The Age of Inattention
Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library
Is she putting the flower in the vase, or taking it out?
Lord Frederic Leighton's “Mrs. James Guthrie.”
It's been a moronic spring. But did it have to be? That J.P. Morgan Chase trader known as the “London Whale”—could he have been caught by a keener-eyed boss? How about the Secret Service scandal—would more astute overseers have spotted the signs? And the Pope's butler—nobody saw that coming? Across the board, our perceptiveness has plummeted.
Today's signature move is the head swivel. It is the age of look-then-look-away. Our average attention span halved in a decade, from 12 to five minutes, according to a study commissioned by Lloyds TSB Insurance. (And that was in 2008.) We miss almost everything; we text while we walk. What makes a person stand out now is the ability to look and keep looking.
But as global competition makes us manic about technology—just to keep up, we spend $2 billion on a new CornellNYC Tech campus—we rush past the humanities, the very fields that teach us how and what to notice. Before lunging for another engineering degree, we should catch our breath, look around. We need an intervention—and not the psychotherapeutic kind.
A “museum intervention” is now mandatory at Yale's School of Medicine for all first-year medical students. Called Enhancing Observational Skills, the program asks students to look at and then describe paintings—not Pollocks and Picassos but Victorian pieces, with whole people in them. The aim? To improve diagnostic knack.
Linda Friedlaender, the curator of education at the Yale Center for British Art, and Irwin Braverman, at Yale's medical school, created the program a decade ago and guide groups through the New Haven museum. Each student is assigned a painting—“Mrs. James Guthrie,” say, by Lord Frederic Leighton—which they examine for 15 minutes, recording all they see. Then the group discusses its observations.
There is no redness, no apparent pressure, in Mrs. Guthrie's fingers as she holds a flower. Does that mean she's putting it into the vase—or taking it out? The conclusion matters less than the collection of detail. “We are trying to slow down the students,” Ms. Friedlaender told me. “They have an urge to come up with a diagnosis immediately and get the right answer.”
Many have been taught that schooling is a race to the finish. Others learned early that equations beat etchings (picture book writers, once considered the “academicians of the nursery,” have been trampled on the fast track to pre-K). Ms. Friedlander is realistic: “This is not an aesthetic experience we're providing. The artwork is a means to an end.”
Surgeon Richard Selzer, in “Letters to a Young Doctor,” wrote: “I have seen sorrow more fully expressed in a buttocks eaten away by bedsores; fear, in the arching of a neck; supplication, in a wrist. Only last week I was informed by a man's kneecaps that he was going to die. Flashing blue lights, they teletyped that he was running out of oxygen and blood.” The Yale intervention may not endow students with Dr. Selzer's acute empathy. But a three-year study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that, afterward, they are 10% more effective at diagnosis.
The program has expanded to more than 20 medical schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Cornell. It has also become part of Wharton's executive education. In “Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic),” by Thomas Eakins, “there are people who can only be seen if you are standing at a particular angle,” says management professor Sigal Barsade. Participants hear others describing the image and think they're nuts. “It is only when they move, physically, that they see what is being talked about.”
Seeing the whole picture, from the specifics up, is a good skill for all of us. Research just published by the MIT Media Lab used Google's facial-feature tracker to gauge our ability to distinguish between smiles of delight and frustration—vital, right? A frustrated smile uses different muscles than a happy one, and it lasts an average of 7.5 seconds, versus 13.8. Yet it's a coin toss whether we can tell the difference. We get it right only half the time. An MIT computer algorithm, by contrast, succeeds 92% of the time. It turns out the machine does what museum intervention would have us do. Rather than rush to a general impression, it zooms in, absorbing every detail. It sees what it needs to. Perhaps the folks at J.P. Morgan Chase, the president, the Pope—all of us—should pop off to an art exhibition once in a while.