This month I’ve been starting a new teaching job, defending a dissertation on attention, and starting this site/blog. If I were to identify a common theme to tie all three seemingly divergent projects together, it would be…

[Pay attention!]

…that attention is key. The attention of YOU – site visitors – how to get you to come to and read this page. And the attention of students – how to get them to attend class and attend in class.

For then unrelated reasons, I recently uncovered an important distinction on attention in the work of William James, originally intended for advice to teachers, but upon reflection, I think it surely applies to website design as well, or any situation in which we want others to pay attention to something we want to present.

In Chapter 11 of Talks to Teachers (1899), James writes [bold font added for emphasis]:

“WHOEVER treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it excites attention. But in addition to the attention which any object already interesting or just be coming interesting claims-passive attention or spontaneous attention, we may call it;—there is a more deliberate attention,—voluntary attention or attention with effort, as it is called,—Which we can give to objects less interesting or uninteresting in themselves. The distinction between active and passive attention is made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with the deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical point of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate; and passive attention to natively interesting material requires no further elucidation on this occasion. All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the class-room work goes on…”

In the century-plus since James wrote on this distinction, much work has been done, particularly in cognitive psychology over the past few decades, on the differences between automatic/passive/involuntary attention and attention-with-effort. Consider the phenomenological difference YOU feel between effortfully attending to a boring lecture or blog post and attending to an exciting book or movie. In both cases you are paying attention to an object, but in the latter case that attention is ‘paid’ to the object with much more ease. (Those of you interested in selling things through your presentation of information should note the linguistically cliched link between ‘pay‘ and ‘attention’).

Nonetheless, it is often necessary in life that we attend to “uninteresting information” in order to learn, whether it be from a boring but important class or from an unexciting but informative webpage or book. The problem, as James notes, beautifully, and in accordance with his celebrated idea of the  ’stream of consciousness’ is that:

But a little introspective observation will show any one that voluntary attention cannot be continuously sustained,—that it comes in beats. When we are studying an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to wander, we have to bring back our attention every now and then by using distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the mind then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures it and takes it off. Then the processes of volitional recall must be repeated once more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a momentary affair. The process, whatever it is, exhausts itself in the single act; and, unless the matter is then taken in hand by some trace of interest inherent in the subject, the mind falls to follow it at all.

So how do we, as teachers and presenters-of-information, introduce content that it inherently uninteresting, either in the classroom, in a book, or on a website, in a way that can capture the attention of our students or readers? James’s solution… or “prescription:”

The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.

And, later (after some ingenious introspective thought experiments)…

In this process the incoming impression is the newer element; the ideas which re-enforce and sustain it are among the older possessions of the mind. And the maximum of attention may then be said to be found whenever we have a systematic harmony or unification between the novel and the old. It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting; the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. The old in the rim, is what claims the attention,—the old with a slightly new turn. No one wants to bear a lecture on a subject completely disconnected with his previous knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of which we know a little already, just as, in the fashions, every year must bring its slight modification of last year’s suit, but an abrupt jump from the fashion of one decade into another would be distasteful to the eye.

In essence, we must put new spins on old ideas if they are to warrant the attention of our audience. Perhaps this notion is familiar to you, perhaps it is a bit of an old idea. And thus perhaps it resonates with you. Now connect it in new ways. Give it a new spin.