0.10 Life occurs in sharp spikes {cp}  (Page 31/10)

This article theorizes that attention is not linear. That is almost obvious, however, because when you look at a room full of objects your attention must fluctuate many times just then as you go from object to object. The question is, what is your conscious awareness of what you are paying attention to? If you look at it from that perspective, your attention doesn't change that much because you are not aware of that many major changes. If you look at it from an unconscious perspective, your attention fluctuates greatly all the time, with minor variations in how you are processesing everything. Are someones unconcsious fluctuations in attention important, however? When someone first starts paying attention to something do they have to pay more attention at the start to bring the object into cognition? Is it necessary to pay sharp attention to things every so often because you need to be kept awake? This chapter tries to show that your unconcsious attention must pay sharp attention to things in spikes in order to a) keep noticing things and b) stay sharp. However, if people might are not aware that they need to refocus on objects, then how important and significant is this refocusing of your attention in a spike pattern?

People need to pay attention to things in order to keep their minds alive and active. They need to pay attention to little things all the time. That is why spikes occur, when people refocus their attention on little things over and over it occurs as a spike, because the new object needs to be processed as a whole and this processing takes energy in the form of a “spike”. [The key thing there is that the object needs to be processed as a whole. You pay attention to lots of little things all the time, but you only pay attention to complete things infrequently, so infrequently that when you actually do pay attention, it occurs as a spike.]

Humans cannot pay attention to everything, and the things they do pay attention to they need to “spike” their attention initially to get that object into their attention and focus. It is possible to not use spikes of attention, but if you did that then life would be boring. In order for life to be interesting people naturally spike their attention on certain things every so often (once a minute or so) to make life more exciting. Life would be boring if you never paid sharp attention to anything. Spikes of attention keep life “crisp”. [You could rephrase that as, if you never pay attention to anything, you are never going to be interested in anything. And if you actually pay attention to something, you would need to direct your attention to it at some point, putting in maximum attention so you grab it into focus, that is the spike.]

A good example of a spike in attention is if you direct your attention to something that is going to be shown to you for only a short period of time. For instance in a study by Sperling (1960) found that when subjects were presented with visual arrays lasting 50ms, containing twelve letters, they were able to report only about four or five items. However, subjects said they could "see" the whole display for a short time after the display was terminated. That shows how it is possible for people to direct high attention to be able to pay attention to something for that short a period of time, but also that this attention will die down very quickly after it was given – shown by the fact that they forgot what they saw soon after.