Where the seeds of attention grow
What we get from the previous sections is that whatever gets our attention doesn't get our attention until the brain lets it. It is here that you need to remember that humans were a prey species for most of our evolutionary history. The fact that we were a prey species for most of our evolutionary history means everything was getting our attention. For example, there was no filtering mechanism attaching survival relevance to information, and we were ready for fight or flight at every sound, every touch, and everything that came into our visual field.
The brain-mind has a vast surplus of these old attention skills that haven't quite become new attention skills yet and are what some people mistakenly call the "sub-conscious." It is more correctly "non-conscious" because the brain-mind system (to use a modern metaphor) places lots of information in a buffer -- an online storage area -- for further evaluation but at a different level of awareness or attention, and processes it at a level we're not aware of, hence "non-conscious."
This buffer works like this: The brain throws things in there tagged with various levels of importance. The mind goes through them and says, "Yeah, yeah, okay, good, good, not important, okay, yeah, not important, good, no, okay, not important ...," and we recognize the "yeah", "okay" and "good" as things that get our attention. This analysis of the buffer has to occur non-consciously because it would take far too much time to perform this evaluation at the conscious level.
So we need to explore this buffer to figure out how the brain places things in and how the mind takes things out. More to the point: what get's people's attention, how and why?
Putting the pieces together
Simultaneous media and multi-media (what NextStage calls media rich) environments require the brain-mind system to allocate the buffer contents differently. Media rich environments are the modern equivalent of walking through a forest with your tribe, your bow drawn and arrow ready to kill predator or prey while deciding if those tubers coming up on the left are edible while listening for movement in the brush or trees while listening to your children and elders while...
Media rich environments don't have the survival element of the above described scenario, but the brain -- that wonderfully wired brain -- disagrees. The mind knows the TV, the stereo, the computer, the newspaper, the dog and cat, and the kids aren't going to thrust us into an immediate life or death situation. The brain knows only life and death as a fact because it's been that way for several million years. How else could it be and why change now?
The brain-mind system doesn't understand media rich environments so it translates these environments into what it does understand: walking in the forest. It's been good at walking in forests for millions of years, and to the brain, a media rich environment has similar qualities. The brain essentially decides it knows how to deal with what's going on and sends the mind a "Don't worry, I've got a lock on this. You can relax," signal.
What the brain-mind does understand via this translation is known in neuroscience as multi-modal environments. It is this recognition of the multi-modal environment that allows the brain-mind system to force a different allocation of buffer storage in media rich environments. This translation to multi-modal means you can make one of those cross sensory-attention systems send a message that will be recognized as important, specifically, important enough for the mind to take it as meaningful in the current situation and focus attention on it.
Waving my hands to be heard, whispering to be seen
People in our offices and clients are often amused that I'll raise my hand in the middle of a discussion in order to be heard. In business meetings where everyone's attention is focused on the presenter or a slide, I'll sotto vocé something and everyone will turn to me, "What was that, Joseph?" There are lots of tricks along these lines that effectively tweak the multi-modal recognition filters to pass information through the buffer system to get the mind's attention.
And there's more. People aren't irritated when I wave my hand or whisper something. Quite the opposite, usually. Tension leaves. This is because the multi-modal system was designed to keep us safe and alive. Waving my hand and whispering signals the cross sensory-attention systems in a non-threatening way.
Most websites -- especially Web 2.0, RIA and rich media sites -- haven't learned how to be non-threatening. One of the things that happens in media rich environments is that our multi-modal system is constantly accelerating us and decelerating us, giving us a little adrenaline then taking it away, because it's designed for survival and is now left recognizing nothing it's alerting us to is a threat. In fact, most of what it's alerting us to is an irritation, something we didn't come to a site to do.