Montana is part of “Big Sky Country.” During a sabbatical last semester (thank you, Calvin University!), my wife and I spent time under the big sky and worked on writing projects. Unobstructed views and dramatic land features yield a sense of perspective that the sky’s not just big, it’s enormous. In parts of Montana, plains go to the horizon. In mountainous regions, distance to a mountain is hard to estimate until it’s reached. Mountain vistas reveal broad valleys and distant plains. Throughout those two months, I felt insignificant relative to the landscape, yet limitlessly free as we hiked without another person in sight. If I tried taking it all in at once—the sky, trees, land formations, and animals—while walking on rocky, uneven trails, I often stumbled. I found I needed to stop to absorb the richness of my surroundings.
I’m a cognitive psychologist, interested in perception and attention—how we take in our surroundings. We’re constantly surrounded by external stimuli and information: sights, sounds, smells, textures—not to mention our internal thoughts. We have endless possibilities to consider. Most cognitive psychologists assume that our cognitive capacities are limited, leaving us unable to attend to everything at once. We must limit by selecting. Attention processes accomplish this.
Acknowledging personal limitation, let alone emphasizing it, is hardly popular. I see this occasionally when I ask students in my psychology courses to reflect on limitation as a biblical characteristic of being human. Students often conflate limitation of attention (or more broadly, thinking capacity) with sin. While granting such shortcomings may be moderated by medications such as Aderall or Ritalin, many conclude that inattention is a character flaw; the inability to fully focus indicates we’re not all we could be.
They’re not alone. Concerns that we’re letting our attention be usurped or we’re just not using it well are in news stories. Multiple books have been written to “improve focus, concentration, and productivity.” In today’s world of ubiquitous technology and devices, we’ve all had to learn how to navigate information-saturated environments. Should we heed the dire warnings that we’re losing our attention to a tech-heavy world, and we need to seize it back before all is lost?
Although they don’t use the word sin, several recent, best-selling authors disparage those who seek to limit human attention and chasten any who don’t act to maximize their focus. Some point to thieves among us who actively conspire to steal our attention. Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants1 criticizes media companies and tech firms who would monetize our attention. Wu rightly cautions that the product “sold” on social media is users themselves. Websites are designed to capture and keep your attention. While some obviously want us to buy their offerings, it may be less apparent that many are also buying us, in the form of our demonstrated preferences. Nir Eyal, after writing Hooked2, something of a playbook for how businesses could capture and keep your attention for financial gain, next went on to write Indistractible3 to teach people how to resist those techniques and have full control over their focus. Questions of trying to capitalize on both sides aside, the clear message is that businesses can control our attention, but everyone can fight back and reclaim it. Eyal optimistically writes, “In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves ‘indistractible.’”4 The onus is on each of us to maximize our attention and fight the powers that distract.
Johann Hari’s recent Stolen Focus5 implicates everything from smartphone usage to COVID to processed foods as destroyers of attention. Although it sounds like a wide-ranging cast of culprits, his case for each factor has some merit. Like Wu, he also blames big media for buying and selling our attention, and like Eyal, he encourages readers to increase their self-control and to fight corporate practices. Hari goes further as he believes companies should be forced to cease and desist their focus-stealing practices.
These are only a few of the authors who claim that we have created a highly distracting culture in North America. And they are correct that we would do well to change our individual habits and require a change of those who would monetize our attention. At best, however, these critiques only tacitly acknowledge the human condition of limitation. They assume nearly limitless potential for each person’s attention capabilities, that is, if we have the self-control to use them and break free of constraints. By contrast, Gloria Mark’s recent Attention Span,6 names several popularly held myths regarding the purported benefits of unending focus. She claims distraction isn’t entirely bad, nor is laser focus entirely good (or even possible). Interruptions allow us to switch from what is less important to what is more important.7 We also need times of rest and unfocused attention as ways of resetting attention. She also notes that technology is not the only distraction we face. Distraction is simply part of life. Mark’s comments get closer to the deep issue largely missing in the popular discussion of attention and distraction: we are fundamentally limited.
Our embodiment necessitates limitation.8 Attention selects for possible action that we are physically or mentally capable of pursuing, such as thought about an idea, movement of a limb, or following one conversation among many. When monitoring one of your hands for example, attention could select for action to the left or the right but not both, because you can’t physically move one hand in both ways at once! On the proverbial other hand, attention is flexible like our bodies, so it can shift almost instantaneously to select motion to the right after just attending to motion to the left. If attention doesn’t select, however, possible actions aren’t in mind.
In this way, attention acts as a gateway to possibilities. In fact, I would argue that attention is our entry point to the relationships for which God made us—to interact with people, creation, God, and even ourselves. Attention systems select for both possible action and interaction. We exist within a web of relationships, but as embodied creatures, we cannot interact with all of these at once. We need attention because we are limited.
As God’s “very good” creation (Genesis 1:31), humans are equipped for interaction with what’s around us and within us. Part of our equipping is our attentional systems. As Psalm 139 reminds, God knows us thoroughly, intimately. God knew our needs and what would make us prosper. God continues to know our needs. God can track our actions (verses 2-3), our thoughts (verse 2), our next word (verse 4). The psalmist writes, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain” (verse 6).
“Too wonderful,” certainly in the sense that God’s abilities are astounding. “Too wonderful,” also in that “such knowledge” would be shocking in both amount and content. God can handle the endless thoughts, including those that are hypocritical, self-focused, sinful. And God loves us despite these, offering and drawing us into a forgiving relationship. God can have a relationship with every single one of us, simultaneously. The distance between our attention and thought abilities relative to God’s is immense. If we miss that, we underestimate God’s capacity to know and to love, and we perilously overestimate our own abilities to do so.
If falling short of unlimited attention focus were our fault, it follows that greater self-control should solve that problem. Cognitive limits can’t be eliminated by effort or repentance, however, as if being limited is sinful, rather than a result of embodiment. That said, there certainly are ways to improve the efficiency of our limited attention, but even so, our attention remains limited.
Embracing who God has made us to be means accepting that God is our creator, and we are creatures.9 Realistic self-assessment of our abilities can help us learn to flourish within those gifts, rely on God, and enable us to better grow in all the fruits of the Spirit, not just self-control. Attention as a behavior and ability (or inability) is not always ours to choose. What we do with our finite attention—what we choose to focus on, what we choose to do or not do—may well be a matter of agency. We may choose to focus on ourselves and ignore those in need, for example. The Bible has no shortage of stories of people choosing to ignore God’s desires,10 and like those people, we too may need to seek forgiveness for how we steward our gifts.
If our attention systems are both limited and as God intended, might we more fully embody the image of God by embracing limitation? Consider interpersonal relationships. We can’t process everyone’s behavior simultaneously, let alone all their thoughts (i.e., we’re not God). We can, however, focus on a single interaction, a single task, or a single prayer. The purpose may not be maximization or increased productivity (although this may occur), but to develop connections. To live as the relational creatures God made us to be.
How broadly are we trying to give access to others, creation, God, or even ourselves through the gateway of our attention? Are we missing the fullness of experience by trying to respond to too much at once? Are we missing God-given (God-promised) rest by constantly straining attention capacities?
I’m not suggesting we abandon goals, hopes, or desires because we must attend to our limited attention. What a depressing rejection of sanctification and abrogation of stewardship that would be! Instead, how might we thrive as God’s beloved creation, taking serious our creaturely attention? Do we need to stop other things we’re doing, respect our limitation, and go deeper?
Each moment presents nearly endless possibilities for our attention under the big sky–in Montana or anywhere. This is nothing new. Even monks of the early church found they could not escape distraction in desert solitude.11 But the options and enticements may be greater than in the past: consider the smartphone! Limitation, paradoxically, allows for deeper engagement and reflection. Experiencing more may come from attending to less.
Footnotes
- Vintage Books, New York, NY, 2016.
- Portfolio/Penguin, New York, NY, 2014.
- BenBella Books, Dallas, TX, 2019.
- Nir Elay, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your life. (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 3.
- Crown, New York, NY, 2022.
- Hanover Square Press, New York, NY, 2023.
- What constitutes “important” is critically important, but beyond the scope of this blog post.
- This is the perspective laid out well by Alan Allport, “Visual Attention” in M. I. Posner (Ed.) Foundations of cognitive science: A Bradford Book, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 631-682. For a more recent formulation, see Christian N.L. Olivers and Pieter R. Roelfsema. “Attention for action in visual working memory.” Cortex 131 (2020): 179-194.
- God has made humans “a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:5). It’s significant that humans are described this way after the Fall!!
- In Jeremiah 6:8, God warns Israel to pay attention, but in the following chapters, Israel doesn’t and is invaded by Babylon. In Matthew 7:24-27, the parable of the wise and foolish builder, told by Jesus, depicts both hearing a warning, but only one, the wise builder, listened and built on solid ground.
- John Cassian, A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction. Translated by Jamie Kreiner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
