Conscious and unconscious attention

Revisiting Happiness by Design a decade on

It was actually recognised 150 years ago that a great deal of perception, memory, and behaviour occurs without conscious deliberation or will. We therefore need to distinguish between two types of attention. Conscious attention is when you are in some way aware of where your attention is being directed and unconscious attention is when you are unaware of what you are attending to. Unconscious attention encompasses the thought processes that occur while conscious attention is directed elsewhere. Understanding the distinction is critical if you are to give yourself the best shot of being happier for longer; and ultimately in being so without exhausting yourself through the effort of trying to be happier. Some of the time, you are aware of what you are paying attention to, and much of the time, you are not.

As with the intuition behind the production process of attention, my aim isn’t to be literal here. We don’t really allocate unconscious attention in any meaningful way – it just gets allocated without us having to make any real decision about what is attended to. But, as we shall see, you can consciously select the environments that your unconscious attention can roam in. Although you can’t consciously dictate how your dog runs around a field, you can choose which park you take it to. We are a lot like dogs in how we react to situational triggers.

To get a better sense of the distinction between conscious and unconscious attention we need to go back a bit in time. The first stage of humankind, in terms of our evolution, is thought to be Ardipithecus ramidus, a four-foot-tall tree-dweller who lived about four and a half million years ago. He’s dead now but, to some extent, his brain lives on in all of us. We are Ard-wired, if you will. Much of how our brains work today owes a lot to our ancestors.

In more recent times, there has been an emerging consensus in behavioural science that we are all driven much more by the automatic processes of “system 1” – the hardwired bit of our brain – than by the deliberative reasoning of “system 2”, which is the Spock-like bit of our brain. The word “system” is used here as shorthand for two processing systems. According to my classification, unconscious attention is all system 1. There aren’t really two separate processing systems in the brain: it’s much more complex than this, with significant overlaps between brain regions. But it is a useful distinction for illustrating the different influences of context and cognition.

All of us have an automatic system 1 that is wired in pretty much the same way. It has not evolved differently in an East End boy and a West End girl. You may have a deliberative system 2 that is quite different from mine because of the cultural and other forces that shape us, and this will result in us behaving quite differently some of the time. But, even then, our system 1 is still reacting in a similar way. And as we’ve learned, context will dominate much of the time, making it likely that you’ll act just like this East End boy.

The sharp rise in our understanding of unconscious processes has led to many books on the subject and opened up a wealth of new possibilities. One prospect I find amazing is encrypting computers with passcodes that are embedded in the unconscious mind but that are not accessible by conscious thought. The research evidence has even led some to question whether conscious thought has any influence on behaviour at all. This might be an overstatement, but the causal role of conscious thought has certainly been overstated.

One thing is for sure. Our brains are lazy and want to conserve attentional energy. Looking to automate behaviours where it can means that many decisions that start out as system 2 end up as system 1. Have you ever gone the wrong way to a meeting that is not at your office because you are used to going to your office? Or have you ever gone back home to check that you have locked the house properly even though you had locked up without realising it? I have done these last two things within the last week. And both came about as a result of my brain wanting to create a habit and conserve energy. A habit is a behavioural pattern enacted automatically in response to a situation where the behaviour has been previously performed repeatedly and consistently. Why waste attentional energy thinking about how to get to work or whether to lock the house when you can automatically do both in the same ways every day?

Sports stars are able to shut out various distractions completely in order to focus only on the task at hand. They have to get themselves “in the zone” until being there becomes automatic for them. In a similar way, art historians are better able to spot a fake work of art when they transfer their wealth of knowledge and wisdom from system 2 to system 1, and thus make what appears to be a snap judgment. Ideally, much of what you must initially concentrate on to improve your happiness similarly becomes automatic in time.

The last thing that experts who have transferred from “slow” to “fast” thinking should want to happen is to start thinking consciously again. For stars in sports like weightlifting, golf, and snooker, thinking consciously about the task can lead to “choking” – freezing up and failing because of the pressure of the situation. In a weight-lifting competition, you would be more likely to lift a given weight if you were ranked tenth after the first round than if you were ranked first. The guy ranked first is the one to aim at; he knows it, and he often chokes as a result. Decisions can move from system 2 to system 1 and back again over time.

Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.