In the 21st century, we are bombarded by various information, and the ability to selectively focus on information has become an important skill. If you and I are truly rational, our focus will be on the information that is most useful to the task at hand. But for some reason, no matter what the task at hand is, we keep looking at our phones. What makes a phone so irresistible?
Everyone knows what attention is, and at the same time, no one really understands it. Generally speaking, it allows us to focus on one specific stimulus (the attractive person in the bar) rather than all the other stimulus (many other people in the bar, the bar itself, the music played or the drink in your hands). It's a process involving selection, but until now, psychologists are still studying how it works. Should we first think about the meaning of something and then pay attention to it, or should we first attract our attention through its signal strength (such as a loud bang) and then obtain meaning through our cognitive processing area?
As early as the 1950s, psychologists such as Donald Broadbent and Colin Cherry had already debated the issue of "there are chickens first or the eggs first." Physical properties are at the starting point of our brain filtration system, while Cheri insists on meaning first, Broadbent said. He pointed out that even in a loud noise, we can always hear others calling us by our names, and he (happily) called this phenomenon " cocktail effect ".
Anne Treisman believes that all information from the senses can pass through the brain's processing system, but this information can pass through the brain's processing system at an unconscious level after it decays. In this "unconscious stream", something (such as your name) may get noticed. Freud will definitely appreciate her point of view.
Recent studies rarely involve the cocktail party effect, but many of them study brain imaging, and they believe that attention is a dynamic and competitive system. During information processing, our attention highlights certain information ("winner") at a specific moment, and suppresses other information ("loser"). This process involves many areas of the brain and depends on two aspects: your goal (looking for a friend in a red dress, so all other colors are ignored) and the intensity of the incoming stimulus (like broken glass attracts your attention more easily than anything else).
Our goal relies on the "top-down" cognitive processing process, so if you are thirsty, you will notice the bottle of water on my desk when you walk towards me. This choice is endogenous because it comes from within you. If you hit a trash can on the way to the office and hurt your calf, your attention will be attracted by the “bottom-up” sensory processing from your surroundings. This is an exogenous or exogenous process.
This system has some inherent flaws, because the absolute selectivity of information processing means we will miss something, especially when we are in an environment where space or time is tight (information is delivered in a fast flow). We also have the potential to fall victim to “change blindness”, which means we are not paying attention to the elements of change beyond our core interests. For example, if you're watching Julia Roberts have breakfast with Richard Kiel in " Pretty Beauty" you might not notice that her croissant magically turns into a pancake. So we missed information in geospatial and time. Because of this experience, we know that these "missings" are likely to happen.
The problem with mobile phones is that they focus all these attention-grabbing things on one convenient thing, and these things will create pleasant and addictive chemicals in the brain.At the exogenous level, they all make these tiny sounds, as if saying "You have text messages!" or "This is a video of our party last night!" These external stimuli are very attractive. Most importantly, you may have some serious endogenous targets – did she text me? Is that job admission notice coming? Does anyone like my photos? Has anyone commented on the pictures I shared? And, when we realize that our attention is elsewhere, we miss something, then is it that one of them really happening and I miss it?
For example, you received a message or photo. This activates the novel center of the brain, and you experience a "reward" in the form of endogenous opioids that will give you an instant happiness effect, but it will also make it harder to focus on the business meetings you are currently attending (at least physically difficult to concentrate). If you respond to funny messages/photos/videos, you will secrete another dose of dopamine for this little “achievement”, a major reward chemical, and maybe you will secrete more dopamine when you think about how wonderful it is to build a social relationship with others.
To some extent, we create our own experience rather than a state directly determined by a camera-like process. Perception is more like a controllable hallucination than an automatic recording of stimuli. ——Anne Tresman
mobile phones also give a random reward rather than a fixed reward. Behavioral Sciences B.F. Skinner, father of , confirmed that nothing is more irresistible than random rewards (he calls it a "variable proportional schedule"). He placed the animal in a box with a pressurized lever. At first, every time the animal presses the lever, food will appear, and when the animal is full, it will stop pressing the lever. When food stops appearing for a long time, they no longer press the leverage. But when food only appears occasionally when it presses the lever, the animals will constantly press the lever. (Is there any information? Yes! Is there any information? No. Is there any information? Yes?)
Interestingly, the phone may even take advantage of the power of "implicit attention". In 1894, Hermann von Helmholtz described this phenomenon. He confirmed that although the eyes may be directed to a specific point (the notepad in front of you), visual attention can be directly “implicitly” shifted elsewhere—that is, there is no need to move the eyes in the process. By keeping the phone within the peripheral visual range, we actually keep staring at this fun-filled little machine from time to time, even if we don’t look at it completely. Is there any problem with
? Unfortunately, there is a problem. In fact, there are several problems here. First, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can effectively handle multiple tasks at the same time. But our human attention is limited, and if we divide our attention to two or more tasks, it becomes very distracted (so we don’t notice too much about any of them), or if one task takes up most of the attention, the other tasks will be affected. Professor Glenn Wilson found that working on multiple tasks simultaneously, such as working to focus while knowing there is an email waiting to be read, can lead to more cognitive loss than smoking marijuana.
In addition, dopamine acts on the nucleus accumbens region of the brain. Scientists conducted an experiment on mice to provide the mice with a leverage. When this leverage is pressed, the telecom will be directly transmitted to the nucleus accumbens, playing a dopamine-like role. The mice love it so much that they keep pressing the lever; they are too lazy to eat, sleep or have sex. They just keep pressing the lever until they die.
In 2016, the Australian New South Wales government announced that they will pilot road traffic lights to attract the attention of pedestrians who sometimes accidentally walk on busy roads.These people will ignore all the clues that are whizzing by the car, the noise of the car's engine, the huge signs, and even the edge of the sidewalk under their feet. None of cars, vans, trucks and motorcycles can compete with the appeal of mobile phones, they are completely inaccessible, which is very dangerous.
This article is from "What is the use of psychological analysis? 》
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