THE NUANCE
The Difference Between ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Fascination, and Why It Matters
One type depletes your attention (and maybe also your health) while the other restores it.
Phone interviews are a big part of a journalist’s job, and last Wednesday afternoon I had four scheduled one after the other, without breaks in between.
By the middle of the last call, as a very nice gastroenterologist was telling me about immune cytokines, I had an epic, involuntary space-out. The poor guy actually had to ask, “Are you still there?”
It was embarrassing and I apologized, but afterward I still struggled to pay attention to what he was telling me. After nearly three hours on the phone — listening carefully, taking detailed notes, asking pertinent questions — my concentration was tapped out.
We all use the phrase “to pay attention,” but not many of us consider what these payments cost us. As the demands on our attention have increased in recent decades (thanks in large part to mobile media technologies), researchers have turned their attention to the various ways the human mind can attend to the world — and to what happens when we overtax the brain’s attentional systems.
“Attention is a limited resource and it can fatigue with use, sort of like a muscle,” says Avik Basu, PhD, an environmental psychologist at the University of Michigan.
According to Basu’s academic bio, he’s interested in “the role environments play in depleting and restoring our capacity to pay attention, and designing environments that simultaneously enhance individual and communal well-being.”
Attention and well-being may not seem to have much in common, at least not directly. But Basu and others who work in the field of attention-restoration theory have found that depleting one’s attention can temporarily lead to distractibility, impulsivity, irritability, and mental fatigue.
‘Our brains are simply not designed to handle the rates, frequencies, and magnitudes of the stimuli we’re getting.’
More concerningly, there’s mounting evidence that the brain’s attentional system is closely linked with the stress and arousal systems. A lot here still needs to be sorted out, but it seems increasingly likely that when one’s attention is too often over-worked and under-rested, a consequence of this is chronic stress and sympathetic nervous system activation, which are major risk factors for everything from anxiety and depression disorders to cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases.
“Modern environments present a constant stream of stimuli that require the full bandwidth of our attention,” Basu says. “One diagnosis of many of the problems we’re seeing today is that our brains are simply not designed to handle the rates, frequencies, and magnitudes of the stimuli we’re getting.”
A lot of his research has examined how natural environments (forests, parks, etc.) can restore attention, and therefore may counteract all of these potential problems. He says natural environments are able to do this for us because they give our directed-attention system a break.
“So the directed-attention system is what we use to pay attention to a conversation, or when we watch something on Netflix — activities that don’t allow much space for reflection or to resolve internal threads of thought,” he explains.
These are also known as forms of “hard fascination.” According to Basu’s research, “[T]elevision, social media, and other popular modes of escape and ‘chilling out’ are emblematic of hard fascination.” These may all be fun and entertaining, but they don’t give the brain’s directed-attention system much of a breather.
‘Anything that allows your mind time to wander or not pay hard attention could be restorative.’
In order to relieve and restore that system, he says another form of attention has to come online. “This other type is known as the involuntary attention system, and this is where soft fascination comes into play,” he says.
Whereas hard fascinations grab and hold your attention, soft fascinations allow your attention to broaden and roam without settling on anything too heavily. “Simple elements in nature, such as wind blowing through leaves or ripples of water traveling across a pond, are classic examples of soft fascination,” Baku says. “These leave you with plenty of space for reflection.”
Our brains evolved in natural environments, he says, and so it makes sense that our attentional systems would find more forms of relief and restoration — more balance — in those types of settings.
But you don’t have to walk in a forest to give your brain a break. “Anything that allows your mind time to wander or not pay hard attention could be restorative,” he says. Doing dishes, folding laundry, gardening, coloring, eating, going for a walk, staring out a window at nothing in particular . . . these could all be considered forms of soft fascination.
Rather than offer rigid advice about how to incorporate periods of soft fascination into one’s life, Baku says he finds it more helpful to encourage people to experiment on their own. He recommends taking note of those times when your focus feels fatigued; maybe you’re finding it hard to concentrate, and you also feel amped up and irritable. When you encounter those moments, that’s a sign your attention needs a little (or a long) respite.
Also, keep in mind that hard and soft forms of fascination likely exist on a spectrum. Listening to music may be less “hard” than listening to a podcast or news program. Likewise, watching a baseball game on TV may demand less attentional bandwidth than watching an action-packed show.
None of this used to matter much because life was full of idle, unstimulating moments. But just as the modern food environment robs your gut of healthy breaks from food and digestion, the modern media environment is engineered to deny your attention time for rest and rejuvenation.
In both cases, you may pay for these losses with your health.
