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Can I Have Your Attention, Please! by Gary Trotta |
"Class, can I have your attention, please". These are the words uttered by every grade school teacher I have ever had. A futile attempt to have the class listen to what is about to be said. Our brains take in a huge amount of information and most of it is registered unconsciously (perhaps 99%) and this is for a very good reason. If we were aware of all the information being fed into our brains each second we would certainly not be able to THINK. Our eyes register 36,000 precepts every hour. This alone would be more than enough to crash the system but then we receive sounds, smells, tastes, memories and feelings registering both internally and externally.
As a result, our brains have become excellent information filters, throwing out most of what is not unique, different or of any interest. This makes sense because as we evolved our survival needs required that we focused on what might be potentially dangerous in our environment. Consider a drive to your local mall. You pass by stores, signs, other vehicles, pedestrians and plants as you tool your way to your shopping experience all the time thinking about that special item you're going to purchase and at the same time, missing most of the rest of what's going on in the world. And this is by necessity. Imagine trying to attend to all this stuff. In the 1920's Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky (1886–1958) was a Russian journalist and mnemonist. He was the man who could not forget. Shereshevsky could memorize complex mathematical formulas, huge matrices and even poems in foreign languages and did so in a matter of minutes and remembered these for literally years after. As a journalist he was great at remembering the facts, but this really didn't give him the intelligence edge that you might imagine. In fact, despite his astounding memory performance, he scored no better than average in intelligence tests.
Our brains don't work like Solomon's remembering every small detail. We boil things down. Then we burn them deep down into our brain forming our general understanding of the world around us. These life experiences are constantly and unconsciously compared with the external stimuli that is coming into our brain every second, and only when something surprises us, "Hey that's different", we just continue on our way to the mall. This works well for human evolution but can be hard on teachers and educators as their students murmur to themselves, "Same old, same old, not interested, blah, blah, blah or what time will this class be over".
The obvious challenge is then how to present information so it becomes conscious, interesting and worthy of a student's attention. It is something we try to do with games. The game grabs attention and if the instructor is smart, uses this focused time to deliver critical information, which now has a chance of being retained. I didn't want to just do a commercial about games here because there are many other ways to gain attention. What is most important is that anyone attempting to command the attention of a classroom of people should understand how our brains work and have some plan for grabbing attention before attempting to deliver the goods.
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