Breaking Through The Attention Filter
“The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.”
If it takes you more than a quarter of a second to read all the words in this sentence, you are, scientifically speaking, a moron.
That made you stop and pause for a moment, didn’t it?
Ok, so it’s a) not true, and b) it’s simply there to prove a point.
That is the fact that we are bombarded with so much information every day that in order for something to cut through it needs to grab our attention.
To do this, it needs to pass through the ‘filter’ from our subconscious to our conscious. This exists to protect the conscious brain (which has relatively slow processing speeds) from being overwhelmed.
As a storyteller, this is of paramount importance. If you don’t make it past the gatekeeper, then it really doesn't matter what your story is about in the first place.
In her excellent book Wired for Story, Lisa Cron sums it up well when she writes, ‘...in order to distract us from the relentless demands of our immediate surroundings, a story has to grab our attention fast.'
So what kind of stuff makes it through the filter?
Anyone who works in the advertising industry is probably best placed to answer this question. After all, advertisers have to be masterful storytellers to get their point across in 30 seconds or less.
The legendary UK advertising creative Dave Trott has a wonderfully simple way of explaining it with his anecdote about watching a series of TV ads.
He says to imagine the ads being represented by a line of ‘X’s with one ‘O’ in the middle. I.e. something like the below:
XXXXXOXXXXX
The ‘X’s mark the adverts, which are all similar in their look, tone and message.
They become familiar to the brain, so it ‘tags’ them as not worth your attention and so they don’t make it past the filter.
The lone ‘O’, on the other hand, is something novel and different. Your brain hasn’t seen something similar to it before, so it stands out. Because the information might be important it is prioritised up the chain.
It makes it past the filter.
