Understanding Attention

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We do everything so incredibly fast these days. Eat fast, drink fast, and get our various meetings over as quickly as possible. But all this speed has a price.

A friend of mine, who is a professor of English literature, became first the dean and then the vice-provost of her university. She did that for many years, and she was very good at it. But she complained more and more about not being able to enjoy the novels and poetry that had been her life before. This became so acute that she resigned from her post as vice-provost.

That is when she discovered she is not alone with this problem. In fact, there are entire courses designed to help high-level executives and administrators rediscover reading for pleasure. But the problem exists not just for these executives and administrators, but for all of us. We are all often forced to skim through texts, maybe an official document, a student essay, or a newspaper article, as quickly as we possibly can.

If you do this too much, it becomes a habit, and it's a habit that is very difficult to shake. If you skim 20 emails, 15 newspaper articles, and five official contracts in the morning, it is very difficult not to have the same attitude toward a literary text you may want to enjoy during your lunch break.

How do we break this habit?

We need to understand the difference between slow reading and fast reading. This difference is not really that of absolute speed. These are very different mental processes. When you read fast, you always know what you are looking for, or at least what you are not looking for, those are the bits where you can skip ahead. You know what to expect (maybe based on the title of the article or because you know the person who wrote you that email). And it is these expectations that guide the reading activity.

But this is not how we read novels and poetry. We don't have fixed expectations when we approach these texts, and more often than not, we don't really know what it is that we are looking for. And we definitely don't know what it is we are not looking for. Any part of the text could be rewarding and fascinating, and skipping over them is not a good idea.

We can put this distinction in terms of the kind of attention that is being exercised. In fast reading, our attention is laser-focused: we know what we want, and we want to get it as efficiently as possible. But in the case of slow reading, our attention is open-ended: it can linger on some sentences and words and then move on. It is diffuse, distributed attention. There is a certain kind of freedom in this open-ended exploration of a text that is blatantly missing from skimming. And this feeling of freedom is not really worth losing to gain a couple of seconds.

Understanding Attention

Find a therapist to help with ADHD

The impact of hyperlinks, skim reading, and perceived importance when reading on the Web. PLoS One. 2022 Feb. L.T. Jayes, et al.

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