By Marc Chalufour

Sam Ling’s remote teaching experience will sound familiar to anyone who spent the pandemic tied to their computer: A grid of faces in Zoom covered a mosaic of open website tabs, emails, and Google Docs. A phone, ready to ding or flash a notification at any second, lay nearby. To avoid the cacophony of animated ads and alerts, Ling, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, would switch Zoom to full-screen mode and flip his phone face down.

Pushing potential distractions out of sight is an obvious—and effective—way to focus on a task, like teaching a class. But why is that? Ling, who directs the Visual Neuroscience Lab, is quick to say that we don’t actually know.

Exactly how the brain processes vision and elevates the things that we intentionally or unintentionally focus on is a mystery Ling and his colleagues are working to solve. “It’s as if the volume has been cranked up for what you attend to, but we don’t really know the mechanisms that give rise to that,” Ling says. “It’s kind of like a magic trick that happens in the visual cortex.”

“There’s a seemingly endless number of interpretations in just a single shot of a retinal input. One of the goals of the whole brain is to turn that into something discernible, coherent, and meaningful.” —Sam Ling, Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences

To learn more, Ling and his colleagues show test subjects a variety of simple visuals, like a black-and-white checkerboard or a wavy line, and measure their brains’ reactions on an MRI scan. The images they use represent the elements that our brain breaks a scene into while processing it, like shapes and contrasts.

“‘Attention,’ while we all know what it is, we use it as a colloquialism,” Ling says. With his research, he’s trying to define the process by which we focus on, or attend to, certain things. So much is unknown that Ling is hesitant to offer advice on how we might focus better in this age of information overload. “What the brain is doing is still enough of a mystery that I would be lying if I said we know that there are some great best practices,” he says. Instead, he offers some useful insight into what is known—and how that knowledge is being used.

1. Our brains must deal with an information glut

Everything in our sight is information that our brains must process. Colors, contours, contrasts, movements—all of those building-block elements used in Ling’s experiments. “There’s a seemingly endless number of interpretations in just a single shot of a retinal input,” Ling says. “One of the goals of the whole brain is to turn that into something discernible, coherent, and meaningful.”

2. … but they are uniquely equipped for the challenge

“Our brain is plastic, by which I mean it’s adaptive,” Ling says. “If you go from a dark room out onto a beach, it’s really intense and jarring at first. But the retina is adapting, you’re going to recalibrate.” Likewise, our brains are able to keep pace with a fast-paced, digital world, Ling says. “The idea that, as our worlds get busier, there’s some sort of catastrophic hit on the human brain’s ability to process things and that people are less able to attend to things—I push back on that.”

3. Conserve your personal bandwidth

Going back to the example of eliminating onscreen distractions when he needs to focus, Ling offers simple advice: “It sounds obvious—reduce distractions that are in your control,” especially things engineered to distract, like phone notifications. “You have finite resources at any given moment and distributing attention to multiple things comes at a cost.”

4. Marketers want your attention—and know how to get it

Marketers are also studying vision and attention, and using that information to distract us. “There are more temptations to draw you away from a focused task—and that is by design,” Ling says. “Advertisers are aware of this, explicitly, so they have things that flash and grab your attention reflexively. They’re actually drawing from attention research to do this.”