Attention "Deficit"? Or Attention "Disruption"?

Attention: it’s one of the most debated topics in psychological research, yet it is arguably impossible to find an environment where it is absent. Even in this instance, your body is not only paying attention to the words on this page, but it is also paying attention to the temperature of the room, the oxygen levels of the air, and the ground beneath you. However, these are not directed forms of attention. Directed attention occurs when you focus on something, such as learning Spanish or watching Family Guy. But how do people specifically do this? And more interestingly, why do some people show deficits and differences in terms of how they pay attention, and how much attention they give, to certain things? This question has been partially answered with the establishment of certain disorders such as attention deficit disorder and attention hyperactive deficit disorder. In Frank McCormick’s poem, “Attention Deficit Disorder”, he tries to capture the very essence of the disorder. One thing that I want to highlight in this post is the fact that I believe that the naming for ADD is incredibly inaccurate, and I believe that McCormick may agree with me. His poem starts out as follows:

I guess I paid attention to the wrong things:/

the creamy empty space between the words,/

the silent edges of the textbook illustration,/

the worn lines along my teacher’s thick brown neck./

Still, I could re-draw them in my sleep.

This first stanza of the poem highlights a very interesting, important feature of ADD, in my opinion. This is the fact that the word “deficit” can be very deceiving and almost untruthful about the overall attention state of those who have ADD. People with ADD do not suffer from a strict deficit of attention, per say. From this stanza, I would say that McCormick argues that it is more of an altercation or reallocation of attention. The narrator says “I guess I paid attention to the wrong things”. So it does not seem like he does not pay attention, but rather that he believes his attention was on things aside from what he was specifically supposed to be paying attention to. It seems safe to assume the narrator is a school student. He goes on to refer to the “creamy empty space between the words” and the “silent edges of the textbook illustration”. It seems as if the narrator is paying attention to his school book, but not what normal people without ADD would most likely pay attention to. Most of us don’t spend time focusing our attention on the white space between the text, or the edges of pictures, but this caught the narrator’s eye for some reason. The most interesting line from this stanza, however, is the last one. He states that he could draw the “worn lines along my teacher’s thick brown neck…in my sleep”. No one would argue that the wrinkles on the teacher’s neck is a very particular detail. To pick up on such a feature requires extreme attention. But hold on….this is has attention deficit  disorder. Is he truly capable of such detailed memory for something when he was clearly not paying attention to the lecture material. Well, it seems that McCormick would argue “Yes,” and I would have to agree. I believe that the name Attention Deficit Disorder is extremely deceiving, and it makes you wonder if the disorder deserves a more fitting name, such as Attention Distribution Disorder.

Furthermore, I believe that N. Katherine Hayles has some very interesting contributions to this argument in her paper, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”. In this paper, Hayles addresses the ideas of deep attention and hyper attention. She states that “deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response” (p. 188) This seems to relate perfectly to the situation in McCormick’s poem, “Attention Deficit Disorder”, where the narrator says he is able to remember the teacher’s neck lines. In this situation, the narrator’s deep attention was focused on the teacher’s neck, and he was oblivious to the environment around him. Hayles also states that “hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a noninteractive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem” (p. 188). This highlights the narrator’s inability to pay attention to the words on the page of his textbook. However, the teacher, who was a much more interactive object to hold the narrator’s attention, became the object of focus, and the vivid memory of the neck lines was the result. This displays the very intriguing allocation of attention that, I would argue, is in no way a deficit, but more of a disruption.