Wow look at That!: Attention, Worry and Distraction

By Gary Berg-Cross The recently completed, and ever so long, election process is only one of the Big things that have commanded our attention this season. Monitoring political ups and downs became a habit in 2012 (and with discussion of a Fiscal Cliff is likely to continue). This Fall one could tune in daily, or twice daily, to the latest polling stats. These are relatively easy to follow, but making sense of the statistics is hard. And there are so many issues to consider with largely secular ones swamped by hot button economic, jobs and fairness topics. It seems that large attention is going to be distracted from some Humantist concerns for quite a while.

Superstorm Sandy was another national-level, mind grabbing event whose consequences linger after holding the media’s attention.  Over days we were fed a series of projections followed by fearful storm of sights and sounds to us. Many of us couldn’t take our eyes off of the approaching storm, it whereabouts, landings and impacts. There was plenty to it. Sandy was no joke affecting millions from NC to Mass. On one day people awoke to tsunami like destruction of homes, businesses & infrastructure. Damaged, debris and destruction everywhere and for now too ling no electricity, heat, fuel or certain recovery for too many. But those of us out of the main storm path there was and some type of automated arousal to watch unfolding events as well as a deliberate one. Sandy was something to worry about and that grabs human attention. There was a confluence of at least 3 reasons for this – natural attention grabbing, motivation from anxiety and defensive distraction.  
Attention
 

Abstract topics like justice and freedom don't get a lot of attention even in normal times. One has to build an intellectual environment and have teachable moments. Some states of affairs are hot topics. You can understand part of the attraction by imagining a time when we lived in small tribes that unfolding events nearby would be of immense value to know – where is that tiger going? There is a built in system for certain types of events to grab our attention. Like thinking fast and slow cognitive science tells use there are 2 different ways that our brain processes information coming from the outside world. One is the evolutionarily more recent willful focus, as when we study a school topic produces.  In the brain the neo-cortex produces  "top-down" signals.  The other is a more primitive and automatic focus such as produced by an unexpected noise.  These are produced more "bottom-up" as shown by
monkey studies.  Researchers Miller and Buschman found that when a picture or object "popped out" at the creature, the parietal cortex jumps into action. When the monkeys were merely searching for the object, however, it was activity in the prefrontal cortex controlling the brain. Anxiety & Anxious Narratives Some signals of possible danger demand our attention, but holding it is worry and fear. Getting the amount of concern with dynamic data, where will the storm hit and how much damage will it is – am I prepared?, is hard business taking a mix of the right information and lots of deliberate reasoning more than the evidence warrants. Long after satisfying one’s basic news needs about power disruptions, travel advisories, and closings/delays we are often left unsatisfied lingers around computer, phone and TV screens. There’s always more. Look, a tweets to a live video feed of a dangling construction crane in midtown NYC.  It’s a natural short story in the larger narrative and I want to know how it ends and who is impacted, even if there are no cranes in my sage suburban area.

Wake Forest professor Eric Wilson polishes up an old Jack London observation on disaster attraction in his new book, Everyone Loves A Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away. It is simple that we evolved in a challenging environment and never feel more alive than in times of distress, danger and calamity. The modern twist is that we may now get this strange alive feeling experience 2^nd or 3^rd hand through TV along with the earlier cultural artifacts of movies. Wilson notes that Edison “early film The Great Train Robbery" caused a cultural sensation because he:

 "realized at the beginning of narrative cinema that audiences love looking at terrible things."
 
It’s something that novelist realized earlier.

People, like David Ropeik (author of “How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.”), who study risk perception talk about addictive following TV, scanning news sites and social media  as a weather or storm “porn” phenomena. We hook into staying informed constructing our own story interpretations much more than is useful. It’s like that habitual scanning of the environment just in case a predator will appear and trigger our fight-or-flight response, which release stress hormones and heighten our sensitivity to any new signs of danger. Hormone lifted anxiety creates a longer term positive feedback loop which in turn plunges us into more worry.  The more anxious and alarmed we become the readier we are to be anxious.

Distraction  

The last part of it is the value of distraction that demands attention in a stressful life. As Adam Hochschild said of it, “ Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.” This seems particularly true in modern life which is not only jammed scheduled but serviced by modern technology that affords distraction as well as convenience. It’s the ever present media mixed with social networks & mobile devices that affords opportunity for daily distractions.  And distractions are one way of handling stress and anxiety.  But in the case of a “storm porn” we have yet another part of a positive feedback process. Work is hard since we have some free floating anxiety cause by the possible impact of a storm. It is easy to think that “Perhaps a small distraction will allow me to get back to work.”  In earlier times it might have been a magazine or newspaper to read, or a movie or TV. Now it can be my smart phone. With ever present, new info these information break distractions are never ending and are just as likely to produce heightened anxiety. Tough times indeed for deliberative thinking and intellectual discourse on serious topics. Something to be reflexively anxious about.

Images

1.  NASA image of Sandy: http://gizmodo.com/5955575/hurricane-sandy-satellite-photos-and-videos-updating-live  
2. Sandy Approaches: http://djandyw.blogspot.com/2012/10/anxiety-high-as-super-storm-sandy-draws.html 
3.  How Risky Is It, Really: How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts   
4. Afraid of Tigers?: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/evolution_of_anxiety_humans_were_prey_for_predators_such_as_hyenas_snakes.html

Thoughtful and Shallow Skepticism

As a boy I was lucky to read the work of Martin Gardner, a brilliant polymath, who was also a hero to “skeptics and science-minded people worldwide”. My skepticism was greatly influenced Gardner’s 1952 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (still in print) which was the classic, rational-empirical examination of pseudoscience and pseudoscientists. As Michael Shermer put it: "Modern skepticism has developed into a science-based movement, beginning with Martin Gardner's 1952 classic". It is worth noting that in 1976 Gardner became a founding fellow of CSICOP, now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (SI), and was an original member of SI’s Editorial Board.

With Garner’s guidance as a base I am respectful of a thoughtful skepticism. But neither he or I view it as an absolute or something that protects us from false beliefs. Indeed increasingly I see Garnder’s disciplined, skeptical stance being replaced with a shallow version that is used to bash topics as diverse as Climate Change, Evolution (Teach the Debate) and Science itself. 

 Some of it is ideological in nature. So libertarians like Penn and Teller who are general skeptics apply shallow thinking to Climate Change. When Penn Jillette was asked whether he “still believed that man-made climate change is bunk, as he has said more than once, his basic answer was:

" I loathe everything about Al Gore, so since Gore has been crusading against climate change it must be garbage.” 

OK, so your loathing emotion means you don't have to examine data and rational arguments???

Both Penn and Teller are well-known libertarians, but also supporters of the libertarian Cato Institute, leaders in spreading doubt about global warming. It is humbling to see people considered both hard-nosed empiricists and skeptics giving way to ideo-emotions that encourage some pretty stupid stances. 
 

Another contributing reason, I suspect, for a shallower skepticism is a false idea of its role in Science. The basic scientific methodology requires any theory to be subject to refutation, and this creates a base skepticism for many people. People latch onto a nihilistic idea that everything should be refutable and people are being "scientific" when they take this stance even while ignoring the other aspects of a scientific stance (e.g. coherence, validation, etc.).

Dr. David Morrison (Senior Scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute) states it well when characterizing climate change deniers, “It is fine to be skeptical, but we need to be concerned when skepticism drifts into denial.” And such denial abounds in climate change despite a pretty prominent scientific consensus. This scientific consensus is combated by lots of misinformation/disinformation about climate change (published on the Internet), driven in part by eco-political and economic positions. 

I have a neighbor who sends me example of these things, perhaps in an effort to convert me. His self image seems to be of a powerful skeptic. But it usually takes me only Google minutes to find that the sources of his articles are people backed by groups and fronts for Exxon and allies. 

I have long wondered why he isn’t skeptical of such backings. When confronted, his “skeptical” response is a knee-jerk negativity - an appeal to the meme-idea that climate scientist receive money for their research and they are just milking the public for more support. He has a reflexive disbelief in the assertions made by climate scientists. He seems unaware of the role rationalism plays in Gardner’s skepticism based on a scientific view of the world. This is a rational skepticism that uses the tools of reason and critical thinking to follow the data wherever it leads. This thoughtful skepticism may start from a simple disbelief, but it qualifies and arms skepticism with an empirical stance; because assertions, no matter how commonsensical, require proof. Proof includes data that is rigorously investigated wherever it leads, which can be an increasingly messy picture for a while.

Clearly some topics like climate change are complicated and messy, but there is a broad consensus when one looks at the complete set. That is not to say that there won’t be surprises. Indeed what some future validated data supports may not be our original hunch, but something else entirely. It is just that these discoveries cannot be expected to follow a simple, ideological narrative. Simple, shallow skepticism’s does have this narrative appeal - it may be lulled into acceptance by being a good story. We often need a simple story that we communicate to others. This is a plus. We prefer stories with a connection to something familiar and comforting over a complex story even one that has a rational-empirical base. In climate change some simple but deceptive narratives include: ‘What we are seeing are “natural variations” caused primarily by variations in solar output’ or “The apparent increase in temperature is an artifact caused by the fact that much of the data are from cities, which are warmer than their surroundings”. Good stories, but not supported by (subsequent) analysis.

Stories that pass our skeptical filter may mature into climate hoax stories that provide a shallow skeptical identity that people happily try on and use happily. We saw this type of thing in the narrative that vaccines cause autism in children, something that seemed to have some data in back of it, but which turned out to be concocted. A publication earlier this month in the British Medical Journal accused Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher responsible for the controversial 1998 study linking MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccinations to autism, of falsifying data. The wheels of science may grind slowly but truth will out.

And of course from a secular perspective, we see simple, deceptive narratives in religious stories that provide comfort, structure, and cultural identity. Acceptance of these is a challenge for skeptics, but once accepted by the gullible they may offer fertile ground for the shallow forms of self protective skepticism. Often such religious stories intertwine as other shallow skeptical deniers support one another with a lacing of stories.

The simple doubts of confirmed curmudgeons and cynics can be a precious thing held firmly as part of their coping identity. It can be comforting. But a thoughtful skeptic can change his/her mind and not deny the preponderance of the evidence. Indeed there was an informal study done looking at sites of listed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Skeptics_and_skeptical_organizations to see if there were climate change deniers on them. Turns out nary a one. 

Thoughtful skeptics are not climate deniers for the most part.

For more on skepticism see http://www.skepticnorth.com/2010/09/what-is-skepticism-week-1-curmudgeon-cynic-skeptic/ and http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/skeptics-circle/