Research Tip: Don’t Let Your Attention Get Hijacked

When you’re deep in the throes of doing legal research and totally focused on task, you’re using what’s called “controlled attention.” This type of attention is also called “goal-directed attention” or “purposeful attention.” If your phone alerts you to a new text and you immediately respond, then you’re using “stimulus-driven attention.” Stimulus-driven attention getters – like texts, emails, Facebook or Twitter posts, or phone calls – can be murder on controlled attention because we feel compelled to respond to them and our brains gets a little dose of the chemical signal dopamine, which is responsible for pleasurable addictions, when we do respond. Legal research requires controlled attention. You may want to try limiting the stimulus-driven attention getters in your life by setting aside focused time for legal research – you might find that your research results are much better.

See Joanne Cantor, Five Reasons We Can’t Stop Distracting Ourselves, Psychology Today.