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After painstakingly collecting this data, my graduate student and I discovered that people in workplaces averaged only three minutes, five seconds on any low-level event on or off screen before switching to the next one.8 This included interactions with colleagues. But if we just looked at attention behavior on the computer, we found that people shifted their attention on average every two and a half minutes. Switching all activities every three minutes and specifically switching attention on the computer every two and a half minutes seemed unfathomable at the time. But this was nothing compared to what was to be discovered in the next decade and a half to come.
Attention Span
Gloria Mark
Making music with others is a profoundly intimate experience. Philosopher Bennett Reimer described it as a self-combined-with-other-selves experience in which individuality and community are fused in service of original musical expression. So powerful is this experience in enhancing both the sense of self and the sense of self united with other selves as to change the inner lives of all who have been privileged to undergo it.2 Practice with others. You’ll find that bouncing ideas off another musician will go a long way toward improving your own approach and clarifying what you need to do next. And the very best part about practicing with others is that it’s fun. It can be lonely sitting in a practice room all alone, hour after hour, day after day. Practicing with other people is much more enjoyable. Sometimes, there is beer. And fire. And stars.
The Practice of Practice
Jonathan Harnum
Of course, we may also be driven by sheer curiosity to click on links and not necessarily by being primed. But it can be hard to separate the two—they may go hand in hand. The psychologist George Loewenstein explains that curiosity is an urge to fill a gap in our knowledge, and we are drawn to information that can help us resolve our curiosity.18 Even a small amount of information can arouse our curiosity, says Loewenstein—and this could be links we encounter on a web page. We then act—sometimes impulsively—to quench that thirst for curiosity by clicking on the link, consciously or not. Our inquisitiveness is satisfied and we are rewarded. In fact, fMRI studies show that curiosity triggers an expectation of a reward, as shown by activation in the caudate nucleus and lateral prefrontal cortex, regions of the brain associated with anticipating rewards, and with an intrinsic value of learning.19 When we see a link on a web page, it ignites our curiosity. Knowing it’s a gateway to new information, we anticipate a reward, and we click. So as we traverse the internet, reading content, it activates associations and/or stimulates our curiosity, we select links, read more content, our mind is further aroused, we click on new links, and we easily fall down the rabbit hole. Curiosity is the drug of the internet.
Attention Span
Gloria Mark
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