Farmer versus Fox

Friends have asked me a question about attention span in different cultures, and what psychology has to say on that. Rather than the quick anwer – I’m not sure – here’s a bit more.

Attention span is a tricky thing to talk about because there isn’t a clear psychological category for it. Instead, there are a few mental capacities that to my mind map onto it:

• Working memory. This is, more or less, the amount of information you can hold and act on in your mind at a given time. Hearing and then dialling a phone number, or performing a task where words are flashed up and every so often you are asked to repeat the one you saw two places before. This is what psychologists are likely to refer to when they refer to a person’s ‘span’, but doesn’t feel like it covers the folk sense of the term. However, it is implicated in another function:
• Resisting attentional capture: the degree to which you can control where your focus sits at any given time. Narrowly defined, this looks at situations like can you keep focus on your reading task as colours periodically flash to the sides of the text, or, more ecologically, can you focus on your revision when cars are honking outside. Working memory and other executive aspects of the brain (involved in planning and coordination) are important here. Loosely, we could see this as distraction. But this doesn’t quite do it, either, because ‘attention span’ seems to involve
• Avoiding boredom and drifting entirely away from an area of intended focus. Rapid disengagement with activities, which is seen in certain groups such as people with ADHD. Clearly some of this is attributable to attentional capture, as constant disruption of an activity makes it difficult to enter a flow state with it and gather that feedback. But it may not be the whole story. Unfortunately I don’t know this area at all well and don’t even know what the cognitive function would be that points to this.

As to what is known about how culture interacts with these capabilities, I don’t know. I do know that it is very hard to measure things, due to non-culture fairness of many tests available in the west, and due to the very nature of test-taking privileging abstraction over other forms of thinking. Some progress may be being made, see Cross-cultural cognition: Developing tests for developing countries

My total guesses would be that – to invent a generic premodern population for convenience – these people would be decent at avoiding attentional capture under normal conditions (environmental sounds not relevant to their aim, eg hunting a specific species), that fundamental working memory is likely fairly invariant as it probably underpins components of language processing, but that some of its manifestations (dealing with lists) would be impaired, and that disengagement from task would probably be typical for familiar and pertinent tasks. But these are just guesses, really. Any thoughts appreciated from other folk.

I pack for a long visit to America to explore improvisation, my chosen field of art.

A book picked from shelf, packed beside two blank notebooks. Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. A 30th birthday present never read, owned for four years next week.

I crack it open in the US. It describes a future society that has developed a system of organising thought, in which seemingly unrelated domains of academic thought are explored through dialogue between multiple players, each idea extended independently before interconnections are discovered and the theses join together.

I watch – first in New York, then Chicago – show after show based around the US long-form structure The Harold, in which distinct situations or themes are explored through multiple actors performing, each situation extended independently before interconnections are discovered and themes connect together.

Weeks pass. Learning continues, book opened in spare moments… it won’t speak to me. I am aware how intensely personal the work is becoming, within a group hot-boxed for weeks on end, training together and socialising together. Right now, the work doesn’t feel like an exploration of academic concepts. It feels like pouring ourselves out for examination. What’s more, I’m aware of how much we have become interconnected, problems, anxieties, tensions, and desires – and how the work that is happening on stage is pulling out and depicting these, naming and so transforming these often stifled energies.

I pick up a book I bought on a whim days before, Nozick’s Examined Life. In the introduction, he speaks simply about why we care about a portrait, made painstakingly from single brush-strokes over time, an examination of an individual that compresses emotion, thought patterns and cadence into visual shape. And the self-portrait is more significant still:

“since we can see the components of our life, including its activities and strivings, as fitting together in a pattern, when an additional and distinctive component such as reflection is added – like adding new scientific data to be fit to a curve – a new overall pattern then results…Therefore, examination and reflection are not just about the other components of a life; they are added within a life, alongside the rest, and by their presence call for a new overall pattern that alters how each part of life is understood.”  

Internet vomits so much synchronicity; it loses its bite. Despite this, somehow, the printed word that knows me awakens wonder.

I’m re-reading Let’s Talk About Love, and again struck by what a magnificent book it is. Taking Celine Dion as a focus, the book leads us on “a journey to the end of taste”, with author Carl Wilson interrogating his hatred of this wildly successful performance artist over themed chapters.

The chapter Let’s Talk About Schmaltz makes this claim:

‘Celine Dion’s music and career are more understandable if she is added to the long line of ethnic “outsiders” who expressed emotions too outsized for most white American performers but in non-African-American codes, letting white audiences loosen up without crossing the “color line.”‘

In preceding pages Wilson introduces the notion that schmaltz entered into American popular music in the early 19th C through immigrant groups (possibly beginning with Irish) who decanted their nostalgic longing for a life given up into songs that were a counterweight to the breezy parlor song, concerned with courtship and frivolity. It found a friend in Italian light opera – then massively popular across classes – which was gradually squeezed out of circulation by Serious Cultcha. It re-emerges through Sophie Tucker/Al Jolson, Sinatra, Bennett, Como, Liberace, Nana Mouskouri.

Wilson goes on:

‘In a conversation about Celine’s precedents with other music critics and big-eared fans on an email list, someone remarked, “I don’t think this particular Cinderella wears American sizes.” If you look only to gowns cut and fashioned in the Anglo- and African-American mainstreams, she has a point; but the kind of schmaltz-Americana in which Celine partakes has been a continuing strain in US popular music for two centuries, whether or not the people performing it were fully counted as American. Schmaltz circles the rim but seemingly never wholly dissolves in the melting pot, bubbling up again decade after decade.

I think this is because schmaltz, as Hamm insinuates in his discussion of parlor song, is never purely escapist: it is not just cathartic but socially reinforcing, a vicarious exposure to both the grandest rewards of adhering to norms and their necessary price. This makes it especialy vulnerable to becoming dated: the outer boundaries of extreme conformity, of uncontroversial public ecstasy and despair, are ever mobile. Schmalt is an unprivate portrait of how private feeling is currently conceived, which social change can pitilessly revise. And then it becomes shameful, the way elites of the late nineteenth century felt when they wondered what their poor ignorant forbears ever heard in light Italian opera. Likewise, as a specialization of liminal immigrants in America, it can become a holdover from a time “before we were white,” perhaps dotingly memorialized, but embarrassing head-on.