Do I have Deep Attention or Hyper Attention? 

In my first Lectorial ever I learnt these two terms. My first impression was that I totally misread Hyper Attention as hypertension, but aside from that, I’d never heard about the different kinds of focus. Deep attention refers to the ability to keep un-compromised attention onto one thing at a time – like reading a book without distractions and so forth. Hyper attention is pretty much the opposite and occurs when one focuses on several things at one given time. Considering I’m sitting here listening to music on 8tracks, checking Twitter and talking to two friends at once on Facebook while writing this… I guess you can figure out which attention I have.

But it’s an interesting concept, because I definitely am capable of deep attention and in fact, it’s crucial in order for me to be productive a lot of the time. I’m writing a novel in my spare time (I have said, I’m a sucker for story telling) and it took me months before I could really write anything. I spent a lot of time planning, sure, but the only reason I was able to churn anything out at all was because I went to the beach during summer break where I had no wifi. No wifi = no distractions. I had too much spare time on my hands and so I read a whole book in 2 days and wrote 10 thousand words of my novel in 2 weeks. Maybe it isn’t much, but considering I’ve barely written 3 thousand since being back… says a lot.

So society is hyper attentive – constantly on the move, wanting to absorb everything at once. It’s about time, really, because I’ll spend hours doing one thing and being productive yet feel like I’ve wasted time only to spend the same time doing nothing (watching TV, talking to friends, reading social media updates) and feel fulfilled in a different way. Multitasking has always seemed like the more appealing option; watch TV while doing homework, study for exams with a classical soundtrack, check Facebook while watching a movie. We want to be turned on 24/7 and the only time we really get a chance to stop that is when we completely disconnect, like I did when I had no wifi.

So do I have deep attention or hyper attention? The jury’s still out. I feel like I really work better and am naturally built for deep attention, but have been programmed in the modern tech age for the opposite.

P.S. My aim is to quote movies for the titles of these… let’s see how far I get before I give up! 10 points to whoever knows where this one is from.