Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

data from participants who had been sitting in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scanner for an hour or more. He described to me how their attention levels curved up and down many times per minute, with tons of experiment time “lost” to distraction, daydreaming, and mental fatigue. These participants had been instructed to pay close attention throughout the entire experiment, but even then, their attention naturally flitted about from moment to moment. It turns out that even when we think we’re focusing on something quite intently, our attention is jumping around a bit, even on the millisecond level. Jay told me that these peaks and valleys were pretty much inevitable no matter what the researchers did to keep participants engaged. Rather than dismissing those study participants as horribly “lazy,” researchers simply knew the data had to be cleaned and filtered.