Ben Parr: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention | Big Think.

Attention is the common currency across all business. It's the most important currency you can have. Attention comes in many forms, which is part of the reason I studied it so much.

There's the attention for if you turn your head because you hear a gunshot; there’s attention if you start concentrating on a speaker, and there's the type of attention that makes people long-term fans of a company like Apple or a celebrity like Beyoncé. And so, attention has become more and more important over the last, especially the last ten years because there's so much more information than ever being produced.

In the last two years alone, approximately 90 percent of the world's information was created, and we still have the same 24 hours of time. And so, it's more important than ever, whether you're a teacher, an entrepreneur, or a businessperson, to capture the attention of others.

Immediate attention is short-term and immediate and an unconscious and subconscious reaction to certain sights, sounds, and other stimuli. You can have certain things that will capture their immediate attention: certain colors, certain symbols, certain sounds.

Short attention is our short-term conscious concentration on a subject, or an idea, or an object. It's the kind of attention that you give when you're concentrating on an episode of Game of Thrones, or you're listening to a keynote speaker, or you're looking at a news article. It's the type of attention where we decide we're going to pay attention to something.

And what's really important about that is making sure that something really focuses on novelty and focuses on things that are new. Long attention, which is the final stage of attention, really focuses on that long-term interest in a subject, person, or idea.

Unlike short attention, which is focused on short-term concentration on maybe an episode of House of Cards, long attention is becoming a lifelong fan and watching every single season. It's rather than just buying, like listening to a Beyoncé song on the radio; it's buying all her albums.

Long attention is about that long-term interest and really focuses on what you're familiar with and becoming really, really ingrained with a subject or an idea. You have to think of attention as three stages, and you have to capture attention by going through the three stages: immediate attention, short attention, and long-term attention.

And we've got to start with the first to the second to the third, and that's the secret to capturing attention.