July 31, 2023 • 14 mins
Christian Madsbjerg new book is LOOK: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World, an exploration of how we pay attention, why it matters, and how we get it back. Christian Madsbjerg is cofounder of the consulting firm ReD Associates. He writes, speaks, and teaches widely on the practical application of the human sciences.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:02):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina delRio, a weekly conversation about fitness,
health and happenings in our community onone oh six point seven Light FM.
Good morning and thanks for listening toget connected. Paying attention is a crucial
human skill. Our abilities to observeand perceive are some of the most extraordinary
skills we have as humans. However, amid our noisy world, for many
(00:26):
of us, they are slowly deteriorating. Our guest is Christian Maspia. His
book is Look How to Pay Attentionin a Distracted World, an exploration of
how we pay attention, why itmatters, and how we get it back.
Thank you for being on the showmuch. Christian Mespia is co founder
of the consulting firm Read Associates.He writes, speaks, and teaches widely
(00:48):
on the practical application of the humansciences observation. In the first place,
what is observation? What does goodobservation look like? Christian? Well,
there are many types of observation inscience. You can observe bacteria or planets
or something like that. But I'minterested in human observation. I'm interested in
(01:10):
how we observe humans, and particularlyI'm interested in how we look at how
other people make sense of the world. So how do we see other people
seeing One of your observations in thebook, one of your observations is that
most of us are looking in thewrong places and at the wrong things foreground
versus background. Exactly. Yes,So imagine there are three types of attention.
(01:37):
There's one type of attention, whichis just walking down the street.
You're not paying attention to anything inparticular. You just have this panoptic view
of the world where you know what'sgoing on because that world is meaningful to
you. Another type of attention willbe focused, sozooming in on something and
getting rid of everything else to swoomingin on a particular thing. That's the
(02:00):
one most of us really want alot of, and it's what we ask
for our children when we say payattention. But there's a third type,
and that type is paying attention tohow other people see the world. So
paying attention to how other people's worldmakes sense to them. And that is
something we can do, but it'sreally hard. It's really hard to stop
(02:23):
judging other people, stop judging howthat world looks like, and just observe
it. Just try to figure outwhat does the world look like for them
and based on what do they seethe world and make sense of it in
the first place. So for me, observation I call the hyper reflection in
the book is this kind of attentionand it's hard, but it's possible.
(02:49):
And I was asked at some point, like maybe eight or ten years ago,
can you teach it? Is itpossible to teach to pay attention in
this way? And I think Ifound that when I started teaching it at
the New School in Manhattan, thatyou can in fact learn how to do
it, and you can teach itwell, maybe for a moment if you
(03:12):
could talk about it's sort of theknowledge that you would gain from this sort
of attention versus looking at the foreground. What I found that my students was
increasingly around maybe seventeen or eighteen seventeenand twenty eighteen, they started feeling distracted.
They started feeling that their world wasabstract, and they started feeling that
(03:34):
they looked at the world through opinion, like their opinion about it. And
when you walk down the street,you can have lots of opinions about it,
but you can also get in adifferent attitude or a different way of
looking at it, which is justobserving and describing what's going on. And
that means you can get rid ofopinion. You can start arresting your own
(03:57):
judgment and your own preconceived notion andundermine them really by looking carefully at how
other people see the world. Andit's what I want to do in the
book is just present the tool andsay this tool is helpful in work and
in life. It's good for you. It's good for the way you feel
connected to the world, because Isaw my students transform from this place of
(04:21):
languishing of abstraction to a place witha direct relationship to the world. And
it's all I wanted was just presentthat as a helpful antidote to this feeling
of distraction and languishing. One ofthe examples that you give somewhere in the
latter half of the book is aboutsort of looking at what's not there as
(04:44):
well, observing the invisible, andI wonder if you could use this as
an example to maybe talk about Jilliantech is the editor at the Financial Times.
Looking and kind of seeing what ismissing gave her perspective under the financial
crisis that may other people weren't seeing. Yes, she's a master observer,
and I talk a percent different masterof surfers, but she's one of the
(05:08):
examples. And the example she alwaysuses is that when she looked at the
way people talked about money and aboutfinancial markets in two thousand and six two
thousand and seven, none of themwere talking about some things, and in
that case it was the death inthe housing market. They were all talking
(05:30):
about how the market would change inall kinds of technical ways, but there
were no humans there. She said, the markets didn't have a face,
it didn't have humans involved, andthat meant that she could see, what
I mean, one thing, shecould see what people were talking about,
but she could also do what shecalls looking at the silences or listening to
(05:51):
the silences, all the things wewere not talking about, which is the
background of what people are talking about. And that way she could predict that
this thing is coming down because peoplehave lost a relationship to humans as humans,
and of course markets are made outof humans. So she's a monster
(06:12):
at this and I admire her quitea lot. We're speaking with Christian Mansbia.
His work has appeared in The WallStreet Journal, The Atlantic, Financial
Times, the Washington Post, andBloomberg BusinessWeek. His new book is look
How to Pay Attention in a DistractedWorld. It's an exploration of how we
pay attention, why it matters,and how we get it back. You're
(06:33):
listening to Get Connected on one ohsix point seven Light FM. I'm Ina
del Rio. You mentioned earlier talkingwith your students about forming an observation that
is not opinion. How do weobserve anyway without making up our minds.
We're not perfect exervers to begin with. We're not cameras, you know.
(06:54):
We're sort of taking away what wewant to take away to some degree,
are we not? We are,And that's the only way we can manage
to live with the amount of informationthat we see every day. So it's
natural for us to be immersed inthe world. Humans live in the midst
(07:15):
of things. They don't live outsideof it looking at it analytically. But
it's possible to get in that stanceof the world. It's possible to look
at a social problem, say,without starting with your opinions. Just get
in a stance where you start lookingand saying, maybe I'm wrong, maybe
I'm not, Maybe my opinions aren'tthe full picture, and it's so hard
(07:41):
from at least from my students.It was so hard for them to not
start with opinion. So if youlook at a problem like homelessness, which
one of my students looked at,they could have a lot of opinions about
it, that it's whose fault isit? Is it society's fault, is
the individual's fault? And what isit? But then I asked them go
(08:01):
have a look for a while,and they looked at it for weeks,
and basically they didn't live like that, but they spent a lot of nights
figuring out, talking to observing whatthat might what it might be like to
not know where to sleep tonight,And they found a lot of things about
what's it like to live that way, And they found that many of the
(08:22):
opinions they had in the beginning wasmore complex than that, and that they
were quite wrong about these things.And these were people that were on all
sides of the spectrum of opinions aboutit, right wing, left wing,
judgmental, not judgmental, And theyall learned much more about what it's like
to not know where to sleep tonightby looking at it, engaging with it,
(08:45):
and describing it rather than concluding aboutit immediately that observation, though,
can you explain the difference between ananecdotal observation they're observing, maybe homeless people
in midtown, for instances, beingable to look up data that's been gathered
from places around the world that mightactually overlap with what they're seeings that makes
(09:09):
sense, Yes, absolutely so.A trap here is of course, that
you think you're seeing the entire worldof this. But what I think it
works for is connecting to the context, creating hypotheses for yourself, creating a
question about it, and then youcan look at much grander data sets.
(09:30):
So for me, if you startunderstanding what something might be like, you
can start saying for this to betrue, these other things needs to be
true as well in much bigger datasets, and then you can start looking
at data with context rather than nocontext. And so much of social science
have ended up being so abstract thatyou end up losing the social phenomenon in
(09:52):
front of you, and that's notgood. So you're right, there are
lots of problems with this. Firstof all, it's difficult to arrest your
own judgment. It's a difficult tofight your own bias. But we can.
I'm of the belief that we canfight it, not always successfully,
but we can really try. Andsecond we have to connect it to bigger
(10:16):
data sets. But first by looking. That's really what scientists do as well.
They look at something for a while, they formulate hypotheses, and they
experiment and test those hypotheses. Butthe beginning is always observation, going back
to just that. On the surface, abstract or minimalist art can seem exceedingly
simple, especially when you're looking atsomeone like Donald Judd. It's these concrete
(10:39):
blocks in these boxes, or maybesomeone has like a lightsaber out. You
know, without a context. Doyou have an in so to speak,
to observe and experience art when there'sno story or biography to attach to it.
Yes, and that is experienced.So I mentioned my favorite piece by
Going Judd, which is a newcane in Connecticut at the Glasshouse, and
(11:01):
it's something if anybody's every neared,they should go and see it. And
it's basically a circle made out ofconcrete, and if you stand in a
particular distance and a particular height toit, it looks like a wall of
concrete. But if you move liketwo inches forward, it snaps into place
(11:22):
and becomes a circle again. Sowhat he's trying to show us is when
you stand with a particular distance toit, you see the whole of a
two D space, and you moveforward and you see a three D space,
and you don't see in between.You see either or. And what
(11:43):
he wants to show us, Ithink, is that humans see things in
the holes. We don't see theparts. The parts are defined by the
hole. And he's doing it withthe most surgical, precise way you can
imagine, which is basically just concrete. It's the same thing that someone like
Dings Terrella is doing so showing ushow we see, you know, and
(12:07):
Terrella even says, I'm interested inseeing yourself seeing. So I'm including this
because it's the most precise experiment,or the most precise way of showing people
that we don't see things like acamera or like a robot, or like
a piece of software where it's alot of discrete data points. We see
(12:28):
all of it at once. Andthat's a magical thing about humans, which
brings me to AI. And there'sa lot of consternation about AI. There's
also a lot of excitement depending onwhere you are in the impact of that.
Perhaps the idea is that AI canobserve humans more fully, more quickly,
predict our choices, and therefore perhapsdo our work for us, do
(12:52):
it better than we can. Yourthoughts on AI and its capabilities of observation,
Yeah, I have a lot ofopinions about I am less impressed.
Then it seems like the world haslost its mind over it. And it's
because it's incredibly impressive what you cando with large data sets. But all
(13:15):
that is is correlation, and correlationis something we do. Humans do,
but most of the time that's notwhat we do. We see a world
of meaning, not a world ofcorrelation, which means that the machine doesn't
mean anything. It doesn't look fortruth, it doesn't have any of the
human capacity we have, and itneeds enormous data sets to do it.
(13:37):
We need very little. Humans needquite not a lot of data to understand
what a school is and how theschool works, and the rhythm of a
school, and we can see itwhen we drive past it. We know
exactly what's going on. So humansare I think underrated. And it seems
like now we're talking about humans asif we're broken. Robots were not as
(14:00):
good as the robots, and Ithink I think we're not robots at all.
Like our mind isn't the computer,and a computer isn't a brain.
So I am not so scared aboutpeople losing their job for anything other than
simple things you can automate. Ourguest has been Christian Masbia. His book
(14:22):
is Look How to Pay Attention ina Distracted World. Christian, thank you
for being I'll get connected. Thankyou so much. This has been get
connected with Nina del Rio on oneoh six point seven Lightfm. The views
and opinions of our guests do notnecessarily reflect the views of the station.
If you missed any part of ourshow or want to share it, visit
our website for downloads and podcasts atone six seven lightfm dot com. Thanks
(14:46):
for listening.
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina delRio, a weekly conversation about fitness,
health and happenings in our community onone oh six point seven Light FM.
Good morning and thanks for listening toget connected. Paying attention is a crucial
human skill. Our abilities to observeand perceive are some of the most extraordinary
skills we have as humans. However, amid our noisy world, for many
(00:26):
of us, they are slowly deteriorating. Our guest is Christian Maspia. His
book is Look How to Pay Attentionin a Distracted World, an exploration of
how we pay attention, why itmatters, and how we get it back.
Thank you for being on the showmuch. Christian Mespia is co founder
of the consulting firm Read Associates.He writes, speaks, and teaches widely
(00:48):
on the practical application of the humansciences observation. In the first place,
what is observation? What does goodobservation look like? Christian? Well,
there are many types of observation inscience. You can observe bacteria or planets
or something like that. But I'minterested in human observation. I'm interested in
(01:10):
how we observe humans, and particularlyI'm interested in how we look at how
other people make sense of the world. So how do we see other people
seeing One of your observations in thebook, one of your observations is that
most of us are looking in thewrong places and at the wrong things foreground
versus background. Exactly. Yes,So imagine there are three types of attention.
(01:37):
There's one type of attention, whichis just walking down the street.
You're not paying attention to anything inparticular. You just have this panoptic view
of the world where you know what'sgoing on because that world is meaningful to
you. Another type of attention willbe focused, sozooming in on something and
getting rid of everything else to swoomingin on a particular thing. That's the
(02:00):
one most of us really want alot of, and it's what we ask
for our children when we say payattention. But there's a third type,
and that type is paying attention tohow other people see the world. So
paying attention to how other people's worldmakes sense to them. And that is
something we can do, but it'sreally hard. It's really hard to stop
(02:23):
judging other people, stop judging howthat world looks like, and just observe
it. Just try to figure outwhat does the world look like for them
and based on what do they seethe world and make sense of it in
the first place. So for me, observation I call the hyper reflection in
the book is this kind of attentionand it's hard, but it's possible.
(02:49):
And I was asked at some point, like maybe eight or ten years ago,
can you teach it? Is itpossible to teach to pay attention in
this way? And I think Ifound that when I started teaching it at
the New School in Manhattan, thatyou can in fact learn how to do
it, and you can teach itwell, maybe for a moment if you
(03:12):
could talk about it's sort of theknowledge that you would gain from this sort
of attention versus looking at the foreground. What I found that my students was
increasingly around maybe seventeen or eighteen seventeenand twenty eighteen, they started feeling distracted.
They started feeling that their world wasabstract, and they started feeling that
(03:34):
they looked at the world through opinion, like their opinion about it. And
when you walk down the street,you can have lots of opinions about it,
but you can also get in adifferent attitude or a different way of
looking at it, which is justobserving and describing what's going on. And
that means you can get rid ofopinion. You can start arresting your own
(03:57):
judgment and your own preconceived notion andundermine them really by looking carefully at how
other people see the world. Andit's what I want to do in the
book is just present the tool andsay this tool is helpful in work and
in life. It's good for you. It's good for the way you feel
connected to the world, because Isaw my students transform from this place of
(04:21):
languishing of abstraction to a place witha direct relationship to the world. And
it's all I wanted was just presentthat as a helpful antidote to this feeling
of distraction and languishing. One ofthe examples that you give somewhere in the
latter half of the book is aboutsort of looking at what's not there as
(04:44):
well, observing the invisible, andI wonder if you could use this as
an example to maybe talk about Jilliantech is the editor at the Financial Times.
Looking and kind of seeing what ismissing gave her perspective under the financial
crisis that may other people weren't seeing. Yes, she's a master observer,
and I talk a percent different masterof surfers, but she's one of the
(05:08):
examples. And the example she alwaysuses is that when she looked at the
way people talked about money and aboutfinancial markets in two thousand and six two
thousand and seven, none of themwere talking about some things, and in
that case it was the death inthe housing market. They were all talking
(05:30):
about how the market would change inall kinds of technical ways, but there
were no humans there. She said, the markets didn't have a face,
it didn't have humans involved, andthat meant that she could see, what
I mean, one thing, shecould see what people were talking about,
but she could also do what shecalls looking at the silences or listening to
(05:51):
the silences, all the things wewere not talking about, which is the
background of what people are talking about. And that way she could predict that
this thing is coming down because peoplehave lost a relationship to humans as humans,
and of course markets are made outof humans. So she's a monster
(06:12):
at this and I admire her quitea lot. We're speaking with Christian Mansbia.
His work has appeared in The WallStreet Journal, The Atlantic, Financial
Times, the Washington Post, andBloomberg BusinessWeek. His new book is look
How to Pay Attention in a DistractedWorld. It's an exploration of how we
pay attention, why it matters,and how we get it back. You're
(06:33):
listening to Get Connected on one ohsix point seven Light FM. I'm Ina
del Rio. You mentioned earlier talkingwith your students about forming an observation that
is not opinion. How do weobserve anyway without making up our minds.
We're not perfect exervers to begin with. We're not cameras, you know.
(06:54):
We're sort of taking away what wewant to take away to some degree,
are we not? We are,And that's the only way we can manage
to live with the amount of informationthat we see every day. So it's
natural for us to be immersed inthe world. Humans live in the midst
(07:15):
of things. They don't live outsideof it looking at it analytically. But
it's possible to get in that stanceof the world. It's possible to look
at a social problem, say,without starting with your opinions. Just get
in a stance where you start lookingand saying, maybe I'm wrong, maybe
I'm not, Maybe my opinions aren'tthe full picture, and it's so hard
(07:41):
from at least from my students.It was so hard for them to not
start with opinion. So if youlook at a problem like homelessness, which
one of my students looked at,they could have a lot of opinions about
it, that it's whose fault isit? Is it society's fault, is
the individual's fault? And what isit? But then I asked them go
(08:01):
have a look for a while,and they looked at it for weeks,
and basically they didn't live like that, but they spent a lot of nights
figuring out, talking to observing whatthat might what it might be like to
not know where to sleep tonight,And they found a lot of things about
what's it like to live that way, And they found that many of the
(08:22):
opinions they had in the beginning wasmore complex than that, and that they
were quite wrong about these things.And these were people that were on all
sides of the spectrum of opinions aboutit, right wing, left wing,
judgmental, not judgmental, And theyall learned much more about what it's like
to not know where to sleep tonightby looking at it, engaging with it,
(08:45):
and describing it rather than concluding aboutit immediately that observation, though,
can you explain the difference between ananecdotal observation they're observing, maybe homeless people
in midtown, for instances, beingable to look up data that's been gathered
from places around the world that mightactually overlap with what they're seeings that makes
(09:09):
sense, Yes, absolutely so.A trap here is of course, that
you think you're seeing the entire worldof this. But what I think it
works for is connecting to the context, creating hypotheses for yourself, creating a
question about it, and then youcan look at much grander data sets.
(09:30):
So for me, if you startunderstanding what something might be like, you
can start saying for this to betrue, these other things needs to be
true as well in much bigger datasets, and then you can start looking
at data with context rather than nocontext. And so much of social science
have ended up being so abstract thatyou end up losing the social phenomenon in
(09:52):
front of you, and that's notgood. So you're right, there are
lots of problems with this. Firstof all, it's difficult to arrest your
own judgment. It's a difficult tofight your own bias. But we can.
I'm of the belief that we canfight it, not always successfully,
but we can really try. Andsecond we have to connect it to bigger
(10:16):
data sets. But first by looking. That's really what scientists do as well.
They look at something for a while, they formulate hypotheses, and they
experiment and test those hypotheses. Butthe beginning is always observation, going back
to just that. On the surface, abstract or minimalist art can seem exceedingly
simple, especially when you're looking atsomeone like Donald Judd. It's these concrete
(10:39):
blocks in these boxes, or maybesomeone has like a lightsaber out. You
know, without a context. Doyou have an in so to speak,
to observe and experience art when there'sno story or biography to attach to it.
Yes, and that is experienced.So I mentioned my favorite piece by
Going Judd, which is a newcane in Connecticut at the Glasshouse, and
(11:01):
it's something if anybody's every neared,they should go and see it. And
it's basically a circle made out ofconcrete, and if you stand in a
particular distance and a particular height toit, it looks like a wall of
concrete. But if you move liketwo inches forward, it snaps into place
(11:22):
and becomes a circle again. Sowhat he's trying to show us is when
you stand with a particular distance toit, you see the whole of a
two D space, and you moveforward and you see a three D space,
and you don't see in between.You see either or. And what
(11:43):
he wants to show us, Ithink, is that humans see things in
the holes. We don't see theparts. The parts are defined by the
hole. And he's doing it withthe most surgical, precise way you can
imagine, which is basically just concrete. It's the same thing that someone like
Dings Terrella is doing so showing ushow we see, you know, and
(12:07):
Terrella even says, I'm interested inseeing yourself seeing. So I'm including this
because it's the most precise experiment,or the most precise way of showing people
that we don't see things like acamera or like a robot, or like
a piece of software where it's alot of discrete data points. We see
(12:28):
all of it at once. Andthat's a magical thing about humans, which
brings me to AI. And there'sa lot of consternation about AI. There's
also a lot of excitement depending onwhere you are in the impact of that.
Perhaps the idea is that AI canobserve humans more fully, more quickly,
predict our choices, and therefore perhapsdo our work for us, do
(12:52):
it better than we can. Yourthoughts on AI and its capabilities of observation,
Yeah, I have a lot ofopinions about I am less impressed.
Then it seems like the world haslost its mind over it. And it's
because it's incredibly impressive what you cando with large data sets. But all
(13:15):
that is is correlation, and correlationis something we do. Humans do,
but most of the time that's notwhat we do. We see a world
of meaning, not a world ofcorrelation, which means that the machine doesn't
mean anything. It doesn't look fortruth, it doesn't have any of the
human capacity we have, and itneeds enormous data sets to do it.
(13:37):
We need very little. Humans needquite not a lot of data to understand
what a school is and how theschool works, and the rhythm of a
school, and we can see itwhen we drive past it. We know
exactly what's going on. So humansare I think underrated. And it seems
like now we're talking about humans asif we're broken. Robots were not as
(14:00):
good as the robots, and Ithink I think we're not robots at all.
Like our mind isn't the computer,and a computer isn't a brain.
So I am not so scared aboutpeople losing their job for anything other than
simple things you can automate. Ourguest has been Christian Masbia. His book
(14:22):
is Look How to Pay Attention ina Distracted World. Christian, thank you
for being I'll get connected. Thankyou so much. This has been get
connected with Nina del Rio on oneoh six point seven Lightfm. The views
and opinions of our guests do notnecessarily reflect the views of the station.
If you missed any part of ourshow or want to share it, visit
our website for downloads and podcasts atone six seven lightfm dot com. Thanks
(14:46):
for listening.
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