Tag Archives: attention

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Getting in Touch With Our Consciousness

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A body welcomes the chance to hear from a consciousness that is not interrupted. Walking or taking a hike without devices is a good start.

A declining capability to focus on just one thing takes us away from a useful form of consciousness that allows discoveries that a fragmented thinker may never find.  We may claim full in control of our own awareness. But modern life means that we are now up against devices that too often succeed in vying for our limited and precious attention. Losing track of our own thoughts and feelings is always too high a price to pay. To cite just one measure, American adolescents reportedly check their phones one to several hundred times a day. This is part of the digital treadmill makes us less centered than we should be.

By definition, distractions of this sort are usually detours away from focused attention. The resulting fragmentation of our time happens when the optimal continuity of some effort is broken by the wish to shift attention elsewhere. I see the pattern in myself when I notice that I am less anxious to sit through a full-length film. Short videos or articles can seem more inviting. But this website is dedicated to communicating in “the age of distraction”—be it advertising, social media, too many texts or e-mails. In the interests of our sanity, we should seek to join the declining numbers of individuals who find ways to resist most of this cultural noise. Some may try meditation, mindfulness exercises, or even taking a nap.

Of course, the goal of continuous attention to one thing must pay off with something that is worthy of the time. Given my own preferences, this would rule out video gaming, endless video watching of the ‘lowest common denominator options,” or any other sponge on time that has greater costs then benefits.

One answer to this problem is to discipline ourselves to follow a more linear pattern of involvement, even though cultivating this kind of thinking cuts against the grain of the culture. Walking or taking a hike sans phone can be a start. Your body would welcome the chance to hear from your uninterrupted consciousness.

Linear thinkers take many forms:  avid readers content to devote large chunks of time to a single work, artists happily left alone to sort out decisions that will end up on canvass or as musical notation, writers who must carefully consider their words. And of course, we’ve enshrined the image of the “mad scientist” as a loner following the threads of their research with long hours in the lab, leaving family and friends to fend on their own.

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Distraction puts us behind our ancestors, who were often better at action, meaning ownership of capabilities to deal with our place in the physical world.  By contrast, we cope with distraction by reaction to continuous inundation from the digital world.

George Frederick Handel wrote the great oratorio Messiah in spurt of nearly unbroken concentration, finishing in just over three weeks.  And imagine the sustained effort required by William Lamb’s architectural firm, who designed and prepared drawings for New York City’s Empire State Building in an incredibly short two weeks. The iconic skyscraper was completed in just over a year. Such dedication to a single task can be scaled down to what many writers sense when they don’t notice the passage of time because of their focus on their work.

Linear thinkers look forward to clearing the decks sufficiently to be able to see an unobstructed view of the horizon. Undisturbed concentration gives them the powers of insight and discovery. This is a realm of a consciousness that a fragmented thinker may never find. Unbroken attention to a task allows a first effort to build on the synergies that gather when clarity allows us to see connections that others may miss.

This ability to concentrate is more or less the reverse of the kind of segmentation of effort that is now embedded in our work and so much of our media. A reader’s time on a single web page is usually under a minute. And we are getting cues from all over that we’re not noticing our preference for hyper-compression. Consider, for example, the New York Times reporter who recently noted in passing that an individual “argued” a point on what was then Twitter.”  Really? Can a person “argue” in the traditional sense of the term—which includes asserting a claim and its good reasons—in a verbal closet of what was then a limit of 160 characters? This kind of limit is common on television news, where news “sound bites” from policymakers have been averaging around eight seconds. Meanwhile, standard editing for entertainment television has the length of individual shots lengths of two or three seconds. It is still a cinematic novelty to see a tracking shot that runs close to a minute. We now think of a Ted Talk with a maximum running length of 18 minutes as an “in depth” discursive form. No wonder college students typically dread the idea of a 70-minute lecture or a 40- page chapter. These relatively open expanses of investigation seem like the same kind of alien experience a person might experience if asked to walk for miles in Death Valley.

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Interestingly, one of the features sometimes seen in a person at the higher end of the autism spectrum scale is a consuming and total passion for one thing. Autism can produce laser-focused interests, making a person a challenging fit for a culture that rewards constant pivots to completely different people and activities. Psychological historians believe we can thank mild forms of autism for the achievements of Mozart, Beethoven, Charles Darwin, and Lewis Carroll. And it seems to be the dominant trait of the world’s favorite sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

Given the misplaced importance of multi-tasking across the culture, it makes sense that there is building interest in novel ideas like the self-driving car. Negotiating roads and traffic should be linear processes. But phones, google maps and searchable music files have impaired us. Focused navigating and defense driving are increasingly at odds with what have become our current trained incapacities.  Soon it will probably be better to let a computer handle a task that we used to manage themselves. Distraction puts us behind our ancestors, who were often better at action.  Now we must engage in reaction to deal with the continuous inundation of electronic media.

If we think we have identified a significant problem here, we probably should be humbler and note that these few words on the attributes of linear thinking illustrate the reverse. The concept deserves a book more than a short essay.

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Resolutions for Better Communication

                                                            Denver Colorado’s Civic Center

It’s time for the annual ritual of making promises to ourselves about what we will change in the coming year.  In that spirit, consider a few resolutions that would make us and those we care about better communication partners. 

  • Resolve to be a better listener.

    Becoming an engaged listener is like losing weight: it’s harder than it sounds.  It requires momentarily giving ourselves over to what another is saying.  That must include minimizing other distractions, turning off the far too loquacious chatterbox camped out in our brains, and accepting the challenge of bringing our full attention to another. We can’t do this with everyone all the time.  Listening for nuance is work.  Start with the people that matter most.

  • Protect your soul by deciding to be a more thoughtful gatekeeper and information consumer.

    We allow a lot of worthless messages into our lives:  junk journalism, junk advertising, aimless web-browsing, mean-spirited trolls and the self-obsessed. As tech writer Farhad Manjoo noted last year in the New York Times, the Internet is “loud, shrill, reflexive and ugly.”  It “now seems to be on constant boil.”   So it takes far more personal discipline to keep this stuff at bay and to hold on to our social equilibrium.

    The key is to stay in the discursive world of long-form discourse as much as possible, spending time on articles rather than tweets, in-depth journalism instead of ‘news summaries,’ films in place of youtube videos.

  • Work to put a reasonable limit on the time your children spend with all kinds of screens.

    The American Pediatric Association recommends that children under two spend no time in front of screens.  They need more interactivity as they begin to grow.  Remember that “virtual reality” is a desert compared to the natural world.  Rediscover local parks or just the simple pleasures of a walk around the block.  With my own grandkids it’s been fun to relearn the truth that even young children are naturally weatherized.  Most love to be out and active even in the cold.

  • Resolve to save important feelings and information for face to face discussion.

    Proximity with others usually brings out the best in us.  Media that act as surrogates for ourselves (even misnamed “social” media) offer only selected approximations of the real deal.

  • Listen to more music.

    Because it’s almost exclusively the language of feeling, music unites us in ways that ordinary rhetoric can’t.  A friend reports that Mozart has been a nice escape from the numbing effects of recent political news.

  • Help seniors take a break from television news.

    We have convincing research that many older Americans succumb to a deep and unhealthy pessimism fed by too much news and mayhem. Television is often how they pass the time, especially if they live in a facility.  Do what you can to show them the more normal world outside their door.

  • Don’t believe everything you read.

    Apply some healthy skepticism to both real news stories, as well as the paid “clickbait” stories that are often nearby.  In 2016 has shown us anything, it’s that too many Americans form attitudes from conjecture and misinformation, often from low-credibility sources.

  • With the possible exception of those strange relatives up in Duluth, resist dividing the world into “us” and “them.”

    We may think in simple binaries.  But In the end, the complexities of individual lives will always deal the deck that we and others have to play.  Even after this brutal presidential election we need to find the intellectual honesty to acknowledge the inadequacies of our labels.

                    Happy Holidays!