Are We Losing the Capacity to Give Others Our Attention?

The Extinction of Experience, Chapter 2

When our focus is sharp, so are our experiences. When our focus is hazy, so too are our experiences. All photos are my own work.

This is the second in a series of posts exploring the book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen. Last time, I reflected on the difference between experiencing a sight, a sensation, or a sound, and thinking about that experience. This time, we’ll look at the disembodiment of communication.

Has the primacy of the face and body as humans’ most powerful communication tool ended? And if so, how do our interactions change when a skill evolution fitted us for—face-to-face communication—gives way to mediated forms of interaction?¹

I had an intense opportunity to think about faces on the silent retreat last month.

Meditation retreats are designed to minimize stimuli to all the senses. The austere decoration in meditation halls, the silence of not talking, rules against wearing strong perfumes or cosmetics, the lightly-flavored meals, and a routine schedule that minimizes excess movement. As days pass in monotone, the mind settles and the senses sharpen.²

One way I actively try to minimize stimulation is by not looking at people’s faces—including my own! No matter if I’m in the meditation hall or outside, I keep my gaze lowered to the ground. Even if I have to pass a note to someone, I don’t make eye contact. And as much as I can, I avoid looking at myself in mirrors.

I’m telling you, it makes a real difference. If I look at a person’s face, all kinds of thoughts flood in unbidden. Waves of unconscious feelings prompted by the position of a bunch of facial muscles. The brain is pretty bonkers when you think about it.

And sure, even though not looking in a mirror for several days probably makes me look like a crazy person…I also don’t think about my appearance. Or even that I have an appearance to manage.

The crazy thing is, even this tiny act of avoidance makes a huge difference. At the end of the retreat, when we speak for the first time and begin to interact with our fellow retreatants, the visceral experience of looking at faces…well, stares you right in the face. I can’t not look at their faces without reacting physically and emotionally. It’s automatic.

Christine Rosen’s book prompts the question: are we as humans on the brink of losing all these these experiences?

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We are meant to look at one another, and doing so triggers a host of physiological responses. Intense eye contact increases one’s heart rate and triggers the release of phenylethylamine, an organic compound that functions as a neurotransmitter in the human central nervous system and serves as a mood and stress regulator.

Not that any of us really need science to tell us how important the human face is to communication, but the science really does validate my instinctual experience. It’s not an exaggeration to say that our brains and bodies have been fine-tuned to send and receive all kinds of information conveyed through facial expressions.

As one scientist put it, everything about our “biological apparatus,” from our sensory and motor organs to the particular way our brains have developed, “must have been designed primarily for face-to-face communication.”

Faces aren’t just faces. They are triggers for all manner of psychophysiological reactions that occur mostly invisibly to our conscious mind.

Just think about conversation. Even if a person says the same phrase with the exact same tone of voice and intonation, but their eyes furrow slightly. Or the edges of their mouth creep up. Or their jaw tightens.

Our felt experience of their words will change.

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Talk to anyone who works behind a cash register, and they will tell you stories about their increasing invisibility to customers who complete entire transactions with cellphones glued to ears or earbuds in, without a single acknowledgement of the person standing in front of them.

Yet human interactions in a post-device word are quickly bleeding face-to-face contact. Rosen argues that, our absence of communicating through faces means we miss more than just intellectual understanding of what the other person might have tried to tell us.

We lose out on human interaction, yes, and social cohesion. But there’s more. The withholding of facial expression isn’t just the absence of a face. It’s worse than seeing no face at all.

Passengers on the Beijing subway.

A psychological experiment tested whether a woman making eye contact, smiling, or looking past a stranger as if she didn’t see them would change that person’s feelings of social connection…

The people who had been acknowledged with eye contact…or a smile “felt less disconnected than passersby in the air-gaze condition…

Humans evolved systems to detect the slightest cues of inclusion or exclusion,” they noted, and looking someone in the eye is a subtle gesture of inclusiveness, a small but significant act of civil attention.

Read that last phrase one more time. When was the last time you omitted that small act of “civil attention?”³ For me, the answer is the last time I left the building.

And, when was the last time that you felt someone more absorbed in their phone than in engaging with you?

This chapter is telling is that we feel more than just a sense of rudeness or light sadness. Our bodies respond to faces, including faces that ignore us.

My conjecture is that in the experiments above, the “disconnect” elicited from the experience is likely a description of a negative physical feeling somewhere in the body. All it takes to provoke that response is someone looking right through you.

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We often don’t realize the cumulative effects of mediation until a situation reminds us what real, unmediated human contact is….intense, in-person focus on another person is becoming less common among younger Americans.

I’m sure some of you are already thinking about other facets of life, not just casual interactions with strangers.

If our inability to receive facial feedback from others impacts us psychologically, what might be the impact of our rapidly accelerating reliance on mediated methods of communication? Methods that either obscure facial reactions or erase them altogether?

Another passenger radiates smiles without the hint of a smile.

The late Stanford University communications professor Clifford Nass, an expert on media multitasking…found a strong correlation between media use and what researchers call negative social well-being, including feelings of low confidence, not feeling normal, and even sleeping less. By contrast, he noted, “face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being.”

Professor Nass admitted that the findings disturbed him so much that he told reporters that the substitution of face-to-face interaction for screen-mediated interaction among the young could lead to “serious emotional and developmental consequences.”

I write this post, of course, on a computer. You too are reading my writing on a screen. My intention is for you to interact with me, asynchronously, with no possibility of seeing my face when I share these words.

The written word here is not the problem. The issue comes in a world where the majority of our interaction comes through texting, online forum posts, or exchanging animal videos on social media.

In such a world, we lose not only (sometimes a lot) of the information and context behind the messages. We lose the social aspects of communication and the somatic experience of someone paying us attention.

And if we take Clifford Nass seriously, we also lose happiness, well-being, and healthy development as a human being.

Ten years ago [in 2014], the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that while 63 percent of teenagers exchanged text messages daily with people in their lives, only 35 percent spoke to others face-to-face. Only 25 percent of teenagers see their friends in person outside of school every day, a decline from 35 percent in 2009. Only 37 percent of teens met face-to-face several times a week outside of school….

A Monitoring the Future Survey revealed that the number of twelfth-graders in the U.S. who saw friends in person “almost every day” dropped from 44 percent in 2010 to 32 percent in 2022.

Young people are not merely losing the depth of friendship that comes from deep face-to-face interaction, they are losing cognitive and interpersonal skills that come with interpreting complex facial expressions.

They are losing the ability to experience other people’s reactions in their bodies and use that information to react dynamically in the moment. The ability to pay their partner valuable attention. And to cope with their own psychophysiological reactions.

That abstract world of civil inattention? Not hypothetical. It’s ours now. We already live here.

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“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” French philosopher Simone Weil wrote.

I have already written about generosity more than once in the short life of this little online journal. In Buddhism, generosity is a fundamental practice and attitude that paves the way for all kinds of wisdom. In many early teachings on generosity and stinginess, the Buddha indicates the benefits of the former and the harms of the latter.⁴

Often generosity is split into the giving of things, of teachings, and of freedom…but more simple than any of these, is the generosity of just giving someone our attention. With our listening, with our patience, but perhaps most fundamentally, with our face.

It costs nothing but could mean everything.

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Attention to one another as embodied creatures is central to what makes us human—breathing the same air, sensing one another’s unspoken feelings, seeing one another’s faces, and being attuned to one another’s gestures—and to give attention to others we must spend time in their physical presence.

Our technologies, as brilliant as they are, cannot satisfy all of those needs.

Rosen finishes by returning to the embodied, somatic experience of being a human, together with other humans.

If we value this visceral experience and the deep-seated and automatic feelings it produces, maybe we need to reserve our attention for others, not just for our devices.

Next time, we’ll move from vision to touch in Chapter 3, and explore what we lose when we no longer engage in physical actions and practice.

If you enjoyed this post, why not check out my take below on the first chapter?

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this series of review come from Rosen, Christine, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, W.W. Norton & Company, September 2024. I have opted not to add page # citations because 1) I partly read the book on a Kindle and 2) nobody’s going to submit these blog posts for peer review. (That said, if readers really want page number citations, am happy to add them retroactively or in future posts.)

2. Heck, on retreat we’re not even supposed to wear bright colored clothes or clothes with any writing on them. Even this level of stimulation can become quite distracting!

3. Part of me wants to quibble about cultural mores here and submit that looking at someone directly in the eye is only valorized in Western European cultures and their descendants. But Rosen’s argument still holds as long as we adjust the specific “gesture of inclusiveness” to what is culturally and social acceptable in a certain context. The Japanese aizuchi, the obligatory “how are you” in former British colonies, the classic Indian shake of the head to mean nothing at all besides “I am listening.”

4. See, for example, the sutta on Stinginess or the sutta with Sumanā.