CHAPTER 11

The Attention Wave: Sound and Sense in Cycles ca. 1905

D. Graham Burnett

The English-born, German-trained scientist Edward B. Titchener presided rather grandly over the most prolific American center of experimental psychology in the early twentieth century—at Cornell University. His textbook and lab manual, Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice of 1901, was used all over the United States and beyond.1 One of the early experiments in that volume taught students how to establish the existence of an “attention wave,” a psychological phenomenon to which this dean of American science was quite deeply committed. Let us begin, then, with a close look at just exactly how one caught a glimpse of this important feature of the human mind—at least as it was understood circa 1900.

The experiment proceeded as follows: Students were assigned to work in pairs, and one sat in front of a “kymograph”—an electrical recording device that used a recording needle to inscribe a line on a sheet of smoked paper on a slow-revolving drum; then this student pressed a little key-switch, the needle jumped, and the line marked the change. With that student at the ready, the other student carried a ticking watch away from the kymograph table until the sound of the timepiece could no longer be heard by the student at the switch; then, slowly, inching a bit closer together, the pair found the absolute “supraliminal” threshold of audibility for the student on the kymograph. At that distance, this latter student proceeded to press the key when the sound could not be heard, and release it when it was again perceived. When the experiment “worked,” even if both students stayed perfectly still, the sound seemed to come and go for the student on the kymograph, whose recordings of the phenomenon were supposed to take on an evenly oscillating curve form.

This activity, in fact, reproduced a classic psychophysical experiment: In 1875, the Austrian ear surgeon Viktor Urbantschitsch had noticed that his patients experienced subjective fluctuations in their ability to hear a faint sound without moving their heads, despite there being no measurable change in the intensity of the sound itself. It seemed clear that this was happening in the biology of the listener, because while various subjects would report the same effect, they did not experience it “in phase” together, even when they were all listening to the same tuning fork hum or trickle of water. Urbantschitsch ascribed the phenomenon to a (hypothetical) cyclical change in the receptivity of the auditory nerves themselves.2 Perhaps, he thought, they went through periods of exhaustion and recuperation along the lines of other nervous responses studied by Gustav Fechner and others. Urbantschitsch explicitly analogized the appearance and disappearance of the sound to a visual phenomenon discussed by Hermann von Helmholtz in the second volume of his Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik (originally published in 1860), where the faintest visible rings on a rotating Masson disk seemed to appear and disappear to the eye.3

About a decade later, both the acoustic and the visual phenomenon of fluctuations of liminal perception (together with parallel effects in a third sensory modality—haptic discrimination) came under the scrutiny of Nicolai Lange, who worked closely with Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig. Across a barrage of experiments, Lange satisfied himself that these cycles were a robust manifestation of something much deeper than the fatiguing of peripheral receptors: He made a claim that these discernable patterns of perceptual sensitivity were actually “central,” and hence were better understood as fluctuations not of mere perception, but of active apperception itself, which he would call “Aufmerksamkeit”—attention.4

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the emergent sense that oscillations in the experience of perception at liminal thresholds reflected some sort of general cyclicity in the apperceptive capacities of the human organism gave rise to the formal idea of an “Attention Wave.” This idea was controversial. Titchener, for one, came down firmly on the side of those who believed that these various rhythmical experiences of faint perception (in vision, touch, and hearing) indeed reflected an underlying organic cycle: He believed that the minds of human beings could be shown to have an attentional rhythm not unlike the rhythm of the breath.5 In fact, by 1899, Titchener was persuaded that experimental evidence pointed to discrete “attention-waves” of variable but distinct periodicities:

The attention-wave rises and falls at short intervals: attention fluctuates. The longest stretch of attention recorded is a stretch of 24 sec., and the average length of attention is no more than 5 or 6 secs.6

He even offered an illustration of the rhythmic dynamic of attention, an image meant to depict not only the frequency, but also the amplitude of an attention wave under changing conditions (Figure 11.1).7

In sum, from Titchener’s perspective, “continuous attention” was, as he put it, “a contradiction in terms”—because attention came and went, perpetually, in a series of sinusoidal oscillations.8

* * *

This core claim—that attention itself was subject to an organic rhythm operating at the scale of two to thirty seconds—was hotly debated by a number of leading experimental psychologists in Europe and the United States. Already, in the immediate wake of Urbantschitsch and Lange, a half-dozen published experiments on both sides of the Atlantic contested both the factual findings and the interpretations at stake. Some denied that there was any real subjective fluctuation at all, provided you set the experiments up just so. Others acknowledged perceptual fluctuations, but insisted that they were best explained by peripheral (or modally particular) accommodations of the eyes, ears, or sensory faculties of the skin.

Bracket all this debate (which I discuss in detail in a longer study of this problem). What is relevant for our purposes in this essay is that Titchener, in 1900, was a partisan of the full-on “Attention Wave” theory.9 Which is to say, he believed that what was fluctuating was indeed a central apperceptive capacity, and one that corresponded to what he wanted to call “Attention.” In his view, the specific threshold effects in each of the senses were all properly attributed to the cyclical nature of human attention itself. Thus, his laboratory manual for Experimental Psychology gave clear instructions about how a student of psychology was to be taught to discern this attentional dynamic.

For instance, in Chapter 8, the manual explained that it was important, when setting up the basic fluctuation experiments, to put the student doing the threshold listening right in front of the revolving drum of the kymograph itself—so he or she could see the rise and fall of the indicator needle that he or she was causing. This was key. It allowed “the attention wave” to take shape right before the eyes of the experimental subject. The object of the experiment? To learn to see/feel the attention wave. The assignment? To produce a strip of kymograph indicator showing sinusoidal attentional fluctuations.

What better way to help the student learn to “introspect” these fluctuations than to position him or her in front of the recording device, so that there could be a visible “check” and reinforcement of the auditory dynamics being experienced? A telling note to the lab instructor went on to explain that if the drum was set to rotate too slowly the subject, “(at any rate, in this stage of practice), grows inattentive, and the results are therefore untrustworthy.”10

This is an extraordinary moment in the text, one that speaks a small volume on the intricate nexus of attention (as a problem) and introspection (as a method) in psychology at the start of the twentieth century. Here, the leading figure in the field in the United States provides instructions to young psychologists as to how to be attentive to their own attention. It was a learning process, to be sure. It took a while to get the hang of it. And this was what the laboratory practices of early psychology explicitly taught. Titchener, who had very specific ideas about the nature of attention (he defined it, ultimately, as a kind of mental “clearness”) and how it worked (in waves), laid out, in his laboratory manual, exceedingly precise instructions for how everyone working in psychology would learn to experience, in themselves, and document, in the lab, the wave-nature of human attention. Accordingly, the “clarity” of things—one’s core capacity to see, hear, feel, and think—was in perpetual, rhythmic, and very subtle flux. Successful introspectors acquired, through disciplined psycho-technical pedagogy, a heightened somatosensory attunement: They learned to see past the illusion of a stable world of thoughts and perceptions. These expert scrutinizers of mental life could discern what most of us miss: Our minds, too, “beat,” just like our hearts; consciousness pulses in a systole–diastole of attention–distraction; there is a respiratory rhythm to what Titchener would come to call “attensity.”11

Becoming an expert psychological introspector thus entailed doing hundreds of pages of exercises across weeks and months of laboratory study, and (for those who went on to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees) following such practice with years of careful reinforcement. The result was a cadre of certified experimental subjects for new psychological experiments. It is perhaps little surprising, then, that these individuals were able to generate relatively large amounts of handsomely consonant experimental results. While not a “shell game,” exactly, it was one of the most remarkably refined, elaborate, intensive, and ultimately abandoned regimes of observation ever devised in the modern sciences.12 Moreover (at least for quite a while), it worked—producing vast numbers of professional publications and securing teaching berths for hundreds of newly minted PhDs in an emergent field that would hold a successful place in the modern research university.

By 1900, then, Titchener had created a whole system of “formation,” a process of disciplinary acculturation, an elaborate socio-technical regime of sequential exercises and regular “practices”—in short, a dispositif, in the sense invoked in late Foucault—by which to instantiate his theory of attention in the eyes, ears, hands, and minds of those who would pursue the problem for a full generation in North America.13 In this way, Attention Waves were “baked in” to the dominant process of disciplinary professionalization in the United States at the turn of the century. Titchener not only believed that human attention operated in identifiable waveform cycles, he and his colleagues had anchored that finding in a distinctive complex of laboratory experiments and trained observation. Competent subjects in the psychology labs of Cornell, Ann Arbor, and elsewhere had learned how to discern the rhythmical nature of their own attention through carefully drilled introspective exercises. Empirical technologies of graphic inscription turned this expert knowledge into objective, time-sequenced data, suitable for display and further analysis.

Figure 11.2 shows an image from an article entitled “The Fluctuations of the Attention in Some of Their Psychological Relations,” published in 1901 in the American Journal of Psychology as part of a series of research reports contributed by Walter Pillsbury on work being done on attention waves in his Michigan laboratories.14 The recording was made by John W. Slaughter as part of his PhD work under Pillsbury, who had just recently arrived at the university from his days in Ithaca with Titchener (and who was already on his way to becoming the leading attention scientist in the United States).

We can think of the upper part of this recording as a paradigmatic inscription of the attention wave in the period. Unlike the Titchener graphic shown above (which was merely an “illustration” for pedagogical purposes), this is a photostatic reproduction of an actual sheet of smoked paper peeled off the drum of a kymograph after an active experiment. In that experiment, the author of the paper, Slaughter, serving as his own expert subject, attempted to discern the faintest ring on a rotating Masson disk for a little over half a minute. The top line depicts the tick-marks made every fifth of a second by a Jacquet-Verdin indicator clock on the kymograph sheet. The crenellating curve below records Slaughter’s pressing and releasing of a telegraph key, as (through the introspective scrutiny of his own attention) he saw, and then failed to see, that lightest gray bit of the Masson disk. In other words, that stepwise, oscillating curve depicts the “attention wave” itself, as it was then understood. A full cycle (of visibility and invisibility, which translated to “attention” and “inattention”) varies, but runs about 3 to 5 seconds—the shorter end of the “normal” spectrum that had come to be established in the course of traditional laboratory exercises like those sketched in Titchener’s Manual.

If the upper lines in the diagram, then, establish this document as an inscription of “normal science” for the study of human attention at the turn of the century (the kind of thing that everyone who had done a laboratory course in psychology knew how to make), it is the lower line that accounts for Slaughter’s publication of the research in a professional journal. Because that line shows something different. It depicts the delicate tracing of a “finger plethysmograph,” a highly precise mechanical piston-sensor that could be fitted over the finger and that was capable of recording a number of physiological rhythms—most notably the pulse and the cyclical perturbations in blood pressure known as “Traube-Hering” (or sometimes “Mayer”) waves.15 And what Slaughter claimed that he could show, from this inscription and others made over the course of his doctoral research, was that attention waves could be correlated with Traube-Hering waves. There seemed to be a relationship between the cycles of human attention and the cycling of blood pressure in the body.16 Not only that, respiration, too, appeared to play a role. The rhythms of attention thus seemed to be embedded in a series of fundamental somatic cycles.

I explore this moment in attention wave research circa 1901 in order to give a feel for the kind of work being done on the topic during its heyday, especially the richness of the research program and the dynamism of the larger project of investigation. Literally dozens of intricate, data-intensive papers exploring the workings of attention waves were published in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, many of which clashed with one another in sharp arguments—over measurements, equipment, and interpretation. I will not belabor the point by attempting to offer a résumé of all this work, or the details of the minor point-scoring by junior scholars that went on in those exchanges. But it will perhaps help the reader get a sense of the field if I sketch a few more instances of the work being done by the circle around Pillsbury, who established himself as the leading exponent of attention-wave work—more so even than his mentor, Titchener.

So, for instance, while John Slaughter was working to correlate attention waves with the physiological cycles of circulatory phenomena, another University of Michigan scientist, R. W. Taylor, applied a very similar experimental setup to run nearly one thousand attention wave observations on three different experimental subjects (all with “previous psychological training,” all “careful, interested observers”).17 His experiments had two basic aims: (1) to examine changes in the attention waves under the influence of various pleasant and unpleasant “stimuli” (the warm odor of balsam, the soothing effects of smoking a cigarette, a sudden galvanic shock); and (2) to run these tests while closely monitoring the subject’s breathing by means of a “pneumograph”—a device that recorded the rise and fall of respiratory activity. The results were mixed: It was hard to distinguish the effects of pleasant and unpleasant stimulation; but any stimulation did seem to have a direct effect on the attention wave (lengthening its cycle). Moreover, confirming Slaughter’s findings, there seemed to be excellent evidence that respiratory rhythms, too, were affected, thus suggesting that respiration was also involved in the dynamic of attention waves.18

Related work in other labs followed. Frederick G. Bonser, working at the University of Illinois, expanded attention-wave research by looking systematically at the relationship between Traube-Hering waves and a wide range of sensory modalities in which attention waves were thought to be identifiable. These included the visual modality, using a Masson disk; the auditory modality, using faint audition (as in the original psychophysical work of Urbantschitsch); and then a pair of related phenomena—retinal rivalry (the oscillation of eye dominance in a split presentation of different hues on the left and right side of a stereoscope), and the “flipping” of ambiguous figures like a Necker cube.19 Bonser developed a set of composite images that showed the tight correlation across these manifestations, shown in Figure 11.3.

So robust did these correlations come to seem (to some, anyway), that a good few physiologists decided to dispense with the finicky business of trying to monitor Traube-Hering waves (always very hard to detect) and instead simply to use the much easier to generate attention waves as a workable proxy.20 And for his part, Pillsbury began to investigate, in conjunction with Wundt’s protégé Oswald Külpe in Würzburg, the idea that diurnal patterns in the attention wave could become a useful index for mental fatigue, a topic of considerable interest in the period.21 By 1904, attention waves felt so solid that they could serve as a means for investigating other psychological and physical phenomena.22

This sense of the attention wave as a fundamental feature of the embodied mind extended beyond laboratory research in those years and enjoyed wider cultural resonance. The Hungarian-born social activist Gustav Spiller, one of the early leaders of the Ethical Culture movement (and a convener of the 1911 anticolonial “First Universal Races Congress” in London), picked up on the theme of attention waves in his popular writings on the human mind in the early twentieth century and went on to elaborate what might be thought of as an “attention wave theory” of aesthetics, education, and human possibility more generally. In The Mind of Man (1902), he mined the experimental literature on the dynamic nature of attention to sketch “attention” as something like the essential “delta” or “dynamic of change” in the human organism, understood as a sensory and cognitive being.23 Waves operated at every scale. There were the grand swells:

Instead of imagining attention in time as a smooth sea, we have to look upon it as a stormy one where the surface consists of huge waves. These waves, which form the ocean of thought, represent the several subjects which constitute the field of attention in time, and the largest waves are constantly broken up so as allow others to form.

And then there were the continuous pulsings, which he invoked in a sentence the actual cadences of which reproduced the very dynamic at issue:

Or, we may say, that as the blood is propagated, not in a steady stream, but in waves, so in attention, or neural functioning, advance proceeds by pulsations.

For Spiller, more than for Titchener, Pillsbury, and others, static attention was authentically a contradiction in terms—because static attention meant inattention, even vacancy:

Attention is like a river; it cannot rest; it must report progress. If the larger waves represent the subjects of thought, then the minute ripples which cover the whole surface of the stormy sea represent the essentially dynamic property of attention. Attention, like all work, is movement.24

When attention “sat still” it was no longer attention at all: “In normal life we ceaselessly pass from detail to detail, for persistent attention to one detail, as in hypnotism, produces vacancy or non-attention.”25

Again, the rhythmic nature of the prose—the pacing of these sentences, in little comma-marked units—may well have been intentional, in that Spiller was ultimately committed to the idea that the wave-nature of attention was constitutive of human understanding and aesthetic experience alike. In a remarkable synthetic chapter at the end of his study, Spiller summarized his whole volume under the ambitious heading “Systems as Attention-Determined” and proceeded to lay out the way that the “waves” and “ripples” in human attention determine nearly every aspect of our experience: beauty, poetry, prose, music, humor, play—ultimately, the nature of learning itself. Aesthetic experiences, in his account, amount to a coordination of the rhythms of phenomena in the world with the rhythms of our native attentional being, hence we experience both pleasure and “progress” when we are, effectively, “in time,” attentionally, with the stuff of existence. Not for nothing did Spiller turn his own attention, in his work with Felix Adler and the Ethical Society, to the collation of (secular) songs and hymns by which a new generation of well-tempered souls might be gathered in the enacted harmony of chorale.26

Nor was Spiller alone in linking the attention wave to the wider dynamics of language and aesthetic experience. Carl Seashore, the Iowa-based psychologist who would go on to develop the “Meier-Seashore Art Judgement Test” and the “Seashore Tests of Musical Ability,” devoted six pages of his own popular textbook, Elementary Experiments in Psychology (1908), to attention waves, depicting them graphically in a particularly striking way (Figure 11.4).

He also insisted, like Spiller, that “the psychological explanation for our enjoyment of rhythm in all sorts of mental activity is to be found largely in this basal fact of a natural, biological rhythm of attention.”27

We should pause for a moment on his uncanny image. We are told that this figure gives a sense of what a “detailed record of attention to a constant stimulus” might look like across about ten seconds. The “rugged” nature of the crests and troughs alike indicates that the “rhythmic fluctuation” operates continuously on multiple frequencies. Here is Seashore’s explanation: “There are infinitely short ripplets of attention, hardly perceptible; these form the surface of ripples, which in turn form the surface of wavelets; and these wavelets in turn form the surface of waves, and so on.” Summing up, he sketched a kind of fractal topology of attention, which undulated across all possible scales: “Thus, all attention is rhythmic, and there is rhythm within rhythm from the infinitesimally short to the very long, even daily and annual periodicities.”28

But how strange, then, to read on and discover, in a footnote, that, in fact, the figure in question isn’t an actual image of attention waves at all. While Seashore offers that it “might represent the distribution of attention . . . schematically,” he owns, in the note, that the picture itself is meant as “merely a hypothetical diagram.” Why? Because what the image shows is something quite different: As he concedes, his picture of “attention waves” is actually an engraved copy of “a photograph of the manometric flame for a vowel.”

A what? A quick turn into turn-of-the-century “phonometry” may be in order. The “manometric flame” was the nineteenth-century technical term for a kind of “dancing candle” demonstration pioneered by Paris-based Prussian instrument-maker Karl Rudolph Koenig. It converted sound-waves into a series of vibrations in a gas-fed flame, the oscillations of which could then be seen stretched into a kind of time-lapse strip by means of a rotating mirror. Located somewhere between a parlor-trick and an early instance of “sound-writing” (such as would later give rise to phonographs and sound spectrographs), elaborate manometric flame apparatuses were developed by Helmholtz and other distinguished physicists and engineers interested in music and speech in the second half of the nineteenth century. The instrument got a new lease on life when high-speed photographic technique permitted the near-instantaneous documentation of the flame effects (creating a newly concrete inscription of sonic phenomena). The whole tradition was just passing from currency by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, when Seashore used this imagery as an (unexpected) reference for the complex nature of attention waves.

But his “hypothetical” substitution is telling. By using the graphic representation of the sound-patterns of a human voice articulating a vowel to represent (if “schematically”) the layered dynamics of the attention waves, Seashore was gesturing at something he thought was real: Like Spiller, Seashore too believed that when the object of attention was itself periodic (“as in music, poetry, or rhythmic movements”), then “the attention-waves adapt themselves to the rhythm so that the essentials of the group [i.e., the “units” of periodicity in the object] are grasped during the crest of the attention-wave and each momentary effort is well timed and is followed by a period of rest.”29 Both understanding and aesthetic experience, by these lights, were a kind of phase conjunction, a coordination between attention waves and those of sense. Indeed, Seashore likely felt that the inherent sonic rhythms of the voice (like those of music, to which he would give much of his professional attention in subsequent decades) were closely related to the attention waves that apprehended them.

This very idea—that the rhythms of human language were inextricable from the rhythms of attention waves—was brought to its most elaborate and systematic exposition in the same years by the American applied psychologist, adman, and general dignitary of commercially viable learned enterprise, Walter Dill Scott. Another Midwestern farm boy who eventually took a PhD (circa 1900) with Wundt in Leipzig, Scott had played a central role in establishing experimental psychology at Northwestern University in the early twentieth century—and he would go on not only to be president of the American Psychological Society, but also of Northwestern itself. He was an early and energetic exponent of the utility of psychological testing and psychological theories to the worlds of commerce, administration, and education, and his first book, The Theory of Advertising; A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology in Their Relation to Successful Advertising of 1903, can be thought of as inaugurating the particular unholy alliance of science and capital that comes down to us as the “attention economy”—a dubious distinction.30

Scott’s successful 1906 volume, The Psychology of Public Speaking, gives an entire chapter to attention wave phenomena and elaborates a remarkably detailed vision of the ways that the successful use of language depends on a mastery of the organic rhythms of the human attentional capacity. Reproducing several kymographic strips that depict the fundamental oscillation of attention (such as had been derived from Masson disk work and other threshold perceptual experiments), Scott went on to abstract a full-spectrum attention wave—one showing the layered attentional temporalities revealed in the laboratory (Figure 11.5).

From this diagram, Scott proceeded to elaborate a host of practical observations concerning the nature of human communication. The most fundamental point was simply that “all our thinking is done in ‘spurts’ which are uniformly followed by periods of inactivity.” And for this reason, the work of “public address” must be tailored to the reality of the attention waves—at both ends (meaning both speaker and listener). And it must take into account the multiple vibratory cycles at play in every act of attention. Indeed, it would not be wrong to think in terms of a kind of “harmonics” at play in every effort to communicate. Dill actually used the musical language of “partials” to characterize the subunits of the larger attentional waves, drawing on the theory of musical resonance laid out in Alexander John Ellis’s important translation of (and commentary on) Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone as the Physiological Basis for a Theory of Music.31

Scott appealed to the experiences of his readers to support his general claim concerning the waveform experience of attentive consciousness: “Every public speaker has doubtless had the experience of finding himself unable to attend to the matter at hand for a moment, and then he seems to lose all control of himself and what he is trying to accomplish.” This unsettling episode of “struggle” corresponds, Scott explained, to a dip in the major attention wave, such as can be seen between “A+” and “A-.” Scott went further, noting that when the trough of the major wave coincides with a local minimum in the “minute waves” (which he identified as “A-q”), the result is an attentional nadir:

The speaker may forget his part or he may speak on from the familiarity of the part, but with a minimum of efficiency. The hearer will not understand that which is being spoken.

All of this is often happening at a speed that militates against clear awareness (which is anyway what is somatically compromised). If the amplitude and frequency of the waves are sufficiently high, “when the crest of the second wave and of the minute wave coincide at a later time, the view of the whole may be so complete that the loss sustained by the previous lack of attention may be wiped out and not become known to the individual at all.”32 This meant that high peaks of attentiveness had the capacity, in effect, retrospectively to supersede upon the inevitable and continuous “gaps” created by inattention. One senses a theory of consciousness that is fundamentally analogous to the phenomenology of cinema: The experience of smooth, conjoint perception is an artifact of the physiology and psychology of the perceiving subject and does not correspond with the underlying discontinuities revealed by techno-scientific analysis.33

This had direct implications for the work of communication—implications of material importance to anyone (like an adman) who needed to get a message through to an audience. And Scott drove the point home: “No one can attend to what we are saying or doing unless we are presenting a new aspect of the subject every few seconds.” Not only that, it stood to reason that the way to manage the inevitable series of local minima of attention in any time sequence was to make sure that the peaks of attentional engagement were sufficiently full and engaging that they could cast a little time-defying ring of ripples capable of widening across the stone-skipping lacunae in any listener’s capacity to attend.

In this effort to “tune” a message for the human receiver, it was the actual structure of language that provided the key tool. In a remarkable section of his analysis of attention waves entitled “The Sentence, or Clause, as the Unit of Thought,” Scott turned to a delicate discussion of the concordance between syntactical structure and the dynamics of human attention itself. While the verbal expression of a given “conception or idea” may require a number of seconds, Scott again contended that laboratory study had shown definitively that “we do not sustain a maximum of attention to it during the entire time.” And this was, of course, true for both speaker and listener. Under certain circumstances, “as we pronounce a sentence our minds may hardly be on it at all, but we may be thinking of the sentences which are to follow, and the sentence which is being pronounced almost ‘says itself.’” Similarly, when we are listening to a discourse, “we do not hold ourselves to a continuous strain, but we comprehend the sentences by very short pulses of attention, which are followed by periods of comparative rest.”34

This meant that understanding itself proceeded by a kind of saccadic rhythm: “As a sentence is pronounced we may give but little attention to it and may not comprehend any of it till the very last word is spoken, and then by a single momentary activity of the mind we get the import of the entire sentence.” And this could go farther. Now and again, the lacuna may endure “till after the following sentence has been commenced, and this later sentence may give the cue to the former, and it may then be grasped by a single pulse of thought.”35

What the laboratory study of the attention wave had established was that the “normal” periodicity of attentional peaks seldom exceeded a few seconds, and thus that “to be compelled to attend without pause longer than this time is exhausting and very unpleasant.” At the same time, “vibrations of attention that are shorter than a full second” are equally problematic, as they, too, are out of sync with the natural rhythm of our attentional capacities. Scott insisted that this “psychological law” had direct “application” in the work of effective and artful expression: The rhythm of the mind needed to be brought into harmony with the rhythm of the body.36 Scott pointed out that normal human respiration could be shown to involve exhalations of about three seconds’ duration: “Sound may be produced during an entire exhalation; or several ‘breath groups’ or ‘exhalation groups’ of sounds may be produced by a single exhalation.” Citing physiological and psychological research done on the poet James Whitcomb Riley as he declaimed his thirty-two-line poem “Old-Fashioned Roses,” Scott reported a total of twenty-nine exhalations, of which twenty-two fell at the end of a line: “Each expiration period expressed a single idea and could be grasped as a single pulse of attention,” with an average period of 3.13 seconds. The point? “Here we have the expiration period usually identical with the line of poetry and the time of the enunciation of the line (or expiration period) . . . well within the time stated as the fluctuation of attention.”37

Here was the modal optimum for the syncopation of human breath, human attention, and English syntax. Yes, longer sentences were possible. And shorter ones too. But the former were “exhausting” and the latter felt “choppy.” The reason for this lay in the essential periodicity of the faculty of attention itself. There was some elasticity in all of this, naturally, in that “the nature of the discourse and the mental development of the auditors seem to make a difference,” but the divergence fell in a narrow zone, given by Scott, on the basis of laboratory research as “from a minimum of approximately a single second to a maximum of a very few seconds.” He summarized his discussion with concrete advice to those who wished to deliver an effective message to an audience:

In general it may be said that each single sentence requires a ‘spurt’ of the attention, and the presentation must conform to this psychological fact. Every lecturer or entertainer must also expect a rise and fall of the intensity and duration of those recurrent ‘spurts’ of attention, and so [must] adjust his lecture to the mental limitations of his hearers. By skillful adjustments to the attention waves of the hearers the maximum effect is produced with the minimum of strained attention.38

* * *

The “Attention Wave” rose across the first decade of the twentieth century. But it fell before the First World War. The full story of that collapse is beyond the scope of this chapter, but suffice it to say that new experiments made it hard to hold on to the dream. Yes, there were fluctuations in sensory experience at the threshold of perception; but it became harder and harder to insist that what was fluctuating could properly be described as “attentional.” On the contrary, a spate of younger researchers, working on the cusp of the second decade of the century, gradually established that what was “fluctuating” were the neural signals being generated at the sense organs themselves. This was hardly “attention” in any meaningful sense; it was simply “perception.” Along the way, the primary means by which the scientists of the attention wave did their work—relying on trained “introspection”—also slumped into the dustbin of history. A new cohort of psychology researchers, eventually termed “behaviorists,” would move away from the kind of self-scrutiny on which the science of Edward Titchener and his acolytes depended. Treating the mind as a “black box,” these new researchers focused on inputs and outputs, and mostly deemed actual “thinking” as simply beyond scientific scrutiny. Sure, stuff happened in the mind, but there was no way to get at it from the first-person perspective. This had been the error of the introspectors, who spent so many hours feeling the rise and fall of the attention wave inside their persons.

But the sense of synchrony of voice and mind—the sense of a self understanding itself as a kind of rhythmic coordination—was a dream that died hard. As a coda to this story, we can do no better than return to one of the champions of the attention wave at its peak: Walter Pillsbury, one of Titchener’s earliest and most faithful students, and himself the author of a distinguished treatise on attention, published in 1908. But the decade that followed was tough—globally, personally, and in the learned precincts of psychology. The First World War had sundered the Germanophilic world of American mind science and devastated the laboratory meccas of Old Europe to which that project had long oriented itself. Pillsbury himself, though always prolific and still the éminence grise of Ann Arbor, had teetered through an episode of psychological and physical collapse just before the outbreak of the war, slipping from the podium mid-lecture in a sudden rictus of epilepsy or stroke—to be caught by an attentive student in the front row. Convalescence ensued. And doggedly, the old warhorse of the attention wave returned, even in his depleted condition, to the pursuit of that essential periodicity he still posited, despite the ever-mounting evidence to the contrary. In a touching exercise of what might be called “absent-minded introspection” (or is it the “psychophysics of scholarship”?), Pillsbury had both himself and his typewriter wired up to a kymographic recorder in order that, as he wrote up a new psychology textbook in the postwar period, the rhythms of his scholarly productivity could be correlated to his respiration rate, his blood pressure, and, yes, his “attention waves,” which were also monitored. The results were ambiguous. He presented them at the eighth international conference of psychology, held in Groningen in 1926. By the time the abstract saw print, the following year, Titchener himself was dead, and so was introspective/structuralist psychology.

The attention wave was a flatline.

Notes

1. 1.  For a recent not entirely unfavorable assessment of all of this by a philosopher interested in the ways philosophy and psychology orient to introspection, consider: Eric Schwitzgebel, “Introspective Training Apprehensively Defended: Reflections on Titchener’s Lab Manual,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, no. 7–8 (2004): 58–76.
2. 2.  Viktor Urbantschitsch, “Ueber eine Eigenthümlichkeit der Schallempfindungen geringster Intensität,” Centralblatt für die medicinischen Wissenschaften 37 (21 August 1875): 625–28.
3. 3.  The Masson disk is a circular card marked with a single radius of black hachures. When rotated sufficiently quickly each of these marks appears as a gray circle. Although the marks are all identical, the concentric gray circles they generate in rotation are evenly graded from dark (in the middle) to very pale (at the margin)—on account of the faster speed of the turning disk as one moves out toward the circumference from the center. This was a standard instrument of the psychophysical and optical laboratory in the period. See Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, edited by James P. C. Southall (New York: Dover, 1962). This publication presents the three original volumes in two, with Helmholtz’s volumes one and two bound together with separate numeration in a single book. The relevant pages for the Masson disk work are thus volume one (of the Dover), but volume two (of the work), and they are numerated pp. 178–180.
4. 4.  Nicolai Lange, “Beitrige zur Theorie der Aufmerksamkeit,” Philosophische Studien, 4 (1888): 390–422. Interestingly, Lange also tried to demonstrate that these perceptual fluctuations correlated to what would later be thought of as “gestalt shifts” in bivalent imagery (like a Necker cube). For a discussion of Lange and the fate of the idea of fluctuating attention in Wundt’s work, see: Sven Luders, “The ‘Fluctuations of Attention’ Between Physiology, Experimental Psychology and Psycho-Technical Application,” in Psychology’s Territories, edited by Mitchell Ash and Thomas Sturm (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007): 31–50.
5. 5.  In the United States, Titchener’s primary adversary in this matter was Hugo Münsterberg, who already by 1889 had defined the core elements of an alternative view by focusing on the role of specific ocular adaptations (blinking, averted vision) on perceptual fluctuations as they were experienced at sensory thresholds.
6. 6.  Edward Bradford Titchener, A Primer of Psychology, revised edition (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 88–89.
7. 7.  Ibid., p. 75. The work that this graphic does in the Primer should not be underestimated, as the simple image is actually deployed in a rhetorically intricate way. Yes, Titchener references this figure as an “attention-wave” on page 89, in the course of an analogy that likens the dynamics of attention to the carnival game in which an egg, bouncing atop a little jet of water, offered a difficult target for sharpshooters. But on page 75, where the image originally appears, Titchener glosses it as depicting the flow of consciousness coming out of the page at the reader and suggests that each peak be understood as an idea or perception in the field of awareness (i.e., apprehended at the same time); as one perception or idea seizes the attention, it can be understood to be “amplified,” and the others correspondingly diminished. This is, obviously, not at all the same thing as the “natural” and continuous oscillation of attention in time—though Titchener uses the same image to illustrate both phenomena.
8. 8.  He asserts that continuous attention is a contradiction in terms in his Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice, vol. 1, 196.
9. 9.  The specific formulation “attention wave” arises in English, in the relevant sense, for the first time (that I have yet discovered) in Science in 1889 in the course of a discussion of the publication, in German, of a series of experiments conducted in Strasbourg by the pioneering Swiss Sanskrit scholar Ernst Leumann. Leumann, inspired by experimental practices in physiology and psychology, monitored the pulse and respiration in readers, and believed he had noted correspondences between the rates of bodily functioning and textual expression/comprehension. Coincident patterns suggested rhythms of attention. See: Anonymous, “Mental Activity in Relation to Pulse and Respiration,” Science 14, no. 355 (22 November 1889): 347–48. Leumann’s work became part of the general argument for “attention waves” in the early twentieth century, though it was sometimes noted in the psychological literature as a “lay” contribution (e.g., in the American Journal of Psychology).
10. 10.  Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 195.
11. 11.  On “attensity,” see Edward Bradford Titchener, “The Term ‘Attensity,’” The American Journal of Psychology 35 (1924): 156.
12. 12.  One thinks of how richly Titchener’s regime of introspection could be assimilated to the analytics laid out in Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck’s Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
13. 13.  Kenneth Rogers, in The Attention Complex: Media, Archaeology, Method (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), plays out a fully “Foucauldian” treatment of attention from William James to John Conway, although his study really gets started with an analysis of behaviorism. The first chapter, for instance, examines how a behaviorist account of attention was inextricable from the “subject” of regimes of labor, training, management, and education in the period 1900–1945. The work on attentional cyclicity and mental fatigue in the early part of the century makes for an interesting counterpoint to his study (he does not discuss “attention waves”).
14. 14.  John W. Slaughter, “The Fluctuations of the Attention in Some of Their Psychological Relations,” American Journal of Psychology 12, no. 3 (April 1901): 313–34.
15. 15.  Traube-Hering-Mayer phenomena are genuinely complex and remain imperfectly understood to this day. But the consensus is that they relate to changes in the “tone” of the blood vessels, changes effected biochemically. They came to the attention of physiologists in the 1860s and 1870s, and their relationship to respiration and other physiological patterns was a subject of active research in the late nineteenth century. Continuous blood pressure recording sensitive enough to see them and stable enough to permit them to be distinguished from other factors was not easy to achieve. The finger-plethysmograph used by Slaughter is described in detail in: Warren P. Lombard and W. B. Pillsbury, “A New Form of Piston Recorder and Some of the Changes of the Volume of the Finger Which It Records,” American Journal of Physiology 3 (1900): 186–200.
16. 16.  It is important to note that the English physician-physiologists Charles S. Roy and Charles S. Sherrington had suggested, in 1890, that threshold perceptual experiences (like the fluctuations of the visibility of faint rings on a Masson disk) might be attributable to “Traube-Hering undulations of the arterial pressure—with the wavelength of which they agree very well.” But these medical doctors were not engaged in the study of attention and did not conceive liminal perceptual fluctuations as “attentional.” See C. S. Roy and C. S. Sherrington, “On the Regulation of the Blood Supply of the Brain,” Journal of Physiology 11 (1890): 85–108, at p. 108. Because modern neurophysiology continues to ascribe threshold perceptual fluctuations to circulatory rhythms, it is interesting to consider a more recent reappraisal: Robert P. Friedland and Constantino Iadecola, “Roy and Sherrington (1890): A Centennial Reexamination of ‘On the Regulation of the Blood-Supply of the Brain,’” Neurology 41 (1991): 10–14.
17. 17.  R. W. Taylor, “The Effect of Certain Stimuli upon the Attention Wave,” American Journal of Psychology 12, no. 3 (1901): 335–45, at p. 333.
18. 18.  Though not in any simple way. Taylor deferred to Slaughter’s hypothesis that the Traube-Hering waves were tightly aligned to the attention waves. But Taylor thought that an inspiration could provide a “respiratory reinforcement” that could “keep the [Masson] rings in consciousness.” Taylor saw his work as complementing “Slaughter’s conclusions that the attention waves are due to overflows from the medulary centers to the central nervous system in general”—a process that heightened activity in the nervous system and that was itself, in all likelihood, “reinforced” by physiological processes of circulation and respiration. See Slaughter, “The Fluctuations of Attention in Some of their Psychological Relations,” 333.
19. 19.  Frederick G. Bonser, “A Study of the Relations Between Mental Activity and the Circulation of the Blood,” Psychological Review 10, no. 2 (1903): 120–38.
20. 20.  See Taylor, “The Effect of Certain Stimuli upon the Attention Wave,” 345.
21. 21.  Pillsbury was resident in Würzburg in the summer of 1902, where he became acquainted with the closely related work of E. D. Wiersma (Wiersma, E. “Untersuchungen über die sogenannten Aufmerksamkeitsschwankungen,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 26 [1901]: 168–200, and two subsequent supplements), then working with Külpe. More generally on the study of fatigue, the classic study remains Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
22. 22.  W. B. Pillsbury, “Attention Waves as a Means of Measuring Fatigue,” American Journal of Psychology 14, no. 3/4 (1903): 277–88.
23. 23.  “Delta” and “dynamic of change” are my phrases. But here is his theory in nuce: “We have identified attention with cerebral change. The meaning of our key-word is readily distinguishable from the only other term, besides activity, with which it might be confounded. Willing is divided from attention, and attention from willing, in that attention always is change and nothing else, while volition never is change, but only points to it. The relation is that between being and becoming, between sein and werden.” Gustav Spiller, “The Dynamics of Attention,” Mind 10, no. 40 (1901): 498–524, at 523. Emphases in the original. It is an extraordinary passage, suggesting as it does that “attention” is properly thought of as “being”—understood dynamically. But it is precisely a dynamic conceptualization of “being” that has proved elusive within the history of Greek-derived philosophical inquiry. About a decade later, Heidegger himself would be preoccupied with this very problem, as it emerged from a neo-Kantian “psychologism” not unlike that of Spiller.
24. 24.  This and the block quote above, from Gustav Spiller, The Mind of Man (London: Sonnenschein, 1902), 69–70.
25. 25.  Ibid.
26. 26.  The wider project of linking physiological rhythms to artistic form in the period is the subject of Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science: Pound, Yeats, Williams, and Modern Sciences of Rhythm (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Golston mentions attention waves briefly in connection with the work of Thaddeus Bolton, but the book could have made more of the centrality of specifically attentional rhythms.
27. 27.  Carl E. Seashore, Elementary Experiments in Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 163. The image above is found on p. 160.
28. 28.  Ibid., p. 161.
29. 29.  Ibid., p. 163.
30. 30.  Walter Dill Scott, The Theory of Advertising; A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology in Their Relation to Successful Advertising (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1903). The longest chapter in this book is the one that immediately follows the introduction, and it is on “Attention.” Interestingly, Scott is overlooked by Tim Wu in his lively and wide-ranging book on the history of the buying and selling of attention, The Attention Merchants (New York: Knopf, 2016). Wu takes up “scientific advertising” a quarter-century later. But Scott was writing a regular column for Mahin’s Magazine, the Chicago-based ad-industry newsletter from the first issue (in 1902).
31. 31.  Walter Dill Scott, The Psychology of Public Speaking (New York: Hinds, Noble, and Eldredge, 1906), 112–113. Helmholtz’s book went through multiple editions, the first in 1875. I have consulted that of 1895, published in London by Longmans.
32. 32.  Scott, The Psychology of Public Speaking, 113–114.
33. 33.  See Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
34. 34.  Scott, The Psychology of Public Speaking, 115.
35. 35.  Scott, The Psychology of Public Speaking, 115. The sense that understanding itself was effectively “saccadic” (in the way I am invoking here) wants to be examined in the context of the actual identification of the saccadic movements of the eye in reading. I strongly suspect a relationship. There is a notable convergence in the timing of the inquiries, as well as in some of the research personnel. It is the French optical scientist Émile Javal who is usually credited with first observing the jittery skipping of the eye along a line of text. But much of the mechanical/experimental early eye-tracking work was done by the idiosyncratic American psychologist Edmund Burke Huey. See his The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (New York: Macmillan, 1908). It is important to note that the term “saccade” would not come to be used in English in the relevant sense until later, when Raymond Dodge applied the Francophone neologism to the jumpy, horizontal eye-movements associated with reading.
36. 36.  Scott, The Psychology of Public Speaking, 117. Interestingly, the dramatist, radical, and Victorian man of letters George Henry Lewes, writing in his Problems of Life and Mind (London: Trübner, 1879), offered a surprising early invocation of the “syncopation” of attention and breath-rhythms. Scott does not cite him, but Lewes’s decidedly “nonprofessional” essay on attention was taken up by a number of scientific psychologists in the later nineteenth century, including Ribot. Here is Lewes’s striking footnote (which appears in a note that runs from pages 188 to 189 of the work cited above): “The acquisition of the power of attention is the learning how to alternate mental adjustments with the rhythmic movements of respiration.”
37. 37.  Scott, The Psychology of Public Speaking, 117.
38. 38.  Here and above, ibid., pp. 116–18.