When I sat down with Chris Hayes, I asked him to pretend that we were at a cocktail party

and that I was talking his ear off.

I just like won't shut up about, I guess, we'll save my child.

You're giving me a decent amount of your focused attention. What kind of attention is that?

That is voluntary attention, where I'm using my sort of conscious mind to exert my powers of focus on you.

And particularly in those sorts of environments, there's a lot of distractions. You actually have to work

pretty hard to kind of block those out if you're in a, you know,

if you're at a concert or a baseball game or a cocktail party where there's like a lot of stimulus around you.

You may know Chris from his MSNBC show, All In.

But he also just wrote a book, The Sirens Call, which is all about attention, and how, in the age of smartphones and social media, attention became, quote, the most endangered resource in the world.

So let's keep going with our party. All of a sudden, someone on the other side of the room drops a huge tray of drinks, and our attention

swivels over there.

That's involuntary attention or compelled attention.

And the reason that's so important is it's kind of the whole kernel of both the faculty

we have and the problem.

When the tray drops and it makes us enormous noise, your head whips

around and you notice it before you even get a chance to consciously weigh in. Then the party

gets going again, Chris and I keep talking, until someone near us, someone engaged in their

own conversation happens to say his name, barely even audibly,

but Chris's brain hears it immediately. And to me, it's an example of the particular acuteness of what I

call in the book social attention. I mean, first of all, just as a feat of processing, it's kind of crazy that this works because

I'm focusing on you in the cocktail party.

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