Topics on Potential: Attention and Reading On Your Phone
Have you ever noticed that color can be attractive but also distracting? Humans are very attuned to color—this is why traffic signs and lights have bright colors, and also why advertisements are often brightly colored. In the case of traffic lights and signs, color is very helpful, as it allows us to quickly process and react to important information. Color can also help us to organize information for later recall and improve attention when used intentionally.
But color can also be distracting, as in the case of advertisements. Have you ever tried reading a news article online, and found that the brightly-colored sidebar advertisements make it difficult to concentrate on the black text in the middle of the page? This is because the drab text is less visually interesting than the colorful ads, which draw your eyes in. In recent years, text has become even less visually interesting, as designers have embraced low-contrast combinations like dark grey text on a light grey background.
Colors can also be distracting—and even addictive—on your smartphone. Colored badges that indicate a new message or notification can sidetrack you when you want to stay focused. It can even be tempting to open an app just to clear a notification indicator, even if you already know that the notification was for a junk message. We’re simply very responsive to color, and those little red circles can call out like a siren’s song.
Small distractions like these can add up and significantly inhibit your ability to focus. The effect is especially detrimental for people who are highly distractible, have difficulty staying focused or are very anxious about a task. Some people find color so distracting that it simply takes more time to return to their original task. And because digital interruptions come so frequently, it’s critical to have effective strategies for staying focused.
Brain Tip: To combat the addictive colors on your phone’s home screen, try turning off badges for non-critical apps, or even activating the system-wide grayscale mode in order to remove the allure of color-based cues. To focus better when reading online, use an ad-eliminating “reader mode” in Safari, Firefox, or Edge. Or you can try a color-based reading tool like BeeLine Reader that uses eye-guiding color gradients in text (disclosure: I invented this technique) to improve focus and attention.