Attention!

V: Attention
This day begins with Ray Charles signing the “Mess Around” in the speaker behind me. In an ironic twist, the artists were content to work in silence until about five minutes after I got here. Now there’s music.

Wow. I swear to God that’s a chihuahua in a fight on the other side of the parking lot behind me, snorting and snarling like some kind of gremlin. I can hear it through the open garage door behind me. Oh, it sounds bad. I’m fighting the urge to go look. Eez. Or maybe I don’t want to look. Also, the dust is getting worse. It’s getting thicker the closer we get to the opening of the Habitats show. Plus, this is a dusty time of year since it’s hot out and windy, but the afternoon rains haven’t come yet. With all the doors open, the dust just blows on in. I just sneezed one of those huge, throw-your-head-forward, maniacal sneezes aimed at clearing every last particle out of your sinuses and beyond. I realize I’m unprepared for allergies, which could seriously disrupt the writing process. I have no Kleenex or Claritin D. I will make a note of this for tomorrow.

I get another text from my boyfriend: “Xoxo and also distraction distraction distraction.” Yes, he’s having fun with this. The problem is that I’m having fun with it too, so I keep looking at the texts when they come in. I could argue, however, that it’s not what I’m doing (joking, communicating) but how I’m doing it (sporadically, while trying to get something else done) that’s the problem. Not so long ago, people used to get the mail delivered once a day. And at one time each day, they received all the messages anyone had sent to them in the past 24 hours. That time, actually, didn’t end for me until somewhere around 1995, when I got my first email account. But even then, not having a computer of my own, I didn’t have instant access to those messages until 2002, when I connected my new laptop to a modem and accessed the Internet from home for the first time. Of course texting wasn’t even in the picture until after I got my first cell phone, in 2006. And then I didn’t bother to learn how to use the texting feature until some time in 2008, when my friend Emiliano moved to Santa Fe from California and threw all his new friends into confusion by texting us instead of calling. No one in my age group in Santa Fe really did that yet. That was only two years ago. Two years.

It’s no surprise people are sounding the alarm on distraction. Both the scale and the rate of the change in how information comes at us are staggering. There’s an urgency in peoples minds about the issue because it’s simply so huge that we feel, whatever problems may arise from it, we’re not prepared to handle them. I mean, what do you do if you’re that 40-something guy who ended up as the managing editor of a magazine and now, instead of ever reading a book, you spend your days manically returning emails, searching the web, answering phone calls, and shuffling half-written documents? This isn’t what your father’s life looked like. Your dad had clients who sat in his office and chatted about golf for two hours before taking five minutes to make the business decision at hand. Then your dad bent over his work and, uninterrupted, got it done.

Twenty-seven minutes later, boyfriend sends me two more texts: “Distrac” and “tion.” I almost reply just to tell him I thought that was clever, but I delete my draft after realizing I’ll only prompt more texts from him.

I’m starting to nest. A short while ago I noticed, on the platform against which my desk is shoved, a straw basket containing colorful foam sculptures. There’s a little frog creature, in green and pink, and a three-petaled flower in yellow and orange. I’ve pulled them out and set them on my desk, on either side of my computer. It makes me feel cozy, which is relaxing and, ideally, will help me concentrate. Some writers are minimalists—they think best after clearing away the clutter. I’m sort of the opposite. I want to be surrounded by things that make me feel good, like foam critters.

Are these critters a distraction? I’m not sure. They just sit there. I consider what economist Herbert A. Simon said in 1971: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources.” A logical inversion of this argument would be to say that poverty of information leads to a wealth of attention. This would suggest that, to achieve the greatest level of attention, I should reduce irrelevant incoming information to the barest minimum, and therefore move the critters off my desk. But I don’t want to do that. And actually, science is on my side this time.

When it comes to peace and quiet, there is in fact danger in too much of a good thing. Studies done in the 1960s revealed that the human brain requires a certain level of stimulation in order to function properly. Removing all stimuli (read: potential distractions)—as was done in experiments in which people were put in empty, evenly lit, silent rooms for days on end—severely fucks a person up. Some of the test subjects started hallucinating after as little as 15 minutes, their minds producing their own sensory information to fill the void of their deprived senses. People’s visions grew increasingly bizarre, even macabre, and would not cease until they returned to normal surroundings—someplace where there were things to watch, and listen to, and smell, and feel.

So what’s the right amount of distraction? If we break down what was happening in this experiment, we see that it was about more than distraction. It was also about it’s opposite: attention. In removing all distractions, the experiment’s designers also removed everything a person might possibly pay attention to. It looks like this poverty of attention—the same problem Simon pinpointed, but for a different reason—was truly what was so hard on the brain.

I lay my head on the corner of my computer keyboard, resting my cheek against the warm metal. As it happens, this makes me look out the open doorway, through which I see, across the empty street, a large tree. Its branches, all leafy and green, blow in the wind in a cradle-rocking sort of way. In a moment I realize I feel a little bit refreshed. And I’m amazed. Of course I knew that being in nature is healthy, that meditative movement feels good. But I never really noticed it before. Not like this. Not in the sense that I am aware of it at the very moment it is saving me.

What exactly is happening here I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s not interruptive, and that’s the key. The tree isn’t yanking me away from my thoughts about this essay. It’s just giving me an opportunity to let them lie for a moment. There must be something unconscious going on that’s important here. Like, my brain has been only separated from my task on a very superficial level; the rest of my mind is still holding onto it and working through it. The distractions that hurt our lives—what writer Sam Anderson dubbed “the technology of distraction” in his New York magazine piece on the topic—are the ones that pull us away much more completely.

That tree is giving me something to pay attention to, but it doesn’t feel distracting. I suspect this has to do with the kind of information it’s communicating to me. What I mean is, information can be defined on a very fundamental level not as knowledge (what we usually take it to mean), but as a change in conditions that, if we were recording changes, would require us to take note. A tree blowing in the wind, then, is always providing us with new information. It never does exactly the same thing twice, so we can’t put our record-keeping on autopilot and only note when the cycle repeats. Instead it does nearly the same thing in an infinite number of ways, while always staying within certain parameters. The leaves aren’t falling off; branches aren’t breaking. The leaves are just blowing, doing their thing again and again, yet never identically. In other words, that tree is completely predictable and utterly unpredictable at the same time.

Lots of things in nature are like this, and they tend to make us feel good: a campfire, gently breaking waves, clouds forming and transforming. Watching these processes relaxes us and makes us feel like space is opening up inside us. This tree is playing some sort of amazing game with my twin functions of attention and distraction. It requires just enough attention and provides just enough distraction that rather than taxing my brain, it actually feeds me in some way. I suspect that our brains have evolved in sync with nature in this sense, so that our ideal baseline levels of information to be attended to or distracted by—that balance point, maybe, where we get just the right amount of each function—are aligned with the baseline levels of change and repetition in nature. I suspect that we’ve evolved to think best when we’re in the conditions in which we evolved.

Agh. And then a guy appears between me and the tree out of nowhere, stands in the parking lot over some sort of plastic dome, and starts blasting it with spray paint. Which blows indoors and straight to me. Now I’m sucking spray paint fumes. And I feel more tired than ever. I want coffee. Wow, do I want coffee. Iced coffee. It’s hot out. Not insanely hot but hot enough to get old after a while.

A girl on a platform to my right is thatching the roof of a miniature white clapboard house. Actually I don’t know if it’s clapboard. Actually I don’t know what clapboard is. But it sounds good. And her thatching job looks pretty good, too. The grass she’s using is still green, so it has a sort of fresh look to it.

It’s infinitely easier to write about the distractions than in spite of them. To my far right, a skinny kid whose name I’ve forgotten constructs a miniature adobe hut, pulling straw-riddled mud from a wheelbarrow behind him. Then he pauses and heads past me, and I can’t resist telling him the house-cave looks really good. He says thanks, and asks how the writing’s going. Good, I tell him. But I’m a little fried right now. I get a little fried near the end.