Quotes About Attention

The results also reinforce something that Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. "How do users read on the web?" he asked then. His succinct answer: "They don't.

The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits.

Sam Anderson, "In Defense of Distraction," New York, May 25, 2009.

vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,

their eyes skipping down the page in a pattern that resembled, roughly, the letter F.

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That's not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It's also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Bruce Friedman,

In a renowned 1956 paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," Princeton psychologist George Miller observed that working memory could typically hold just seven pieces, or "elements," of information.

takes a delay of just 250 milliseconds in page loading for people to start abandoning a site.

Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them.

Intensive multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy," commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research.

The strip-mining of "relevant content" replaces the slow excavation of meaning. IT

we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap.

Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we're online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively.

The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.

sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.

The mounting evidence of an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions should give us all pause. As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: a glass cockpit can also be a glass cage.

those with the helpful software were found "to aimlessly click around" as they tried to crack the puzzle.27

the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in.

la Red atrae nuestra atención sólo para dispersarla.

reading books chronically understimulates the senses."11

The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything on you. Only it turns out it doesn't feel like that at all. We don't feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to."1

A 1989 study showed that readers of hypertext often ended up clicking distractedly "through pages instead of reading them carefully.