A few months ago, while I fought for mere seconds of attention in social feeds at work, I also ended each day by rewatching all 6 seasons of The Sopranos. If we can be immersed by characters like Tony Soprano for over 78 hours, is our capacity to pay attention actually dwindling?
Or have we been focused on solving the wrong problem?
It turns out we’ve been wrong about attention. It’s not disappearing. You just have to know how to earn it.
In creative reviews, a favorite and deceptively hard question to ask is: Would you actually watch this? Would your bestie, or your grandma, care? Now, The Attention Framework gives us the tools to answer these questions—with intuition and science.
Our brains are hardwired for 4 types of attention
Created in partnership with the world’s top neuroscientists, The Attention Framework outlines four proven attention types. Since I grew up in the era of boy bands, I like to think of them as sort of a musical supergroup. The band members include:
- Instinctual attention: triggered when something is surprising, loud, or flashy. (Made you look!) This is like the wildly energetic member of the boy band who still hasn’t quite grown up.
- Emotional attention: gets activated when you connect with or care about what you’re seeing. You get pulled in, much like the introspective member of the boy band who always sings the ballads.
- Cognitive attention: comes up when you’re presented with the unexpected—something that needs interpreting, solving. We’re not talking Rubik’s Cubes, but letting people connect their own dots can be powerful. Think: the smart “bad boy” who answers press questions with cryptic, clever statements.
- Planned attention: drives a decision to engage. It’s focused, goal-oriented, and also the most difficult to capture. This is the responsible one who plans the tours and makes sure the band stays out of trouble.
They can be earned at the same time; there’s no right order.
