9 Mind Wandering during Lectures
Magda Stanová
Academic lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are all formats for shared listening, but somehow they took on conventions that make listening itself difficult. In this short, drawing-based lecture, I outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the lecturer. Not paying attention when someone is speaking is usually considered a bad thing. But there can be different reasons for not paying attention. If you’ve stopped paying attention during a lecture because you’ve started to think about something that you heard or saw during the lecture, then you are truly attending to the lecture.
Question
Were you mind wandering during this lecture?
Notes
- D. Yovino, “How to Live Productively Using Your Hipster PDA,” filmed November 29, 2008, at “The Art of How-T,” Koret Education Center of SFMOMA, San Francisco, video, 6:03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HqMV7XNfS4.
- Horror vacui (latin for “fear of empty space”) is a term used in art history to describe paintings, prints, or other types of artworks in which all of the space is filled with people or objects so as not to leave any empty space as a background.
- R. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1975), 24.
Acknowledgements
The first part of this video was recorded during Learn & Lunch at Campus Biotech, Geneva, Switzerland, on May 2, 2022, during my residency at the Embassy of Foreign Artists and Campus Biotech.