Attention Load and Overload — Filtering?
Greetings from Honduras where I’ve been traveling for the last four weeks. The abundance of things to do and the lack of many good places to plug in my laptop have distracted me from posting this month. But today I read a blog from an American expat who lives here, and it got me thinking about the ADDexecutive:
La Gringa wrote about culture shock:
Isolation: I didn’t realize how much I would miss the English language. I knew some Spanish, but Honduran Spanish didn’t sound anything like I learned or had heard on television. I didn’t understand people and they didn’t understand me. I found myself tuning out to everything around me, just like I do for commercials on TV.
La Gringa was talking about language, but it got me thinking about travel to places where there’s lots and lots that we don’t recognize or understand. In these circumstances, does our ADD push us to zip our attention all over the place, from one new thing to the next? Or do we rapidly go into overload, and find ourselves hyperfocusing on any one thing we do understand, or maybe nothing at all?
When the senses are bombarded with new stuff, how adaptive are our filters? I ask this not only in the context of travel, but in the context of any situation — business or otherwise — in which we find that there’s a lot going on that we don’t understand. How do we find the ability to figure out which things need our attention? (Never mind the secondary need to keep our attention there, amid the distractions.)
