Negative Attention is Better Than No Attention at All

To give and receive attention is a fundamental human need. In the 13th century, King Frederick II of Sicily wanted to find out what language children would naturally grow up to speak if they were never spoken to. He took babies from their mothers at birth and placed them in the care of nurses who were strictly forbidden to either speak to or touch them. The babies, as it turned out, didn’t grow up to speak any language, as they all died of attention deprivation within a fortnight of the start of the experiment. A study involving less extreme methods at the University of British Columbia in 2014 found that the withdrawal of attention — ostracism — is psychologically more harmful than bullying. Negative attention, it seems, is better than no attention at all. By giving and receiving attention, we are meaningfully connected to others and to a larger social whole.

In his 1996 book Learning How to Learn, author and Sufi scholar Idries Shah argued that giving and receiving attention is a cornerstone of human behavior. According to Shah, attention exchange is often the main, underlying motive for any human interaction, regardless of the actors’ overt intention. Yet attention is a brutally limited resource. A healthy attention capacity, involving the ability to block out parts of the world in order to focus, is crucial for learning. We have to be able to properly listen, think about things, and digest and integrate knowledge into a wider context if we are to develop and grow. Attention is the basic currency of this process. Yet we have been giving it away freely to the attention merchants because we do not know that it is precious.