Attention and Distraction: It's All in the Emphasis

“Pillsbury agreed with Titchener, indicating, ‘The essence of attention as a conscious process is an increase in the clearness on one idea or a group of ideas at the expense of others.’ Researchers at the beginning of the 20^th century debated how this increased clearness is obtained. Mach, Stumpf, and others favored the view that this increase in clearness was direct, whereas Wundt, Kulpe, and others held the view that the increase was accomplished indirectly by inhibiting the sensations that were not attended to. … The debate about whether attention increases the clearness of attended events or decreases the clearness of unattended events presaged the current argument in psychology regarding whether attending is accomplished primarily through excitatory or inhibitory mechanisms.” – Proctor and Johnson, “Historical Overview of Research on Attention” (p. 11-12)

“Trim ran down and brought up his master’s supper,—to no purpose:—Trim’s plan of operation ran so in my uncle Toby’s head, he could not taste it.—Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, get me to-bed;—‘twas all one.—Corporal Trim’s description had fired his imagination,—my uncle Toby could not shut his eyes.” – Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (p. 70)

     In Tristram Shandy, the narrator is a sort of maestro of distraction. The story rolls along one tangent after another, returning to core scenes only to depart again in an abrupt digression. However, Sterne manages to hold his reader’s attention through a deft use of suspense, both blunt and subtle: several times, usually at the end of chapters or volumes, he openly dares the reader to guess what happens next: “You may conjecture upon it, if you please,” he says at the end of Volume II, “but I tell you before-hand it will be in vain” (Sterne 111). More indirectly, his very style of alighting and departing from specific scenes generates a building suspense that draws focus to these scenes by the act of distracting the reader’s attention elsewhere. In this way, Sterne lends focus to his very disjointed novel.

     In the passage excerpted above, Sterne illustrates a conception of attention at the level of his characters. The scene preceding this passage is composed of constant distractions; it begins with Toby blushing “as red as scarlet” after hearing Trim voice his scheme of reconstructing Toby’s wartime maps on Toby’s own property. What follows is a series of interruptions in the conversation between the two. Each of the men becomes consumed by his own train of thought, unable to pay adequate attention to the other. While Sterne’s prose dodges back and forth between them, one can see through the jungle of punctuation that Toby and Trim themselves are singularly occupied.

     Proctor and Johnson’s review emphasizes the proposed theory that attention results from increased clearness of an idea at the expense of others, whether by an increase in clarity of the attended event or by suppression of superfluous stimuli. Sterne illustrates this notion here: Toby can neither taste his food nor fall asleep due to the diversion of his attention into this one idea. However, Sterne does not reveal the identity of Toby’s idea itself until the next paragraph. By creating suspense in the form of the protracted exchange between Toby and Trim, he places emphasis on the distracting effects of this idea. Paradoxically, the reason the idea is in fact so distracting as to blunt taste and prevent sleep, is because it so effectively holds Toby’s attention that he cannot direct his thoughts elsewhere. Sterne’s suspense in this scene comes to completion with the following passage:

“My uncle Toby had a little neat country-house of his own, in the village where my father’s estate lay at Shandy…so that as Trim uttered the words, “A rood and a half of ground to do what they would with:”—This identical bowling-green instantly presented itself, and became curiously painted, all at once, upon the retina of my uncle Toby’s fancy;—which was the physical cause of making him change colour, or at least, of heightening his blush” (Sterne 70).

     Unpacking this passage yields telling results: after revealing the details of the notion that has so engrossed Toby’s mind, Sterne supplies the concluding image of the blush, bringing the moment full circle. Much like the rest of the novel, in which Sterne bookends digressions or sub-stories between familiar images, he frames Toby’s bout of distraction with his blushing face, the outward expression of his inner condition.

     Furthermore, in a level of significance that I do not believe would have been available to Sterne himself but offers an interesting coincidence for us modern readers, the description of the retina mirrors the concept of clarity of one idea accompanied by the abstraction of others. As we know, the receptive fields of light-sensitive cells in the retina are composed of on- and off-centered cells. These receptive fields, like little bullseyes, respond to light in the center and darkness in the periphery—or vice versa—to emphasize contrast and enhance light-dark boundaries. This allows for clearer vision.

     Without such contrasts, there would be no such thing as focus. In order for one idea to be emphasized, others must be either de-emphasized (if we go with the inhibitory theory), or at least less emphasized (excitatory). It’s the same reason why summer feels so nice—if we didn’t know winter, summer wouldn’t be half so warm.