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Modern life is degrading our attention. At least that's what we've been told. ADHD is epidemic. Tweets and text messages may be messing up our collective mind, fragmenting it, relentlessly distracting us with pop-up ads, Facebook updates and search engine byways. Experts, authors and teachers advise us to resist these attention-whittlers, to cutback on technology and most of all, to focus, focus, focus!!
And they do have a point, of course. In order to complete a task or explore a subject in depth, one must be able to focus. ADHD can be a cruelly destructive disorder which undermines learning, memory, job performance - and most painful of all - social relations. Attention problems are indeed real, they are serious, and they are widespread.
Yet, even as the search for drugs and other treatments to increase attention move forward, scientists and practitioners are also finding the surprising benefits of not paying attention.
In one remarkable study, researchers at the University of Michigan and University of Memphis asked 60 undergraduate students whether they had ever won a prize at a juried art show or been honored at a science fair. They found that students diagnosed with ADHD achieved more in every domain! It appears that when it comes to creativity, the ability to not focus (or the inability to focus) is an advantage.
These findings comport with some of the earliest research in the field of creativity, which recognized that a basic dynamic of creative thinking is "remote associations," i.e., the ability to see a connection between two things (ideas, words, objects, for example) that are not generally considered to be associated.
Here's how remote associations work: Let's say a truck drove down a country road and turned out to be too big to fit under the overpass. The truck got stuck. In all likelihood, a gathering crowd would look up at the spot where the truck was stuck and helpfully suggest ways to get it to budge, or bend, or to somehow skim away a bit of the overpass. In this classic story, a child, (someone easily distracted and less focused) pipes up with a creative solution, "why not let some of the air out of the tires?" That's problem solving by "remote association."
Researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard gave a short mental test of distractibility to 86 Harvard undergraduates. They were examining the students' ability to screen out irrelevant stimuli, such as a nearby conversation or the hum of an air conditioner. The students who had more difficulty ignoring distractions turned out to be seven times more likely to have previously been rated as "eminent creative achievers."
The queen of non-focusing is daydreaming, which has an established correlation to creativity; almost as if it primes the pump for new and unconventional ideas. More surprisingly, studies have found that employees are more productive when they're allowed to idly surf the Internet from time to time.
Deficits of attention can indeed be disabling; they require treatment and support. But attention excess is definitely not ideal, either. So when your mind begs for a break, don't reach for Red Bull or Starbucks to whip your attention back in line.
The maximal mind is a flexible mind. A mind that can focus straight ahead on the road when necessary, but can also takes its lead to roam and wander off the path into unexplored territory.
