Even just a few years ago, we thought of our attention span as a single phenomenon. We now realize that each of our brain’s processing systems has its own attention span.
Nearly all of us have different attention spans for our Associative processors and our Sequential processors.
We also are able to activate and hold our attention and focus for differing periods of time with each of our communications processors: Listener, Mover, Reader, Observer, and Talker.
For most of us, these systems have an active state and a resting state. We may be sitting quietly in a library taking a pause from study. We’re sitting; someone beckons us to go to the window; we throw our neuromuscular system into a complex engagement. She points and whispers, “Look. A hawk,” our Observer activates as we search for an image we associate with the word. We hear a commotion outside, Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (http://lil-abner.com/al-capp/) are protesting the change to Daylight Saving Time. We may rouse our auditory processing system in order to make sense of the chanted slogans. Our companion hands us a note, “Meet me in the Ancient Greek section in 15 minutes.” To decode, our eyes recognize the pattern of the letters, integrate the letters into sounds, the sounds into meaningful patterns, the patterns into understanding. The message itself will send us back to activating another complex neuromuscular engagement.
Some of our systems go into deeper resting states than others. When one of our systems is at rest, it takes a higher degree of stimulation to rouse it from a resting state, and it may take a higher degree of importance to keep it in activation.
Some of us have systems that barely rest at all during our waking hours. We have systems that behave like radars: always on and alert to the smallest stimuli. If our Listener is highly active, we may be in a library reading and what is silence to others, to us is full of the hum of the cooling system, the footfalls of fellow patrons, the squeak of the wheel of the cart delivering books. If our Observer is highly active, what may be a still room to others, for us is full of the flicker of fluorescent lights, the shadow of clouds passing the windows, the nervous fidgeting of our fellow patron.
A neuroprocessor in an alert state makes the information taken in by that processor more obvious, can make it seem more important, and will make the information harder to ignore.
A neuroprocessor in a deep resting state requires a higher level of stimulus to activate, will be more discriminating about what it activates for, and will find the stimulus easier to ignore.
While we think we are in conscious control of our attention and focus, and often can purposely focus and attend, most of our lives are driven by the differing states of activation or rest to which our neuroprocessors naturally drift.