 Even
business is now teaching 'observation skills' as part of a 'cultural
anthropology' skill set that also includes interviewing,
story-gathering and story-telling, and 'understanding that things are
the way they are for a reason' appreciation skills.
Why is it that we have have to teach adults to do something that every
child knows how to do from birth? Is attention deficit a learning
disability we acquire as we get older, and if so, why?
In business cultural anthropology, according to Conifer Research, you need to focus your attention on:
- Confusion: employees and customers who are conflicted or unclear about what to do or how to do it
- Barriers: obstructions that get in the way of people doing their job
- Wear Patterns: lingering signs of stress in the use of products and tools
- User Torture: obvious discomfort and struggle in making the
tools, environment or process work the way it is supposed to or needs to
- Duct Tape & String: workarounds that employees and customers have devised to solve problems
They argue that, if you interview people about their wants and needs,
they will tell you what's on the top of their consciousness, but miss
the very real wants and needs that would be obvious from direct
observation. But they also say you need to ask questions, through
interviews, after or during observation, to understand what you're
really seeing and hearing, why it's happening, and what could be done
to make things better, instead of jumping to conclusions. In the
process, the subject may learn as much as the observer. They suggest a process to map the experience of your employee or customer, as a means of archiving and focusing on improvement opportunities.
Paying attention is also a recurring message of environmentalists. The
celebrated environmental writer and story-teller Barry Lopez says:
[My principal responsibility] is paying attention
to what is going on there, so I can come home and tell a story that in
some way or other is useful to the community... My life is defined
largely around issues of language and story and landscape, and I would
be hard pressed to separate those three issues. I think the way in
which landscape is imperiled--by manipulation and attenuation to serve
various political and economic policies--is almost indistinguishable
from the way in which language and story are imperiled...
I first felt what we could call "a state of awe," moments of
recognizing a metaphysical dimension in landscapes, when I was six or
seven years old. I remember at the Grand Canyon, in particular, when I
was eight years old, being awestruck about everything that was around
me, the richness--the smells, the tackiness of Ponderosa sap, the
tenacity of wildflowers, those little ear tufts on the Kaibab
squirrels--and spatial depth. The first mountain lion I saw was in the
Grand Canyon, and it was an incident that went to the floor of my heart.
Perhaps the reason we no longer pay real attention is that we no longer
have much opportunity to see and hear things that inspire a "state of
awe" -- we are surrounded by mediocrity and sameness and efficiency and
noise that exhibit no integrity, dignity, subtlety, or respect for the
sacredness of life and nature. And at the same time we are constantly
barraged by assaults on our senses -- sights and sounds that rudely
compete for our attention until we become numb to all but the loudest
and most violent and most outrageous -- the brightest red light, the
flashiest billboard, the thinnest waist, most defined abs and largest
breasts, the most provocative lyrics and videos and special effects.
 When
I was in Orlando recently at the Disney Institute I was frequently
distracted from the astonishing and brilliant details of the Disney
'customer experience' by wonderful natural sights that no one else
seemed to notice in the Disney World of sensory overload: Baby goslings
chasing insects around a lamppost, ducks in the grass enjoying the
constant spray from the nearby flume roller coaster ride, squirrels
perched on the top of benches staring at the parades of costumed
characters with great curiosity. If I had visited there back before I
moved to the country and took up nature-watching, would I have been as
oblivious to these simple joys as all the people around me?
In an earlier post
entitled Stand Still and Look Until You Really See, I suggested six
exercises to practice paying attention, designed especially for the
left-brain-heavy:
- Move in close, so you divert attention from individual
objects and start to see instead colour, texture, shape, shadow,
reflection, pattern
- Find an unusual perspective from which to look -- get down
on the ground and look up, look at something through trees, through a
microscope, or by candlelight, anything that will let you see things
differently from usual
- Look at things under unusual conditions -- in the fog, at
night, right after a heavy rain, just at dawn or dusk
- Stimulate your other right-brain senses -- get your nose up
close to things, listen to birds, or insects, or train whistles, or
music, walk in your bare feet
- Walk or bicycle without a pre-determined destination,
direction or time limit
- Study something -- birds at your bird-feeder, time-lapse of
a flower over the course of a day or a week, a spider-web, how moving
or dimming the lights in a room changes its character, how a bottle
looks different when viewed from different angles
One of the most interesting theories about why we lose the ability to
pay attention is related to the chemical dopamine, which occurs
naturally in the body and is our body's way of telling us that
something we have just sensed or experienced is important and needs to
be remembered. Here's a theory from Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse:
Over time, the addict's brain
adapts to the torrent of dopamine by dampening the system down. Imaging
experiments show that cocaine addicts' brains don't react to the things
that turn on the rest of us, whether that's romantic passion, food or
cold, hard cash. Volkow's research has also shown that addicts have
fewer dopamine D2 receptors, which are found in parts of the brain
involved in motivation and reward behavior. With fewer receptors, the
dopamine system is desensitized, and the now-understimulated addict
needs more and more of the drug to feel anything at all. Meanwhile,
pathways associated with other interesting stimuli are left idle and
lose strength. The prefrontal cortex--the part of the brain associated
with judgment and inhibitory control--also stops functioning normally.
It's a neurological recipe for disaster. "You have enhanced motivation
for the drug, and you have impaired prefrontal cortical systems. So you
want the drugs pathologically, and you have reduced control of
behavior, and what you've got is an addict," says University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor psychology professor Terry Robinson, who pioneered
this new way of thinking about dopamine with his University of Michigan
colleague Kent Berridge...
Obesity may involve similar malfunctions in the dopamine system.
Volkow's longtime Brookhaven collaborator Gene-Jack Wang has discovered
that the brains of seriously obese people seem to be tuned toward food.
Even when they are lying quietly in the scanning machine, the sensory
cortex of their mouth, tongue and lips is more active than it is in
normal-weight people, he says: "They are putting out their antennae."
Yet he also found that the dopamine circuitry of heavy people is less
responsive, with fewer dopamine D2 receptors. Even among the obese,
there are dopamine differences. The heaviest people in his study had
fewer dopamine receptors than the lightest. Like addicts, overeaters
may be compensating for a sluggish dopamine system by turning to the
one thing that gets their neurons pumping. It's a mark of changing
times--and more sophisticated science--that the head of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse is thinking about doughnuts as well as heroin.
Are we, perhaps, all increasingly addicted to the rush of dopamine as
we get older? Does the sheer constant noise and sensory barrage of
messages competing for our attention eventually dull our senses to the
point we cease being able to really pay attention to anything that
isn't the dopamine equivalent of a 200-decibel jet engine roar? And if
so, does spending time in nature, or in meditation, help us begin to
kick the dopamine habit, and open up our sensory palate to awareness we
had ceased to be capable of? Are television and video games and junk
food and driving in traffic and all the other high-stimulation events
of modern life actually numbing us to awareness of who we are, of the
importance of place and of nature, of the damage we are doing to the
world, and of the messages our instincts and the rest of our
Earth-organism are sending us?
And if this is so, how can we overcome this addiction,
especially those of us who cannot still the din by walking through
nearby wilderness or refocusing through meditation? Especially those of
us who really like the
stimulation that the dopamine rush gives us? Are we doomed to a life of
numbness, and inability to pay attention to things that are really
important?
Photo from my own collection. Sketch by Canadian artist Pierre Surtes.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
