Gloria DeGaetano - Attending to Our Children’s Attention Span

Attending to Our Children’s Attention Span (cont.)

To understand how too much screen time is the wrong ingredient for growing an attention span, there are three important considerations.

First, visual images must be noticed. Do an experiment. In the evening with the lights low, put your head at an angle to the television. Wait for a commercial. Then try not to look. Try as hard as you can. What you soon find out is that it is virtually impossible not to look. The image changes activate the brain’s “orienting response,” discovered by Pavlov in 1927. We humans are programmed to look at changes or novelty—even in our peripheral vision. This can’t be helped. We can’t lose this instinct of our low brain function. It’s an integral and important component of our survival mechanism. Therefore, the low brain cannot easily resist orienting to quick cuts, onslaughts of one-second images, hyped commercials, flashes of sex and violence. If they are there, we will look.

After you notice salient visual images, you remember them. Not always consciously remembered, but stored in our memories nevertheless. How this works is still a mystery for researchers. The huge effect advertising images have on purchasing decisions, for instance, is not even clearly understood. But it seems like once we see images that are repeated regularly, and associated with strong emotional appeal those images become very powerful influencers of behaviors. Easily remembered, they spur the impetuous decision-making process, linking our feelings of happiness and self-worth to the glamorized products—so mundane when you really think about it. A purse—a really cool purse, the kind of purse that demonstrates you are wealthy and with-it can now cost upwards to $2,000—or more. This purse is no longer a purse. It has been artfully constructed by the advertising and fashion industries to be a powerful symbol of belonging to an exclusive club.

A study, published in the journal, Neuron, is the first to explore how cultural messages penetrate the human brain and shape personal preferences. Is there a direct route from the image to the action? Science writer Sandra Blakeslee tells us, “Some corporations have teamed up with neuroscientists to find out. Recent experiments in so-called neuro-marketing have explored reactions to movie trailers, choices about automobiles, the appeal of a pretty face and gut reactions to political campaign advertising, as well as the power of brand loyalty… (MRI’s) are being used to shed light on brain mechanisms that play a central role in consumer behavior: circuits that underlie reward, decision making, motivation, emotions and the sense of self. Anything that is novel, researchers have found, grabs the brain's attention system by tapping directly into reward pathways. ‘Being able to see how the brain responds to novelty and makes decisions is potentially a huge step forward for marketers,’ said Tim McPartlin, a senior vice president of Lieberman Research Worldwide in Los Angeles.” (3)

Corporations have always been a few decades ahead of the average person in understanding just how the human brain can be conditioned, mutated, and re-structured.

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