The Shape of Attention

How Time Frames Creativity in a Digital Age

We often see time as a backdrop against which events unfold but it is not the event itself. It serves as a mechanism to allow events to occur so that we don't experience everything all at once, in one instant. Time is an active medium that is perceived as a product of experience that helps us process our memories and organise our attention. It frames any creative act by giving it a start, a middle, and an end. But rapid information flow and constant connectivity have transformed our engagement with time. The apparent instantaneity of digital experience may be starting to play an unhelpful and negative role in our cognitive and creative lives.

The way we attend to the world is inherently time-based. There are routines and rhythms to our daily lives that are played out across the day, which give us our sense of time passing. Our brain is wired to use the passing of time to review, learn, and enhance performance. Anna Nobre and Freek van Ede in their paper 'Anticipated moments: Temporal Structure in Attention' discuss how temporal expectations can enhance perceptual processing, suggesting that our brains are wired to anticipate and align with these time-based patterns.

"Temporal expectations can act through different mechanisms at multiple stages of neural processing to enhance performance. One interesting observation is that, rather than acting in isolation, temporal expectations often accompany expectations about other identifying attributes of anticipated events, markedly boosting their effects. This alignment allows for more efficient processing of information, indicating that time is not just a measure but a framework that structures cognitive functions."

They argue that temporal expectations enhance cognitive performance by aligning with other event features such as touch, sound, and sight in an interrelated framework of stimuli, response, and expectation. The brain needs time to pass to function as an active framework in neural processing.

But the perpetual distraction from digital media, either by social media, online games, LLM outputs and so on, and their demand for immediate responses incentivised by dopamine hits, serves to break up and fragment the temporal processes needed for the effective use of the brain. Our normal cues that come from the passage of time that guide attention are disrupted by the erratic rhythms of the digital world. The digital and the human are not in sync with each other. Our ability to stay focused and take a deep dive into new, potentially valuable areas for discovery and creativity is compromised. I am sure that many of you have noticed that after an hour of scrolling your media of choice that it is striking how little you remember of such a compelling experience. Time may have passed in a seemingly fleeting manner but with no discernible result. It may be the way to entertain ourselves but it has little value as a learning tool.

The digital world creates an illusion of immediacy and a constant feeling of nowness. Sang-Hee Kweon and colleagues write in 'Time and Space Perception on Media Platform' that digital media changes our perception of time and space. Users of digital media platforms, not just social media, experience a collapse of their sense of the boundaries of time. This, in turn, affects how we create and interpret content. "The new media affects the way in which users experienced the spatial and temporal characteristics of daily social life. People experience new aspects of time and space, such as the collapse of time and space, uncoupling of time and space, and transformation of time and space."

Social media and instant AI outputs are reshaping how people experience the world by collapsing, atomising, and altering the way they are wired to live their daily lives in a different temporal manner.

This has implications for creators of all kinds, entrepreneurs and artists alike. The reflective processes essential for creative thought are undermined by incessant distraction. Many great ideas need a period of gestation to bear fruit. That will no longer be possible if we allow ourselves to be trained as though we were Skinner-like lab animals in a constant state of either responding or waiting to respond. Time to think in this new modern world is now a luxury.

Multi-sensory integration is key to how we operate. Our different sensor modalities such as touch, sight and hearing have different response times and the brain integrates the different information it receives at different rates to recreate a whole that makes sense to us and that useful in helping us navigate the world and its ways. Nicola Di Stefano and Charles Spence, examine in 'Perceiving Temporal Structure Within and Between the Senses: A Multisensory/Crossmodal Perspective' how temporal structures are perceived across different sensory modalities, highlighting the complexity of time perception. The synchronization of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli contributes to our understanding of temporal sequences and durations. "According to the ‘intersensory redundancy hypothesis’ (IRH), the temporal qualities of stimuli, such as isochrony and rhythm, provide a framework for establishing relationships between sensory features that are coded differently in each sense."

In other words, a feature of human activity such as rhythm helps to integrate sensory inputs across the different modalities of sensory inputs, such as touch, sight and sound, enabling the brain to synchronize auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli to enable us to perceive the world around us.

The potential desynchronisation of sensory inputs by constant scrolling and prompting can twist our perception of time and break up our sense of having a coherent experience.

This can have a massive effect on our capability to pay attention. To be able to focus for prolonged periods is essential for cognitive operations and to be able to function effectively. Verena Seibold, Janina Balke, and Bettina Rolke discuss how temporal attention interacts with expectations to optimize perception and action. The precise timing of attention enhances our ability to process relevant stimuli and ignore distractions. In their paper, 'Temporal Attention' they say the following:

"Attention, that is, the ability to focus processing resources on a specific part of sensory input, is often thought of as being mainly allocated in space, toward specific objects or modalities. However, attention can also be allocated within time. Temporal attention can be induced implicitly, that is, through learning of temporal regularities between at least two events, or explicitly, by the active instruction to attend to a specific time point. Moreover, temporal attention can be induced via external rhythmic stimulation."

Attention is not only directed in space but also in time, where it can be guided by experience, or external rhythms. For these rhythms of perception and understanding to work a sense of time passing is a basic requirement.

But our digital world often interferes with temporal attention and our ability to concentrate and focus. We are living in an increasingly volatile landscape where attention is constantly distracted and diverted. This constant disruption has a deeply negative effect on our capacity to engage in sustained creative work. The sort of effort that requires focus, engagement and attention over long periods of time.

Decoupling ourselves from this runawayattention steam-roller that is digital media in its social media form and the increasing use of AI with its instant, sometimes quite wrong, responses, may become a necessary self-imposed discipline as we slide into a chaotic future of constant noise and distortion.

The choice is stark. We either bring ourselves to have digital detoxes on a daily basis or we allow ourselves to be synced up to the machine. The cost of losing our sense of time passing will have terrible consequences. In our relationship with others we need time to pass to feel important things such as empathy and understanding. Lack of careful and judicious use of the these technologies may well lead to an atomised, hyper-individualised society that is lost in a digital desert no longer able to conceive of, or communicate real truths.

Background reading:

Nobre, A. C., & van Ede, F. (2018). Anticipated moments: Temporal Structure in Attention

Kweon, S.-H., Hwang, K.-H., & Jo, D.-H. (2011). Time and Space Perception on Media Platforms

Di Stefano, N., & Spence, C. (2025). Perceiving temporal structure within and between the senses: A multisensory/crossmodal perspective

Verena Seibold, Janina Balke, & Bettina Rolke (2023). Temporal Attention