A congress the University of Navarra discussion attention deficit and its social and individual consequences

In today's world, we are surrounded by distractions that affect our ability to pay attention; external stimuli—primarily from screens—fragment human attention. To address this challenge, Boston College and the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), and the University of Navarra Museum have organized the congress and Flourishing,congress which explored how attention is linked to virtue, mental health, and development .

According to Matthew Clemente, researcher the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics and one of the organizers, digital technologies and artificial intelligence are reducing our attention span—a skill necessary for daily life and social relationships. This lecture together researchers, academics, psychotherapists, and artists from various disciplines to “reflect on how human attention, when focused and cultivated, can lead to human flourishing and allow us to delve deeper into the most meaningful aspects of human existence,” he noted.

Similarly, Inés Olza, a researcher with group ICS’s“Bonds, Creativity, and Culture” group and a co-organizer, explained how today’s rhythms lead to overload, acceleration, and fragmentation of attention, since devices are designed to make our attention jump from one stimulus to another, or to distribute it simultaneously across multiple spaces. “The problem lies in the cognitive and attentional architecture that screens impose: they constantly invite us to click to jump from one space to another and offer us bite-sized chunks of content for rapid, successive consumption,” she warned. This creates what is known as the “fracking” of human beings and their attention: “Our attention span and rhythms are a subject , exploited, and commercialized —one for which institutions not necessarily aligned with our well-being compete,” she lamented.

To counter this skill our attention, a movement known as“attentional activism”has emerged, proposing havens of individual and collective resistance. “We need a movement—at both the individual and community levels—to counter the harmful effects of ‘human fracking ,’” emphasized Graham Burnet, an expert at Princeton University and co-founder of the “Friends of Attention” initiative, network experts involved in “attentional activism.” According to Burnet, it is possible to train our attention through habits and practices; the devices themselves have trained our attention to shift our behavior toward screens. Similarly, the expert asserted that it is possible to retrain, cultivate, and expand our attention to emancipate it and free it from digital stimuli.

In this context, museums become essential spaces for regaining our attention. “Art, music, dance, aesthetic experiences of attention and contemplation, and those practices that require a leisurely gaze are important traditions we can draw upon to combat the fragmentation of attention,” Burnet concluded.