“Pay attention, class,” says the teacher.

Dutifully the third graders focus on the task at hand … until someone walks by the window. Up go the little heads, eyes on the movement.

Are the kids “paying attention”? Sure they are.

From their brains’ perspective, with movement comes the possibility of threats. Is that a bird swooping by? or maybe a rock aimed at your head? Millennia of evolutionary experience make determining whether or not to duck an immediate, possibly life-and-death priority.

To the brain, attention is all about risk management.

To the trainer, teaching is all about repeatedly earning that attention.

Your Brain’s Alert System

In a sense, your brain is always paying attention, continually scanning the environment for anything unusual -- an “intrinsic alertness,” to use the jargon of neuroscience. Changes, novelty or contrast trigger what neuroscientist pioneer Michael Posner famously dubbed the “alerting” or “arousing” stage of attention.

An example familiar to parents everywhere would be the change from the sounds of raucous play to abrupt whispers and silence. To the manager, it might be the sudden drop in the volume when she enters a room full of employees.

With the parental or managerial brain alerted to an abrupt change in the noise level, it next seeks to identify the nature and source of that change. Posner called this “orienting.”

Finally the brain’s executive function kicks in and makes a decision about what to do about the sudden silence that set off the alert. (Unfortunately for the grammatical symmetry of the model, Posner does not appear to have a tidy “-ing” to label this focused attention.)

Earning Attention

What does all this have to do with training?

Your participants need to be paying attention in order to learn whatever it is you are trying to teach them. Obvious, right?

But their brains’ intrinsic alertness keeps right on scanning the environment; and after about 10 minutes or so, your content drops off the top of the priorities list, if only for a few moments.

In the words of authors Stolovitch and Keeps*, “Attention, like breathing, tends to be automatically controlled. You can take charge of both of them for a short time, but as soon as you cease consciously controlling them, they revert to automatic.”

So as you pass roughly the nine-and-a-half-minute mark, you need to give participants’ brains a good reason to keep paying attention.

That means introducing change, novelty or contrast.

Not just any old change, novelty or contrast, of course. It needs to be relevant to the flow of what you are teaching. Breaking out into song would certainly recapture your participants’ attention, but it wouldn’t do much to enhance your credibility in a class about, say, how to operate your new enterprise-wide software. (And it would probably do nothing to improve participants’ ability to use the system, would it?)

Even with less blatant tactics, punctuating your presentation irrelevant attention-getters will only make your talk seem disjointed, and you’ll still miss your objective of helping your participants learn.

What kind of change will set off the brain’s alert system and earn you another 10 minutes of focused attention?

Emotions Help Anchor Learning

Remember that the more parts of the brain that are involved in encoding new information, the better that information sticks. And the brain remembers the emotional components of an experience better than any other aspect.

So possibly the single most effective way to trigger an orienting response and recapture executive attention is to evoke an emotion --fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, incredulity, and on and on.

What might that look like? A quick anecdote to illustrate your point, for example. Or posing an interesting question about it. Or sharing a jarring statistic. Or asking participants to share their reaction with a partner or at their table groups. If it breaks the pattern or changes the pace of what you had been doing for the previous nine and a half minutes, it can re-arouse participants’ attention.

Once you earn their attention, you have another opportunity to help them learn. And you have spared the world from a round of well-intentioned dullness. Everybody wins.




*Harold D. Stolovich & Erika J. Keeps in their best-selling book Telling Ain’t Training