The Drunken Blog

In psychology you learn that attention is a finite resource.  There is only a limited amount of attention that any single person can give to any particular stimulus.  You can pay a little attention to multiple things or you can give all of your attention to one thing.  For instance, right now you are reading this, but not with all of your attention, most likely because you are listening for your boss to walk up behind you and you want to be able to close the browser before they realize you’re reading a site about drunken debacles instead of doing whatever it is you do so that your boss can afford an $85,000 rug in his office.

One of the interesting things about attention is that part of your attention is always reserved for special stimuli.  This most likely came about due to evolutionary demands, such as listening for a rustle in the bush to warn of any potential predators.  Now we don’t listen for predators, we listen for other key words, such as our names.

I’m sure you’ve had the sensation before, somebody at the bar is having a conversation, about what you have no idea, and being engrossed in your own conversation, you have no inclination to listen, but then all of the sudden, your ears perk up because you thought you just heard your name.  You turn to look and see if they are talking about you, but it turns out they were actually talking about Dustin, your twin brother.  How they know about Dustin you’ll never know, but that part of your life is behind you, so you go back to your conversation about Cruella DeVille and sea urchins.

It’s fun to experiment with this.  I was having a meta-conversation the other day (a conversation about our conversation) with my friend Jake while both of our girlfriends were having their own separate conversation directly next to us.  I don’t recall what their conversation entailed, but I recall very explicitly the gist of our conversation (is it even possible to explicitly remember the gist of something?).

What we were talking about was attention, though we didn’t refer to it as that.  But we noticed that the girls were so deep in their conversation that we could say anything and they would be completely oblivious, despite the fact we were sitting literally right next to them.  Their attention was focused almost entirely on each other.  We could have broken it by saying their names or yelling FIRE!, but we wanted to see if they had any other attention-stealing words besides their names and threats of immediate harm.

So we started talking about porn.  Nothing explicit, more about the fact that we could talk about porn and the girls would never notice.  We laughed and they kept on talking.  We started talking more about porn – our favorite sites, how much is on our computers, whether we had any homemade porn (neither of us had).  We then started talking about the prospects of including our significant others in our favorite pastime, but then we forgot what we were doing and drifted into other conversation.  It seems that our attention is somewhat limited as well.  But to our defense, at the time, Jake had a professional grade camera trained on his bed with professional lighting to boot.  It was a homemade porn studio if you ever saw one, so we started talking about that, and then cameras, and then I took a picture with my digital camera, so it was really more of a regression than a “I like turtles” moment.

I don’t remember what our conversation lead to after that, but neither girl realized what we were talking about.  They did, however, realize that we had laughed at some point during our conversation and wanted to know what we were laughing about.  We told them, but they were not nearly as amused as we were.

Other posts by Justin

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, friends, crazy theories, observations, girls . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.