Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance

Our lives emerge in large part from what we pay attention to. Eviatar Zerubavel argues that attention is “arguably the most important organizational feature of our conscious life,” and he provides a framework to describe and explain patterns of attention and inattention in everyday perception (p. 1). This long, elegant essay of fewer than 100 pages begins by looking at the way people hear musical notes and see optical illusions. But Zerubavel makes the argument that the way we attend is driven not only by perceptual features (the contrast between light and dark, for example) but by social and cultural expectations. He begins with optical illusions and ends with the “attentional socialization” of detectives and hunters and Americans and Asians—the social underpinnings of human attention (p. 63).

Attention requires inattention: it is the act of noticing a figure that stands out against a background we ignore. The point of those remarkable optical illusions is that as you attend to one part of them (the white vase rather than the two black faces, the old woman rather than the younger one, the rabbit and not the duck), the other fades into irrelevance.

Zerubavel describes a series of features that create that irrelevance. The eye-catching figure may be more vividly detailed or lifted away, like the images on an ancient frieze. Once we find the figure, we follow it, the way we follow a melody or a conversation in a noisy restaurant, sharpening the contrast between the figure and the ground. (In an aside, he points out that contrast helped to identify the bombers of the 2013 Boston Marathon: while others fled in panic, those two walked slowly away.) He provides an array of examples that manipulate noticeability to avoid detection (or “attention marginalization”)—background matching, camouflage, contour distortion, diversion of attention—with compelling illustrations (p. 28).

Just as you can learn to avoid detection—the pickpocket distracts you, the basketball player looks to the left and passes to the right—you can learn to pay attention to the contrast that helps you focus on what you want to see. Musicians hear more notes. Chess players remember more chessboard positions. And scientists and policemen have different styles of attending. The scientist focuses on the puzzle. Her attention is narrow. Policemen have an open attentional style. They distribute their attention broadly, looking for aberrant behavior.

Remarkably, these differences are also true for culture. One of the robust findings from cultural psychology is that when westerners and easterners look at a scene with a fish in a watery background setting, the interdependent easterners are more likely to remember details from what the westerners would call the background. The more independent westerners remember the central fish. They pay attention differently to figure and ground.

Psychiatrists who read this book will find themselves in the background of the text, although so much of what they do is salient. Does someone listen to the daybreak warbling of songbirds or obsess about last night’s inadequate dinner-table riposte? That is the stuff of psychotherapy. The therapist sets out to shift the way the patient pays attention, and it is hard because—for all the reasons Zerubavel details—the patient does not notice the warbling. All his focus is on the memory of that misphrased response.

But as I read the book, I thought about the different ways of seeing I observed (in Of Two Minds) as young psychiatrists became experts, and the differences between the way they learned to see mental illness when they thought like a biomedical psychiatrist, and the way they thought when they thought like a psychodynamic psychiatrist, and how those ways of seeing were like figure/ground reversals, so that it was harder, when seeing mental illness one way, to see it in the other way. And I thought as well of the invisibility of mental illness to so many who are not psychiatrists. Those with serious mental illness can fade into the background as busy commuters hurry through Grand Central Station, just as mental illness fades as a social issue beside gay marriage and immigration. For those of us who care about mental illness, the political challenge is to make the funding and care of serious mental illness pop out like a figure in a way that will get the average American to care about it with compassion. We have not yet succeeded.