Knock Technology received grant funding from Innovate UK to study the psychology of attention and focus in virtual communication. The fascinating results of this study are being published over the next few weeks. In the meantime, here’s a snippet from one of the articles in progress…

Human attention is a scarce commodity. It is the oil of the 21st century. The digital world today competes so aggressively for attention, that achieving a state of mental focus is a challenge. Companies want to sell to you, apps yearn for your screen time and notifications cry wolf for your eyeballs. Amidst the noise of digital media, our friends, family and colleagues try to reach us, but our technology keeps us too occupied to connect with each other.

How attention works

Our eyes send overwhelming amounts of information to our brains, as do all our other senses. According to Neuropsychologist Lars Muckli, about 11 million bits of information reach the brain every second. However, we’re only conscious of around 40-50 of these. This is what we call “thinking” - it’s the processing of curated bits of information that have been flagged by our subconscious as ‘most unusual’.

Considering how much input we receive every second and how much we are able to think about, something incredible happens in our subconscious. A part of the brain called the Thalamus filters out around 1 in every 250,000 bits of information that is considered worthy of our attention. That’s one seriously impressive spam filter. This heroic bit of grey matter processes 11 million bits of information per second from all our bodily senses and picks out around 40-50 highlights for our consciousness to deal with. It does this quietly and constantly throughout our lives, never asking for a pay rise and never complaining. We are getting distracted by something that disconnects us from one another.

How attention is disrupted

The thalamus can be hacked into sending the wrong information to our consciousness. Tech companies have designed their interfaces to appear worthy of attention. There are a few techniques that cause the thalamus to flag information as important, such as bright flashing lights, contrasting colours or unusual shapes. Anything new that doesn’t fit an established pattern in our memory. Over time, we get used to these new sensations and the thalamus starts to filter out these stimuli, leaving our consciousness in peace again…

This article is a work in progress. To be notified when it is complete, enter your email address below.