it's going towards the flash, towards the dot. And in this case, of course, that's exactly, exactly what you were asked to do. So everything's fine here. The anti-sakad is, of course, the interesting one. This is where you have to go against your natural tendency. So this is someone who does it correctly. You see they do eventually look the opposite direction. So again, a positive means they're going towards the flash, negative means they're going away from the flash. That's what they're supposed to do, right? They're supposed to note the flash and then move their attention the other way, move their eyes, I should say, the other way. And we can, I, I wasn't clear about this, I should have been. We can track their eyes. We have little cameras, and we can see how quick their eyes move, and that's exactly what you're seeing here. You're seeing that, okay, eventually the eyes move to that left side as they're supposed to. But the important part here is look how much longer this takes than this. Okay? When these two things are working together, active attention and passive attention, it's very quick to go look at the flash. But when you have to look at the other direction, you're like, oh, it's hard. It's hard to, that flash is pulling you that direction, and you have to really get past that passive attention pull to be able to do your goal and, and go to the side you want. And in fact, what we're seeing down here is quite often we fail. Uh, and this is the pattern that you'd see where you fail, where somebody starting out, and there's the flash, and they get grabbed by the flash. So they go and look at the flash, even though they're not supposed to. This is an anti-sakad task. You're not supposed to, but they go look at the flash, and they look at it for a while, and they go, oh crap, I'm supposed to be looking on the other side. And then they pull their attention down to that other side. Okay? And so one of the things with the anti-sakad task is you see both of these. Okay? Sometimes this passive attention just takes over, even though it's not the person's will, you know, not their goal, but passive attention can take over active attention. When active attention wins, it has to fight off that passive, that natural tendency to want to go to where the flash is. Uh, and so this is a, you know, this is these are conditions right here where we've got these two kind of fighting with each other. And you see that, yeah, sometimes the conscious mind wins, but it takes it a while to win. And in fact, sometimes it doesn't win at all. The unconscious mind wins and pulls our attention to the, to the, um, uh, to the flash before the conscious mind can kind of get in there and go, okay, come on, let's, let's get back to where we're supposed to be. Okay? So this, you know, this is some sense is, is an encapsulation of this whole idea of us having these two different selves, the frontal lobes, the limbic system, uh, the limbic system being much more primitive, being much more focused on keeping us alive, and therefore wanting us to look at things that just flash right up. But our conscious mind may have goals that differ from that. And sometimes, if our conscious goals differ from our natural instincts, then it can be effortful to make those conscious goals come to life. Okay?
This looks, this is sort of a weird situation, you know, looking at flashes of light and stuff. I think it's a nice, simple experimental situation, but we can now generalize what we've just talked about to something that's really relevant to you every day and something that, you know, well, okay. So let's take these concepts and bring it into place. So let's say, okay, I say online learning here, it's generally learning, but, uh, certainly the slide I took from an online learning thing I did, I, I like to sort of mind your monkey. Um, it's something that was on one of these slides, this notion of the instant gratification monkey. When they say instant gratification monkey, they kind of mean passive attention. Um, and, and yeah, so this is the, this is the easy way to think about it. So here you are, here's your brain, and this is your frontal lobes, and this is your limbic system. Okay? Your limbic system is all about emotional, emotion, and instinct, and habits, and etc. Your rational decision maker wants to do rational things. And so you have an exam coming up, you want to study, you want to read the textbook, learn stuff, exactly study. You know, you have to do that to do well on the exam. But then maybe this happens, right? You sit in front of your computer, you go to study, and then it's like, oh, let's just watch a bunch of YouTube videos on creatures of the deep sea, and then go on a YouTube spiral that takes us through Richard Feynman talking about string theory and ends with us watching interviews with Justin Bieber's mom. This is what happens, right? And so what they're showing here is the instant gratification monkey can grab the wheel, or I would say your limbic system can grab the wheel, and it can pull you away from your intention, and it can make it really hard for you to sit there and study. You keep getting distracted by things. You know, that's the general term we use, but now you know distraction means the environment is pulling you somewhere. Now, how is it doing that? Well, welcome to your internet addiction. It's interesting, by the way. Um, there is a formal, um, disorder called internet addiction. Now we recognize that some people are so addicted to whether it's playing video games or the internet in general, that it's really negatively impacting their lives in significant ways. And so it's seen as an addiction, you know, like any other to some extent. Now, we all have this addiction, but for many of us, it's not really negatively impacting our lives, but it does in certain cases. And studying is one of them. Let's think about these phones. They are programmed to be instant gratification monkeys. They are programmed to be passive attention grabbers. Um, especially things like notifications. So what happens? You know, you're sitting there, you're studying, um, you finally sat down, you're finally in front of your computer. Um, and so maybe this is your computer, and you put your phone beside your desk because we're never, you know, we never have our phone out of reach. Um, and there you are, um, starting to get into the chapter, and what happens? This is something's going on over there. You know, that's a sudden onset. Um, and it usually also has like a flash of something, something pops up on our phone. Our phone vibrates, it may even make a sound if we have an alarm set. Bing, something like that. All of that directs our attention to our phone. If we have our phone feeding our computer, then, you know, maybe someone sends us a text message right across our computer, right where we're staring and trying to study. Right there is a little thing. Oh, grabs our attention, right? That's that's passive attention. Oh, so-and-so is asking what I'm doing Saturday night. Boom. I'm distracted right there. I go. And so these phones are constantly, constant sources of distraction. Even when they're not sending us notifications, you know, even when they're not actively distracting us, we still sometimes think, oh, there might have been something cool that happened. Maybe somebody responded to my post, maybe whatever, whatever. And oh, I'd like to go check that. And we get pulled again to our phone because of something like that. So the point I'm making to you is the biggest enemy of your ability to sit and focus on studying, uh, is technology. Um, and especially, you know, the kinds of things that phones, social media, that kind of stuff. You've probably heard people say, young people now these days can't focus their attention as long. They, they have no ability to, yeah, to just, to attend to something for any period of time. I don't think your ability to attend is any worse than our ability to attend, but I think you've embraced a world full of distractions and full of things that are constantly pulling your attention somewhere else, full of passive attention grabbers. And that's why you can't attend, not that you don't have the ability to attend, but that you're much more likely to get distracted in the process than older people who maybe aren't as plugged in, so to speak. Okay?
So what's this all mean for studying? You can find more information here, but, you know, very common sense. Once you understand the science of attention and how attention works and how it is opposing your desire to focus and study, then you have some very clear ways of, of doing things, of, of optimizing your study. So first of all, create an area you use only for learning. I have a little depiction of what that area could look like or there, but, you know, this is for other psychological reasons, but, but don't sit on your bed and try to learn. Your bed is a place to sleep, and your brain, you want your bed to be associated with sleep. If you start studying in bed, one of two things is going to happen. You're going to fall asleep while studying, or the next time when you go to bed and want to sleep, you'll start to think about schoolwork because now you're connecting your bed with schoolwork and studying. That's not what you want. You want a desk somewhere, you want a table somewhere, and that's the place where you work. Okay? A defined space. Now, most critical, do not bring your cell phone with you when you are in your learning space. I know this sounds crazy, but you can be apart from your cell phone. In fact, you know, one of the really fun things I like to show students is there's this thing on the, on the side here, I don't know if you know about it, it's called a power button. It's amazing. You can push it and hold it, and your phone goes to sleep. It shuts up. Some of you are thinking, gasp, what? It's not on? That is the best thing you could do. Turn your cell phone off. Let it be off for an hour or two while you're studying. You can turn it on after study, and, and I guarantee you will probably have missed nothing of importance during that time. We have this notion of fear of missing out, right? You know, worrying that you're missing something. Get over that. What you're missing is the opportunity to study well. You're missing the opportunity to show the professor and the university what you're really capable of because you're being disabled by your technology. It's continually distracting you. So fight back. Fight back. Turn it off. If you turn it off, then that's it. It's not going to be buzzing, it's not going to be putting lights. Everything's great. It's also not going to be sending things to your computer. And this is another general thing. If you're using a computer primarily to learn, it's a good idea not to, you know, connect that up with your phone the way I have mine connected after my phone, you know, so you're not seeing every social media thing, you're not getting a notification of everything that happens, uh, on your phone. Try to keep your computer just like that space, all about learning. Okay? If necessary, use noise-canceling headphones because if you're in a busy space, you know, I've been talking about your phone and your computer distracting you, but the real world can distract you as well. If you're in a place where there's constant stuff happening around you, well, you know, there's almost two levels of that. Um, there's sort of an optimal. Like I used to be able to work in a coffee shop. I used to go to a coffee shop and write a lot of papers and stuff, and I found I could really attend there because it was almost like the buzz was so much that it became just a buzz, and, and somehow I was able to use that to attend to what I have to do. But it's almost when the buzz isn't so much, when if you were in that, in that, um, coffee shop, and every now and then somebody walked in, that would be more likely to attract your attention than if it was full and there was a line of people. You know, just those occasional onsets of people would grab your attention a little bit more. So all this to say, the world will grab your attention too. If you're in a place where there's a lot of stuff happening, consider some noise-canceling headphones, uh, and so you can be, you know, you can be sitting in your living room with your parents watching TV, but if you have your noise-canceling headphones, you're in your space, you're looking at your wall, you can create a space where the only attention at play is your active attention, because it's the active attention you want when you study. Okay?
I alluded to something at the bottom here. Just start learning the Zeigarnik effect. That's around procrastination. A way to help you beat procrastination. If you want to learn more about that, just search Zeigarnik effect, just like you see it there, and procrastination, and you'll find websites that will give you advice on how to harness psychology to help you beat procrastination. Okay? And this link, by the way, just talks more about creating an effective study space. But again, when you think about all this, think about it in terms of attention. And so as we now kind of zoom out bigger, you know, the critical point here is, yes, we sometimes control what we attend to in the world, and we call that active attention. But very often, the world pulls our attention to certain things. And, you know, advertisers, media play, they're all trying, they're all competing for our attention. And they know the psychology to use to pull us. It's all been built into our phones. Our phones are just perfect examples of somebody harnessing psychology to do to create what they want. And what they want is that phone in your hand. They want you constantly paying attention to your phone. And my goodness, they've been pretty successful, I would say. Just take a look around you and see how many people are staring at their phones all the time. Yeah. And, and there you got it. Okay? So, good. I hope that makes you appreciate attention. I hope that makes you appreciate what your phone's doing to you. And I hope that gives you some advice about how to study well and nail my exams. That would be cool with me. All righty. Talk to you soon. Bye.