America and the case of the disappearing attention span…..
I teach at a small music school in Morris Park, a small neighborhood in the Bronx. I enjoy it tremendously, and am always fascinated by the effort it takes us to pay attention in a music lesson. Most of my students are young, so naturally there is less attention span to be found; and I spend a great deal of time thinking about how to support their interest and further engage them in their music. But it’s not just my students that have rapidly disappearing attention spans; it’s most of America as well.
There is a lot of research on this- the decrease of the human attention span. Roger Ebert wrote a very compelling piece on it in his journal for the Chicago Sun Times :
blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/05/the_french_word_frisson_descri.html
In it, he describes how he has become swept up by the “frisson” or, the jolt of excitement, that he gets from quick tweets and internet surfing. He mentions that research is being conducted that shows our actual BRAINS are being rewired by this, capitalizing on our instinct to want to feel short lived excitement, or the “frisson”. ( That link is: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1)
His discussion goes on to describe how he observed his own habits of attention span- and he noticed that amidst his tweeting and “Frisson” seeking, he had stopped activities that required longer term investment of attention, like reading Dickens. And ultimately, when he commits to reading literature more often and tweeting less, he finds a sense of deeper satisfaction, calm, focus. I certainly agree with him- and then I noticed the very end of his article.
A music clip! I thought the irony had hit me in the face. He ended with a two minute clip of a man playing a guitar, saying it gave him that real frisson. I’m not sure if he was referring to the music itself, or the visual element of watching a person play guitar, but I couldn’t help but wonder- did this intelligent, wonderful writer not consider listening to music equal to reading classics? Or worse- does a music clip go in the same category as the tweets, the short term thrills, the empty, non-substantive internet surfing? And if a person of Roger Ebert’s stature considered this non-substantive….. then clearly we are thinking about music in the wrong way.
Seeing as Mr. Ebert is in fact, a writer, it makes sense that his conduit for greater enjoyment, entertainment, soul-searching would be through reading. But the choice to listen to a piece of music without any distraction provides the same experience as reading a great novel. Forms and characters in literature are similar to forms and musical ideas in classical music. A composer introduces ideas and then develops them- he or she creates dialogue between two or more contrasting musical themes, developing them into something new and exciting, often times increasing the tension , and then resolving ( or, more interestingly, choosing not to resolve) them in a final movement that ties the meaning of the entire piece together.You can get wrapped up in Beethoven just as much as Great Expectations; It is as worthy of our attention as any great piece of writing.
This kind of engagement of our interest and attention is precisely what I think we should be supporting in our society- and music is a fantastic way of doing that. Studies from Stanford University provide some evidence to this point:
http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2007/july/music.html
As we move forward in 2012, I’m sure that Facebook and Twitter will continue to evolve and shape our habits- but perhaps we should consider sitting down with a piece of music more often and give ourselves a break from that unrelenting string of little “frissons”.
Decreased attention span seems more likely to stem from a multifactorial etiology as opposed to a single source like the Web or Twitter. I fully confess that I am not a Twitter user nor have I ever experienced “frisson”, so I may well be out of my league here. But taking a step back and using a longer lens the nature of our ‘connection’ with people, community, events has certainly changed over the ‘modern’ period – for simplicity say 1750 to present. I think the major symptom of the change is volume based, there is simply much more traffic, so to speak, that needs to be routed, sorted, categorized, processed and decisioned as opposed to examined, reflected on, re-processed and integrated. The change takes the form of a dilution in dosage or the intensity of the stimulus. Example, ‘visiting’ today can be done by phone, Web, Skype, Twitter, quick drive/ride/flight/etc.. to see a friend. Much different that the 18th or 19th century. Getting there took much longer but once there the time spent was much longer,hence the dose stronger, the intensity of the stimulus greater and the degree of connection potentially much greater then than now. We can share ideas with the world today but does that mean we are a ‘community’ ? Have we lost depth in the blind pursuit of breadth ? I think so. This tradeoff is a characteristic of the transition from pre and early modern to advanced modern societies.When we turn and then try to focus on the adaptive reactions of indivuals at the neural level from societal level influences it seems that we fail to recognize that the brain & mind are are a continuous, not static and mechanistic, adaptive, synergistic organism. Science here is relatively primitive in terms of explanatory process models derived from data as opposed to theoretical conceptions of how brain and mind work. Perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps there are certain things that are not worth learning about what makes us the sentient beings that we are or attempt to be. Nontheless, considering neurai stimuli as a closed two good micro market of choice (listen to music or read) masks what may be a wider point. The brain and mind, like any other physical organism thrive best on a wide variety of ‘nutritional’ sources in their diet ranging from music, theatre, dance, literature, painting, sailing, etc…. and our market equlibrium is best reached via an optimization from a wide rather than narrow menu. Net conclusions: our species has always been subject to diverse external stimuli, these have significantly increased as society transitioned from pre to modern to post modern, possible that the increase has lessened the quality of response, this tsunami is to a large extent self-inflicted via conscious choice or lack thereof and the quality of brain and mind is best served by drawing stimuli from a wide variety of sources of which music is one, albeit an important one