Debunking Attention Myths That Shape Education
It’s not a flashlight, doesn’t use a whiteboard, and is only weakly willfull
It is said that we’re in an attention economy. The commodity many vendors most want is your attention. Understanding how attention works is an important factor in our decisions about employing it.
Education relies on attention. One overarching trend in modern education is that it has become harder to get a student’s attention. The duty ethos shaped our notion of attention in prior schooling eras. Parents and society now want to develop free thinkers, and those brains don’t conform, by design. Schools need more nuanced ways to help student attention skills.
In neuroscience and psychology, attention is a better understood phenomenon than it once was. Some fundamental attention research insights should affect how students are educated, but not many in education seem aware of them.
Attention is an elusive and slippery creature, with many facets. To ease our understanding of it, analogies are commonly used. The value of analogies is in relating abstract notions, but they can be misleading or even drive incorrect thinking. Analogies can be convenient, but wrong. They are invalid in some respects. Analogies express relationships, not equivalence. One of my recent articles and a short course explored how analogies can be used to “concept stretch”, a process for making concepts more robust and interconnected. Key to doing so is being able to articulate when analogies are invalid.
This article exposes three of the biggest misperceptions about human attention.
Attention is Not Like a Flashlight
One of the most pervasive analogies for attention is that of a flashlight (or spotlight) that illuminates specific information in our environment or consciousness. I even hear attention researchers use this comparison!
This analogy suggests that we actively shine our attention on particular stimuli, bringing them into focus while leaving everything else in darkness. While this image is intuitive, it fails to capture what modern neuroscience says about attention.
Research has shown that attention functions more like a filter than a flashlight. Brains don't simply illuminate information; instead, it selectively filters out irrelevant stimuli. This filtering process occurs at multiple levels of neural processing, from early sensory areas to higher-order cognitive regions.
There isn’t a way for the brain to functionally shine a flashlight. It is a distributed system with lots happening at once. It’s never paying attention to only one thing. It has a largely distributed decision-making process, not a top-down one. The brain’s stimuli—external or internal—is sent out more like a “who’s got something?” than a task delegation.
The filter model of attention explains several phenomena that the flashlight analogy struggles to account for. Our brain actively suppresses irrelevant information, rather than just ignoring it. This is why we can focus on a conversation in a noisy room by filtering out background noise. We can attend to multiple stimuli simultaneously, albeit with reduced efficiency. The flashlight analogy implies a single point of focus. Some stimuli can capture our attention without conscious awareness, a process difficult to explain with the flashlight model but consistent with automatic filtering mechanisms. Our attention has limited capacity, which aligns more with a filter becoming saturated than with a flashlight's ability to illuminate vast areas.
The filter analogy matters in education. Instead of trying to "shine a light" on important information, educators should focus on helping students develop effective filtering strategies. It’s not only whether they are doing the work instead of goofing off, but also whether they’re focusing on the most important aspects of what they are doing. Teaching techniques that reduce cognitive load and minimize distractions are important to help students' attentional filters work more efficiently, but student attention filters also need practice in more cluttered attention environments as they mature. Recognizing that some level of background processing always occurs challenges the notion that students can focus solely on one task at a time. This shows up in subtle ways. For example, research on the “scarcity effect” shows how background worries of the underprivileged can deeply affect their problem-solving ability.
Attention is Only Weakly Willful
A second myth about attention is that it's entirely under our conscious control. That is also what the flashlight and whiteboard analogies imply. Schools and society seem to assume that with enough determination, we can focus on anything for as long as we choose. This belief underpins many traditional educational practices, from long lectures to extended study sessions. While ability to focus for extended periods can be improved, and naturally does so as children develop, attention is less amenable to sheer force of will than commonly understood.
Attention is, in fact, only weakly willful. While we can exert some control over what we attend to, a significant portion of our attentional resources operate automatically and unconsciously. Our brains are constantly processing a vast amount of sensory information, most of which never reaches our conscious awareness. What we end up focusing on is often a result of complex interactions between our goals, our environment, and our brain's innate tendencies.
Students may not be paying attention in class to what the teacher or peers are offering, but they are often still attending based on what their brain automatically wants to do. (Mind wandering is different, but still valuable, as discussed in my prior article.) Aligning the class objectives to the student’s internal attention filter, for example by prioritizing student interests, is a much wiser teaching path.
By recognizing that attention is only weakly under our control, we can design educational experiences that work with, rather than against, the brain's natural tendencies. This approach not only makes learning more effective but also reduces the frustration and self-blame that often accompany struggles with attention, especially among the neurodiverse.
Attention Doesn't Use a Whiteboard
Another common misconception about attention is that it operates like a whiteboard, where information is written and remains visible until it's erased or replaced.
The all-or-none nature of information on a whiteboard has similar issues to the flashlight comparison. The brain’s attention operates on a spectrum, filtering and prioritizing information, not in a binary way. The whiteboard analogy is often used to discuss attention switching, where leftover information from the last brain task is on the whiteboard. This oversimplification fails to capture the dynamic and fleeting nature, and the capacity constraints, of conscious attention.
Attention is a continuous, active process. Our attentional focus is constantly shifting and updating, even when we try to maintain focus on a single task. Unlike a whiteboard that can hold many pieces of information simultaneously, our attention has severe capacity limitations. We can only consciously focus on a small amount of information at any given time. Most of our attention is unconscious, analyzing information through intuitions that aren’t easily explained on whiteboards. Information doesn't stay in our attention until we consciously "erase" it, as with whiteboards. Without active rehearsal or engagement, attended information quickly fades from our immediate consciousness. New information can interfere with or overwrite previously attended information. Unlike omnipresent information on a whiteboard, regaining attention isn’t just “switching back”, it’s “finding again.”
The attention filters are adaptive, similar in principle to noise-cancelling headphones. Modern AI systems, like those powering advanced language models, use attention mechanisms that loosely mimic the brain. AI’s attention is an adaptive filter, dynamically weighing the importance of different parts of user input.
Teachers know about having to manage transitions between activities and to help students develop mode-switching skills.
Schools, however, usually have structural issues that prevent better management of the dynamic attention filter. Traditional school has short, fixed class periods, frequent transitions, and strict subject divisions. Those can work against the natural flow of attention. More flexible time blocks, interdisciplinary projects and thematic units, and diverse spaces that cater to different learning goals and student characteristics are environments that cater to attention’s adaptive filtering.
The myths of attention as a flashlight, as a whiteboard, and as strongly willful have long influenced our approach to education. By understanding attention as an adaptive filter that's dynamic, capacity-limited, and only partially under our control, educational practices can be better aligned with how our brains actually work.
In the attention economy of the 21st century, helping students understand and work with their attentional processes is one of life’s most valuable skills. That means having a more accurate view of what attention is.