On Stratified Attention, Part 1 of 3

“Learning ‘how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” - David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

At this dawn of the Age of AI, an age of disruption and upheaval at the hands of unruly new technologies, an age where we struggle to determine what role these already-powerful yet swiftly-evolving technologies have to play in our lives and work, along with what adaptations we as individuals and organizations must undergo in order to unlock the potential of these technologies we find confounding and exhilarating in equal measure. And just as importantly, how we’re to unlock this potential without getting overcome by the technology itself - not simply in the much hand-wrung-about AI-will-take-all-our-jobs sense, but in the unwittingly-remake-our-minds-to-suit-its-purposes-and-methods sense.

We’re prey, I think, to a nagging idea that AI stands apart from preceding technologies in the sense that more is required of us in order for it make actual sense to us and for us to feel it is fully useful and beneficial, the sense that there’s more to this than learning keyboard shortcuts, say, or some other form of tips-n-tricks level of low grade know-how. We have the sense - the correct sense, it feels important to emphasize - that for these technologies to be as transformative for us as a proliferation of companies and pundits and policymakers are claiming they’ll be, we must become somehow more than passive recipients of them, that these are not simply “plug-n-play bystander” technologies - “switch on the lamp, the lamp throws light,” nor are these simply some “new wrinkle” technologies that execute an existing function in some mildly novel way - “Clap on, clap off! The Clapper®!”

We understand that AI is something altogether new, something that (seems, at least) to learn from us and talk to us, and (where permitted) to operate independent from us. What we’re less clear about, probably, is how we must remake or reconceive our means of engaging, how, in other words, we are to be in relation to these technologies.

Over the course of a recent series of conversations, ZeroWidth co-founders Pete Binggeser and John Cain, along with myself, have identified what we believe to be at least one important way in which everybody already knows how to fold these technologies into our thinking and doing and making: our capacity for Stratified Attention. A vital distinction, we think, worth making: the phrase “divided attention” connotes the blitzed, beleaguered condition that comes of having too much to do and not enough time, resulting in a proliferation of Partially Completed-Then-Quickly-Abandoned Tasks. Whereas with Stratified Attention, we alternate between centering things and allow them to recede, to waft upward in our minds to gain our full notice, then retreat to a lower plateau of our attention where lower urgency or some measure of unresolvedness warrants.

A concrete example from my own recently lived experience:

Like many folks who are socially maladapted, I am currently at work on a novel. Not too long ago, like every novelist, probably - but especially those whose minds are of the hectic and/or ricocheting variety, as mine tends to be - I hit a snag. A bad one. A weeks-long plotting quandary I could not crack.

Quick sidebar about process: generally speaking, approach-wise, there’s a fork in the novel-writing road - in one direction, there are the Outliners, the sensible people who create for themselves a map for where their story is headed and where it’s meant to wind up; in the other direction, there are folks we’ll call the Intuitioners, those recklessly hapless goobers who just start clacking away and see where it takes them. As an avowed goober, I am in this latter camp - get cracking on something and instead of puzzling things out in advance and proceeding with the confidence that comes of clearly knowing what your objectives are, I (for reasons I can’t really name) trust that solutions - to plot, to character, to structure - will emerge as they are needed. Just where these solutions are meant to emerge from I cannot say - the primordial depths someplace? My fractional share of the collective unconscious? The “yes, and” spirit of improv?

Like many “creative” people (these scornful-seeming quotation marks are NOT directed at creative people generally but only at myself, since like every artist, I’m prey to an unhealthy skepticism about my own capacities to be even minimally inventive or interesting,) I harbor scads of superstition about the sources of my (meager) output. So despite my dubious claims to having something resembling smarts, I cling - in the absence of any evidence - to a conception ultimately of my own devising as being some fundamental truth that drives and shapes the direction of my creative work. In some other person, I would urge them to abandon - or at a minimum to examine - such a set of beliefs, as this sort of magical thinking can add nothing of practical utility or value to the complex work of generating original material. In myself, though, I have this odd, unnamed dread of even looking too closely at that this frankly quite weird belief that, in order to avoid unspecified (imagined) consequences, I must place my full trust in some primordial stratum of brain activity toiling away below the level of my consciousness that will feed out a tattered ribbon of theme and incident and so forth in some unwitnessed inexplicable way.

And despite the flimsy and probably spurious underpinnings of this non-method, I nonetheless DO place my trust in this substrate of my cognition, and so far, knock wood, this trust has been well(ish) placed. Because I was able to place this recent plotting quandary, this bottleneck that had bedeviled me for weeks, on some lower shelf of my mind-pantry and let it sit there in the darkness, working away on itself like sourdough starter or something. And after an interval of a few days, the solution to the plotting dilemma presented itself - it just emerged. (From? Who can say?)

Gene Fowler famously said: “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” And, setting aside the anachronistic paper-not-screen construction of it, this is undeniably true - mentally and emotionally, writing is a costly enterprise. But it is ALSO true that there is a category of writing operation that takes place at a depth below effort. And it was here, in that mental layer where sweat is not a requirement, that the troublemaker of a plot pivot was resolved. Which is not to suggest that there’s some magical intracranial Narnia where woodland sprites tend to our business - there is a form of our attention being devoted to a complexly thorny conundrum, it’s just a form that adheres to other rules than the front of mind one we’re used to. It’s like lower gear in the transmission - same gearbox, just more specialized and less frequently required. A much smaller-scale version of this phenomenon happens in my writing every day all the time - I’ll be searching for a phrase or puzzling over what might be a helpful image - the line or paragraph level of constructing text, not the foundational basis level - and I’ll downshift to checking my email or playing a dopey puzzle game for a minute, while the problem turns over in some less explicit quarter of my mind - not a different room or down-some-flight-of-stairs level of my mind-house, the way the plotting quandary seemed to, but in some handy but less directly observed spot, like a drawer in my mind-desk, say.

Shifting your attention back out of my dinky little writer-troubles and onto your own experience* - every day, all the time, there are multiple simultaneous, often conflicting claims upon your attention: some fleeting, some immediate and pressing, some well down range in Important But Not Urgent territory. Mostly, I think, these many claims on our attention, claims of varying urgency and differing timescales exist in our minds like cream poured in coffee - a swirl that’s differentiated but quickly becomes incorporated. True, when stressed, the addition of a Single Other Damn Thing can set us off, but mostly we just fold the new thing into what’s ongoing. When we’re kneading dough and a bit of it breaks off, we don’t typically run around shrieking in terror and confusion, we just add it back into the whole. The way we rank and shuffle, focus on and disregard the many claims on our attention is fluid, is constantly evaluated and updated - a process where we toggle between reflexive/instinctual and conscious/deliberate all the time.

* Meta-Cognition Sidebar: This, right here - in the current moment you’re presently having as a reader, where you’re capable of tracking the threads of A) our observation about interacting with AI, B) garnished with my anecdote about the Novel Plot Quandary, while seamlessly C) shifting mental gears into your own lived experience, AND D) hopping off all these other topics to consider this brief pertinent-yet-tangential-seeming moment of Meta-Cognition WITHOUT LOSING ANY OF THE REST.

And we at ZeroWidth wonder if it is this capacity for Stratified Attention - among other capacities, surely - an inborn quality in ourselves that we sharpen and expand upon over time, is it this quality in us that might permit AI-enabled tools to become such a singular and radical means of assisting us in our work?

Given the now longstanding tendency for monetizing hype and often unhinged rhetorical overreach to cluster around all topics relating to AI, it feels worth re-emphasizing, as we always will, this ordinal relationship between ourselves and this technology: WE do not remake ourselves to suit IT; IT exists in order to further OUR objectives, NEVER vice versa. In order for this to remain so, though, we must develop greater clarity on what we expect and demand of AI. And a vital element of developing this clarity must involve deeply noticing what use of these tools does to our thinking, how it shapes and redirects our “natural” means of navigating problems and processes, what existing aspects of ourselves we may draw upon and what new skills or mindsets we must adopt.

Because it’s nearly always true that there are methodologies and approaches we must master in order to put any newly acquired tools to good use. This is as true of a belt sander as it is a forklift, a screwdriver or set of tweezers - the vital difference between between analog tools and AI-enabled ones is that instead of demanding physical skills of dexterity and precision, procedural steps and safety measures, the capabilities of AI are more in the realm of time spent, attention devoted, decisions that need making. So it follows that that the adjustments that we must make in relation to AI-enabled tools have less to do with technique in any physical, procedural sense, and much more to do with cultivating a clearer and more comprehensive mental map of what we’re seeking to achieve, and develop a greater command of where and how AI tools might provide specific help.

One of the drums that ZeroWidth consistently bangs on is the idea that AI is an INGREDIENT TECHNOLOGY - it provides at most a COGNITIVE ASSIST for human actors, it does not perform meaningful work on its own, does not think independently.

Next week, in Part 2, we’ll examine Stratified Attention in practice and contemplate the changing nature of work.