What do dogs and improv have in common?
Several years ago I enrolled in The Foundations of Positive Psychology. Not only was I about to adopt a thriving- versus deficit-based view of functioning, I was learning from one of the founders of the field of Positive Psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Around campus, he goes by Mike.
While class predictably began with the explanation of why positive psychology is not the study of happiness, we began to circle human evolution. This was not a theme I would’ve predicted but once broached, it made so much sense. In nearly every class after that, Mike would return to evolutionary concepts and emphasize one thing in particular: attention. Humans evolved to have highly tuned attention circuits because our survival depended on it.
Nothing radical has changed about our neural circuitry in the past 10,000 years but the world in which we live has transformed more than once. Take, for example, the amount of information out there. In today’s Digital Era/Knowledge Economy/Second Machine Age/etc., there is more information being created and exchanged than had previously existed in all of humanity. The demands on our attention are infinite. Less often than I am happy to admit, I find myself unaware of how and where my attention is spent. As many of us know, our lack of awareness can be both inconsequential or frighteningly life-changing.
Just like our attention circuits, we evolved to be social because we increased our chances for survival. The search for food, shelter, and safety were much more possible when working as a group. This very human tendency, to form bonds, even translates to our connection with other species. The special relationship 36% of U.S. households have with canines is a great example. We all know people, including myself, that will go to great lengths for their dogs because we feel they are a part of our families. We often quip about being ignored by our cats and loved by our dogs. This general consensus is because dogs uniquely notice us. More specifically, they are skilled at reading our attention, allowing them to respond to our facial reactions. It is arguably one of the strongest reasons we feel such powerful bonds with these animals. Let’s face it, if the other social being in the room — be it a cat or a person — doesn’t pay attention to us, the sense of elevation we derive from bonds just isn’t the same.
The highly evolved skills to pay attention to what matters, and choose what matters to us, make us human. We take social cues that let us know if it is safe to engage, tune into the feelings of others, or ask for help. Paying attention is the first step in our exchange of information with one another, enabling us to communicate, verbally or otherwise. Given the demands on our attention, it is no surprise that many of us find ourselves competing for attention, often with digital devices that otherwise make us productive in today’s world.
Our attention is not only misappropriated to superfluous digital stimuli (cue: email notification, text message, phone vibration). Our attention is hijacked by our own thoughts. How often do you stop paying attention to someone because you start thinking about your to-do list? Have you ever missed a colleague’s point because you were already planning your response mid-sentence? There is an improv activity that highlights the importance of attention as we try to connect and create as a group. The activity is simple: a story is generated one word per person at a time in a predetermined sequence. (If you haven’t tried this, you should because it’s pretty fun.) The reality of this activity is that you have zero control over what the person before or after you will say. There is no suggesting, no editing. You must pay attention to every word that each person says or risk being unable to contribute in a meaningful way. The fact that you have no control over the process is quite freeing because the best thing you can do is commit 100% of your attentional resources. You are suddenly a great listener helping your group build a story.
So what do dogs and improv have in common? When examined through the evolutionary lens of attention, they highlight our human condition to connect and do so in the pursuit of better life outcomes. Those better outcomes might be little things, like generating positive emotion and sharing a laugh, or something far greater, like experiencing deep companionship or our very survival.
