Clearing your head of distractions in order to notice and understand the people you are with can feel inefficient—there are so many other people and issues to think about. But being present makes you effective.
—MARGARET HEFFERNAN
I find that folksy terminology often describes human behavior more aptly than any diagnostic manual ever could. I began the last chapter with the phrase “shaggy dog story.” This one starts with a similarly tactile term: “woolgathering.”
When used to describe behavior in a conversation, woolgathering refers to the habit of indulging in random thoughts or daydreaming. When you’re woolgathering, you may be looking directly at the person who’s speaking and even nodding your head from time to time, but you don’t actually hear a word that person is saying. You’re caught up in your thoughts, in your own world. You are gathering wool.
The term comes from the practice of wandering from bush to bush in a pasture, gathering the tufts of wool left behind by passing sheep. There is no direction or defined pathway; you just amble over to any old bush where you see a clump of white and then move on to the next.
The difference between going into the weeds and woolgathering in a conversation is that in the first scenario, the speaker becomes distracted; in the latter, it’s the listener who struggles to focus.
When I refer to woolgathering, I’m not talking about a momentary interruption or loss of focus; I’m talking about the kinds of distracting thoughts that carry you deeper into your own head and farther away from the conversation. Another common phrase for woolgathering is “going down the rabbit hole.” Like Alice daydreaming her way into Wonderland, you fall down, down, down, away from the conversation that’s happening in real time.
This is an area where I have particular trouble. I’m the type of person some might call “scatterbrained.” I have adult attention deficit disorder (AADD), and at times it can be very difficult for me to focus. My head becomes easily tangled with the threads of a million divergent thoughts racing off in all directions. If I’m not careful, I can follow one of these threads and, within seconds, find myself miles away from a conversation. You’ll be telling me about getting your car repaired and I’ll respond with a comment about Michael Jackson’s performance in The Wiz. (Yes, this actually happened.)
In my early work as a reporter, this wasn’t such a big deal. I was never live on the air for very long—all of my interviews were recorded and edited. However, when I became the host of a live talk show, my tendency toward distraction became a very big deal indeed.
I will never forget one particular interview with a foreign correspondent about the war in Afghanistan. I’m not sure when I first lost my train of thought, but at some point he stopped talking, waiting for my response—and I realized I had no idea what he’d just said. I asked a question that I thought would take us in a new direction, only to discover that he’d already answered it. I know that because he prefaced his response with, “Well, as I just explained . . .”
Tens of thousands of people were listening. I was mortified.
Perhaps this sounds familiar. While there are substantially fewer witnesses to most people’s woolgathering moments, I have yet to meet someone who, at some point, hasn’t been called out for spacing out.
How do you know if, like me, you’re especially prone to woolgathering? There are actually a few tests designed to measure your ability to ignore irrelevant information. One is called the Stroop Color and Word Test (if you Google it, you’ll find that there are many different versions of the test available online). In the exercise, you’re asked to identify a word by the color of the letters, not the word itself. For example, the word “white” might be printed in orange letters. Your task is to identify the color orange, even though the voice inside your head—the one that distracts us in conversations—will be focused on the word “white.” The faster you try to answer each question, the more likely you are to rely on that voice and make a mistake.
People who take the Stroop test find it to be tougher than they’d expected. You could read the scientific studies and pore over the conclusions, but I can boil down the results for you in one simple sentence: most humans are distractible to some degree.
But have you ever known someone who had an uncanny ability to filter out distractions? I had a friend in college who could have written her dissertation while seated in the middle of Times Square. She, and people like her, have a high degree of a quality known as “latent inhibition.” Your latent inhibition determines your ability to filter out noises and other interruptions. If your latent inhibition is high, you probably have no trouble working in an open-floor-plan office. If it’s low, you might need headphones to block out distractions and concentrate on your work. For those with extremely low latent inhibition, a distraction as minor as a pigeon on the ledge outside your boss’s office might prevent you from focusing on what he or she is saying.
Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson has demonstrated that creative, highly intelligent people are seven times more likely to have low latent inhibition.1 Translation: the smarter and more creative you are, the more trouble you may have in tuning out distractions. In some ways, the stereotype of the “airhead” creative is true—those of us with strong creative impulse are more likely to get lost in the endless hallways of our own minds.
It’s natural and quite common to be easily distracted, and it doesn’t reflect negatively on your character. It might even say something positive about you, if you’re the glass-half-full type. But it certainly doesn’t help if you’re trying to have a good conversation.
A good conversation requires focus, and it demands that two people focus on the same subject at the same time. Both people have to be willing and prepared to ignore a good portion of what passes through their heads. Why? Because distraction is inherently individual. Your random thoughts and connections will almost never match what’s going on in another person’s head. That doesn’t mean a random thought can’t become a great addition to a conversation, but that’s not what usually happens.
When someone mentions a specific object or place—a minor detail in their story—you may find yourself scurrying down a rabbit hole. Your friend says she saw her ex at a local coffee shop and that reminds you of the time you saw a celebrity in that coffee shop. You become focused on the effort to insert your story while your friend is describing a tough and awkward experience. She says, “I guess I can’t go to that place again,” and you respond, “But you might see someone famous, like I did!” You’ve allowed the random thought to derail the conversation and you might have caused your friend to question your investment in your relationship.
I want to make it clear that, in the right context, a tangent can be a wonderful thing. Something your friend says to you fires up the neurons in your brain and gives you a flash of insight. When you share it, your friend also feels inspired. This kind of conversational improvisation can be an electric, galvanizing experience. But it is one that generally occurs when your flash of insight is related in a substantial way to what your friend was saying. You’re not completely changing trains, just wandering together to an unexpected track. It is a shared adventure.
Learning to hone your focus offers benefits that extend far beyond better conversations. A study conducted in 2007 reported that exercising good self-control can lead to better relationships, increased mental health, decreased stress, and better grades, if you’re in school.2 And that’s not all: knowing how to tap your willpower can make you less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, suffer from eating disorders, or break the law. For the purposes of that study, self-control was defined as “the ability to control or override one’s thoughts, emotions, urges, and behavior.” That’s exactly what you’re doing when you choose not to follow the thoughts in your head when someone is talking to you.
Incidentally, that same study revealed just how difficult this discipline can be. Your thoughts can literally wear you out. In fact, our brains consume 20 percent of our calories. Researchers found that exerting self-control actually reduces glucose levels in the body. Glucose is a simple sugar that serves as an energy source. Tuning out distractions and narrowing your focus consumes energy. In one famous experiment, participants were tempted with freshly baked chocolate cookies and then asked to resist the sweet treats and eat radishes instead. All participants were then given a puzzle. Those who had resisted the cookies struggled with the test; they were too tired to try.
No wonder we have a hard time concentrating on a conversation at the end of a long day—we don’t have the energy left to summon our attention.
A good conversation is a smoothly flowing river. It can even be a rough river, with white water and sharp turns. But it shouldn’t be diverted or dammed up. And you should never jump to another boat and expect your friend to jump after you. You are in it together, through all the twists and turns.
In order to keep the conversation going, you must learn to let thoughts pass through your mind without distracting you. It’s not easy, but it is possible to train yourself to ignore disruptive thoughts. I can say this based on my own experience because, as someone with AADD, I have had to work hard on this.
Part of what makes it so difficult to resist the temptation to allow our thoughts to carry us away, or woolgather, is the rapid-fire nature of conversations. In the United States and around the world, conversations take place at lightning speed. When researchers recorded conversations in ten different languages in places like Italy, Denmark, Japan, Korea, Papua New Guinea, Namibia, and the United States, they discovered that the average gap between one person ending a sentence and the other responding is about 200 milliseconds.3
The country with the shortest gap is Japan, with 7 milliseconds, which means they’re basically talking on top of each other. And even in the nation with the longest gap, Denmark, it was only 470 milliseconds. That’s less than half a second! Just for context, it takes 600 milliseconds to dredge up a single word from our memory banks. So, if we respond in only 200 milliseconds, then we are quite literally not taking the time to think before we speak.
How can we possibly respond that quickly? Stephen C. Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics says that “we build our responses during our partner’s turn.” Levinson suggests that “we listen to [someone else’s] words while simultaneously crafting our own, so that when our opportunity comes, we seize it as quickly as it’s physically possible to.” That makes sense to me, but I do disagree with Stephen on one point. I don’t believe we can listen to someone while we’re crafting our response. If we’re always thinking about what we’re going to say next, I believe we’re only ever half-listening in an exchange.
Humans have always been prone to distraction, but technology has exacerbated that. In some ways, we now expect our real-life conversations to match the experience we have online. Research shows that most of us scroll through about half of the articles we “read” on the Internet.4 And guess what’s the most popular feature on the Web? Clicking on links.5 Think about that for a moment: our favorite thing to do when we’re reading about something is to click on a link that takes us to a tangential page. And before we finish reading that, we’ll click another link that takes us somewhere else. The Internet encourages our brains to follow tangents, but that doesn’t work very well in conversation.
It’s totally natural to have dozens of thoughts crowding your brain while you’re listening to someone else talk. It’s natural to become distracted when a butterfly flutters by or a guy in a funny T-shirt walks past. It’s also natural to think of something that you’d much rather talk about, or get really excited about something that occurred to you while you were listening. None of these types of distraction are inherently bad or even counterproductive. But attempting to incorporate those random thoughts into a conversation won’t make the conversation better. It’s difficult for someone else to follow the meanderings of your mind, so if you indulge in woolgathering, you will likely wander off and leave them behind.
For some, allowing the conversation to flow freely is difficult because it requires them to give up control. In conversations, we often like to be the driver of the car; woolgathering can be a method of keeping hold of the wheel. If we feel like taking a turn, we do it. We can take an exit at any time by changing the subject. This can be especially tempting if a thought arises that we think is particularly clever or interesting. It’s hard to resist making that joke or inserting a witty comment, even if it will disrupt the flow of the conversation. Often, we don’t realize we’re interrupting! We’re just interjecting an astute comment that enriches and enlivens the conversation, right? It’s a subtle form of conversational narcissism.
The line between a diversion and a legitimate response can be blurry at times. It’s not always clear where a conversation is heading, so it’s impossible to know if your remark will change its course. That line becomes easier to detect if you are really listening.
Here’s a good, general rule of thumb: In a healthy conversation, you’re present. You are listening to what’s being said at that moment. If you’re letting a thought distract you or if you’re focused on what you want to say next, you’re not listening.
It is possible to train your mind to be less easily distracted. Meditation is one very effective method. It teaches you to observe your thoughts and release them rather than hold on to them. But if you’re not one for meditation, you can simply start to take notice of what’s happening inside your head. Don’t try to change anything, just be aware. The sooner you notice a distraction, the better chance you have of allowing it to pass from your mind before it carries your brain and body with it.
Using MRI technology, scientists have not only identified the part of the brain that helps us stay focused (the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), they’ve also found that mental activity has its own kind of momentum.6 For example, once you think about getting a glass of water, your body starts preparing to move and your mouth might even water in anticipation. The farther you get down a mental pathway, the harder it is to stop the momentum. If you make a practice of paying attention to your thoughts, you’ll notice when a distraction slips in before your physiological response is in full swing. That’s what it means to be “mindful.”
Once you’re aware of the thoughts that come into your head, don’t fight them or try to “clear your mind.” You can’t stop your brain from thinking, and actively resisting your thoughts can be very distracting. Instead, when a thought comes into your head, simply say to yourself, “That’s a thought,” and then try to return your focus to the conversation.
Also—at this point, I hope it goes without saying—the best conversations are unplugged. Put away your smartphone, turn away from your computer, and mute any technology that might make noise. It’s a good idea to permanently turn off most notifications on your phone anyway. Do you really need to know every time somebody likes your post on Facebook? Do you need to know the moment that someone shared your photo on Instagram? Probably not. The average adult checks their cell phone 110 times a day. That’s a glance every thirteen minutes. Instead of trying to resist the urge to look at it while you’re talking, just keep it out of sight.
Conversations require patience and focus, two qualities that are not easy to cultivate. I don’t see that as a drawback, though—I think the challenge adds to a conversation’s beauty. Conversations are precious because they require you to share time and focus equally with someone else instead of indulging your own thoughts. In doing so, you follow the natural flow of human interaction and allow yourself to be led into new, unfamiliar territory. You already know what’s inside your own head; open yourself to the surprise and discovery inherent in someone else’s perspective. It’s worth the effort.