What is Attention?

When I’m teaching, I’m constantly wrestling with the kids’ attention – and my own. I have it, then I lose it. I reach, then overextend. One child is gripped, while another wanders the periphery. I tell stories, get loud, then quiet. And frustrated. The truth is I love their freedom. I love this dance.

We can all relate, especially parents and teachers. We’re all searching for a child’s attention sometimes, or a companion’s, or even our own. But what exactly is attention?

There’s a beautiful perspective from one of my favorite writers on neuroscience, but before I share that I invite you to just gape a little. Wonder. What exactly is attention? Where does it come from? How is it directed or applied? What makes us treat people (like students or ourselves) as if they can give it on command?

In other words, what’s happening in a person’s body and mind when their attention is fully given?

Stanislas DeHaene describes just that in How We Learn, a book I strongly recommend to teachers, learners, and every curious person. DeHaene is a neuroscientist, not a teacher, so it helps to understand that he is taking us all the way down to the foundation here – the neurons. He’s asking us to grapple with how learning is embodied in the physical structure of the brain.

At this level, it’s helpful to remember that anything a person learns is true learning. We’re not merely talking about school and academics, though that’s an obvious area of inquiry. We’re also talking about how eyes learn to see objects, how babies learn to walk, and how some people learn to speak kindly (or not). All of it is learned behavior, absent at birth, and later embodied in the physical structure of the body’s nervous system. How?

It All Starts with Attention

The body’s organs are receiving and processing signals day and night – sights, sounds, emotions, meanings, and more. As a result, these sense gates are flooded with information. Absolutely flooded. To function normally, most of what we pick up is ignored by the brain, and rightly so. Otherwise, we’d be overwhelmed. Fortunately, our brains evolved a way to deal with this problem – attention. Attention is the mechanism the nervous system uses both to ignore and focus. DeHaene considers it one of the four “pillars of learning.”

Imagine your body like a giant satellite dish. You’re set up to receive a huge bandwidth of signals – radio waves, light waves, text messages, phone calls, and on and on. These signals travel up the wires of your nervous system and into your brain. Attention is the nob that narrows our receiver down to a specific radio station. Everything else goes silent so that we can listen to our favorite song.

But attention in the brain doesn’t just single something out – it also amplifies, prolongs, and repeats the original signal. Repeats. The nerves and synapses that received the signal get nudged by this executive process of attention, physically repeat themselves, grow louder, and drown out the less important perceptions. It’s a lot like turning up the volume and putting our favorite song on repeat.

Learning, you may know, requires the repeated firing of nerve cells, which strengthens and supports the information they contain. Thus, attention is the first multiplier, a process that makes each synapse more likely to fire (or be remembered) in the future. The lyrics to our favorite song just pop up, whether in the shower or the car. Why? Because the chorus got our attention in the first place.

So turn to the classroom. Or any environment in which one is trying to learn. The body is at all times being bombarded by information, far too much for it to handle. So the brain’s executive function focuses attention on what truly matters in that moment. This attention causes a cascade of neural functions that soothe, repeat, amplify, and solidify the synapses that fired in the first place – making them easier to find and recall in the future.

Now imagine what happens when a child is criticized for “not paying attention” in class. This couldn’t be further from the truth. That child, like any human, is always paying attention. That is, they are always learning. It’s simply a matter of what they’re giving their attention to, and therefore what signals in their own bodies are getting repeated and learned.

Good science often recapitulates the obvious, but I see a door here for building a better sense of trust and cooperation between teachers and students (including the way we treat our own lifelong learning). It’s common to discriminate and rank children as if some are good students and others are not. “He has a hard time paying attention,” we might say. What a sad conclusion. Far better, in my opinion, to recognize the merit and context of each child’s attention.

The skill of an excellent teacher lies in earning that attention, then directing it skillfully. Attention can be attracted by force, but who likes that? Does anyone on the entire planet like having their attention grabbed by force? Even if we give it, it sends a subtle and strange message that almost requires a child to resent or question the value of their own attention in that moment. What a travesty! This is precisely the wrong message, one that tends to stifle the curiosity and self-driven exploration that makes good education shine from the inside out. Sympathy and mutual respect is a great deal more effective, as is a good story, or even a patient smile.

I take this as the essence of good learning (or good teaching, which is much the same thing) – helping a child direct and honor their attention in order to discern what’s truly of merit in that moment. Of course we’re directing a child’s attention to our lessons and curriculum, but it’s worth a little humility on the part of us as teachers. We may not always know what’s most relevant.

This brings up a beautiful and important question for me – What is worthy of a child’s attention?

This isn’t a no-brainer. It’s a difficult question in light of the social, political, and climate realities our children are inheriting, not to mention the sheer bulk of information now available to most of us. What justifies my audacity, the audacity of any teacher, or even that of an entire education department to claim lessons that are worthy of a child’s attention? I find it a difficult and valuable question to ask. One that begs mutual trust, and humility.

Postscript – All or Nothing

DeHaene likens attention to a bottleneck. It would be wonderful if we had lots of attention to give, but as we all know the brain has limited resources here. In order to learn something new, we have to give our full attention to it, and that means that all other things must disappear for the time being. Multitasking is something we only do with tasks we’ve already mastered – like driving, talking, and sipping coffee. Easy enough for most of us, but not a 16-year-old.

How new learning is incorporated into the brain’s long-term memory, a process that allows for more automaticity in our tasks, is another subject entirely (largely, it’s good sleep). But for now, the important point is that when learning a new subject or skill we have but one thread of attention to give. Hold it like a baby. Treat it with love and admiration, not like a battleground.