Where are your eyes led? Do you notice the advertisements, or the graffiti written on top of them? Maybe to avoid eye contact with someone you stare at the subway map, and start making mental notes of neighborhoods you want to explore later. Imagine you are sitting on a packed subway car. Now let’s switch our environment to be a bit more disordered. Because there is nothing “grabbing” your attention, you can focus on what you want, and for as long as you want. Perhaps you smell your trash, reminding you to take it out once you get dressed. Maybe you see a magnet on your refrigerator from Paris, which leads you down memory lane to the trip you took a few years ago. Maybe you look at your countertops and start imagining what you would change if you had the money to renovate your kitchen. What does your attention go to? Maybe you start thinking of a grocery list for next week. You are by yourself and other than the low hum of your refrigerator, it is completely silent. If you are in a more chaotic position, it will be based on an object, or objects (Goldstein, 2015).įor example, imagine you are sitting in your kitchen enjoying a cup of coffee. If you find yourself in a stagnant position, it will be based more so on the region (Goldstein, 2015). In trying to understand why our attention seems to be more fleeting, cognitive psychologists have posed this question: is attention based on location or object? Depending on your environment, the answer is both. Suddenly our attention is re-directed to people and things suddenly details that we would have for sure missed before are abruptly now as clear as day. In the technological era we live in today, deactivating a social media account is almost like discovering a new world. Even when our phone gives absolutely no indication that we have an unanswered text or phone call, many people (myself included) will check our phone without even realizing it because we thought we heard a chime. Waiting for a friend at a restaurant, we check our phones. ![]() When we’re standing in line at the store to checkout, we check our phones. As soon as we wake up, we check our phones. While it is sad, it is a reality our world lives in. ![]() ![]() I pride myself on being self-aware, so it’s not hard for me to realize the off-putting and unnecessary amount of time I give to social media on a daily basis. Often when I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, or when I feel like I am losing focus, I will close (or temporarily) deactivate all my social media accounts.
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