Your brain is starting to think a goldfish. Why? Find out in our latest juicy Slideshare.
Do you think like a goldfish?
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It says something that I left twice in the middle of the slideshow, doesn’t it?
One theory on ADD suggests most people today have agrarian society brains. Slow, methodical, predictable, reliable workers that worked nicely together in the industrial society.
Whereas, the ADD brain is a vestige of the hunter/gatherer societies. They lived by their wits in unpredictable environments, where they are hyper-conscious to changes in the environment in order to avoid danger and be successful hunting and gathering.
Is that the emergent norm, Sally Hogshead?
Traditional society and organizations like their farmers. The organizations plod along, decisions and change are slow, linear going through control layers.
Typically they don’t treat us hunter/gatherers very well. The ADD capacities for complexity, variety, adaptivity and change is a threat to be controlled. Not to mention the emotional lability amongst some ADD. Passion is a bad word!
Perhaps the emerging workforces will soften that immune system intolerance and enrich organizational potential.
Your emerging thoughts bring hope!
Richard Childs
Greg,
ADD is characterized by variable attention spans. In the wilds, I am distracted by any change in the environment. In my work, people are amazed at my 3+ hour focus and solving complex problems.
Richard
Kudos, Sally H., for stating it so well and with great typography, too. Put your message out there persistently and consistently. Evalutate your results. If you’re in front of your preferred audience but still not winning their attention and response, your message just ain’t fascinating (enough).
I believe the process of thinking is slowly being abandoned and replaced by the hunter/gatherer instinct. Those that are totally immersed in media (aka Twitter content producers) are barely 2% of the total North American adult web population. Lets face it, what’s next: the 9 second idea, the 9 second presentation, the 9 second orgasm. Wouldn’t you love to find a remote island with no connections whatsoever? Then we’d have plenty of time to focus on what’s important: shelter, food, lovemaking. Wow… beats Facebook! I should post it.
Wow! Great feedback, all. Speaking as someone who (proudly) enjoys ADD, I think you’re collectively correct that a short attention span isn’t always perceived as a good thing. But today, in a world with a hundred things happening at once, being able to juggle and mentally multi-task is a skill worth honing.
You may be on to something with all of the ADD talk but you may want to consider some of the facts that I learned when I researching the topic.
ADD is considered a spectral disorder which means there are people at one end who have little to no ADD and at the other end there are people who can’t function in society due to it’s effects. Having said that, everybody swings along the scale every day depending on a number of factors going on in their life at any given point in time – quantity of sleep, stress, caffeine intake, etc.
Many people think that they have ADD outside of the norm but their disagnosis ususally fails the one significant litmus test – the ability to control their focus. A true sufferer of ADD will find that he can not get his head into some things while there are other things things that he gets into and he can’t break away from.
Most of us don’t have that problem to a “problem” degree – we can jump, sometimes quite deeply, into a given topic, and then extract ourselves when we get bored and move on to the next thing.
I would suggest that rather than ADD, what most of us are looking for is the constant urge (and rush) to be taught something new at a rate of speed that is historically unprecendented. If you can’t get and keep my attention in the first 9 seconds, then I will move on to the next thing – “…fascinate or perish…”.
I wonder if the fact that the availability of information flowing past me at any given point in time gives me the luxury of moving on because I know that my RSS reader or Twitter feed will give me something new in about 2 seconds. When I was a kid in the country growing up with 3 TV stations, I watched what was on because my options were limited.
…interesting conversation…thanks…
Mike, thanks for your smart insight.
The original BBC News factoid (that our attention spans are now 9 seconds) didn’t link directly to the implication of ADD. I took that extra step of linking it to the growing trend of multi-tasking with a profusion of demands on our attention.
We’re living in an ADD-like world– one in which we might not literally have ADD, but, in which we function with less single-tasking focus than did generations before. Most people don’t actually have ADD, as you say, and don’t pass the litmus test you mention (ability to control focus). Yet we’re exhibiting more of the characteristics of ADD (short attention span, inability to concentrate for extended periods of time, tendency to become easily bored, etc.).
I like your suggestion about revising the phrasing…”If you can’t get and keep my attention in the first 9 seconds, then I will move on to the next thing – fascinate or perish…” That’s exactly what I’m trying to communicate. Fascinate or perish. Fascinate or be forgotten. Fascinate or get run over by your competition. Fascinate or become irrelevant.
Appreciate your input. Great comment.