How do we choose?

When I was a student at Berkeley I would often grab lunch on Telegraph Avenue. This usually meant walking through Sproul Plaza and contending with at least a dozen pamphlet-pushing students pleading for my support for an environmental cause or ballot issue or sport’s team or you-name-it.

I didn’t mind so much – after all, it was Berkeley and it was part of the exictement of the place and of college in general. But I often asked “how.” That is, how did these students choose – out of all of the noise – what issue, what approach, and what people with which to engage? Why was this girl handing me a flyer for an upcoming political rally while that guy wanted me to attend his interfaith forum? With so little time in college, or life, how do we decide where we put our energy? Are we rational about it? Do passions move us? Is it a combination or something else entirely?

Earlier this week Natalie Angier wrote about Change Blindness for the New York Times, and I think it provides clues to the mechanism our minds employ to focus on one thing or another:

The mechanisms that succeed in seizing our sightline fall into two basic classes: bottom up and top down. Bottom-up attentiveness originates with the stimulus, with something in our visual field that is the optical equivalent of a shout: a wildly waving hand, a bright red object against a green field. Bottom-up stimuli seem to head straight for the brainstem and are almost impossible to ignore, said Nancy Kanwisher, a vision researcher at M.I.T., and thus they are popular in Internet ads.

Top-down attentiveness, by comparison, is a volitional act, the decision by the viewer that an item, even in the absence of flapping parts or strobe lights, is nonetheless a sight to behold. When you are looking for a specific object — say, your black suitcase on a moving baggage carousel occupied largely by black suitcases — you apply a top-down approach, the bouncing searchlights configured to specific parameters, like a smallish, scuffed black suitcase with one broken wheel.

This leads me to believe that, at least in part, we are either attracted to movements in a bottom-up fashion because they are the loudest, most popular, most frightening or most interesting OR in a top-down fashion, where we ignore the flashing lights and shouting pundits and pressure from friends and instead search within ourselves, think critically about what the world truly needs and what we can best offer, and then go and search for that cause. And we don’t become dismayed even if, when we find it, the thing we’re looking for is a bit scuffed and has a broken wheel.

The NY Times article concludes:

“Our spotlight of attention is grabbing objects at such a fast rate that introspectively it feels like you’re recognizing many things at once,” Dr. Wolfe said. “But the reality is that you are only accurately representing the state of one or a few objects at any given moment.” As for the rest of our visual experience, he said, it has been aptly called “a grand illusion.”

If we can only truly focus on one thing at a time – one perspective, if you will – then what a pity if our calling exists outside our current frame of reference, and when it asks for a moment of our time on Sproul we dismiss it as nothing more than a grand illusion.