How we pay attention changes the shape of our brains
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I'm also reminded of the biblical passage: "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds." I'm not particularly religious but that line has always stuck with me.
I think that might be less, "If I ask for a car I'll get a car", and more "If I tune my senses towards whatever it is I want (a promotion, a new job, to be a better parent), then subconsciously my brain might start working to better see those opportunities where they exist." I've seen firsthand in my career that people who were open to opportunities advanced much farther than I did because I closed myself to all of them, waving them away, acting cynical about the whole endeavor. I wish I hadn't done that. I just wasn't seeing what my coworkers were seeing.
I'll stop myself before I keep rambling.
Whenever there's a power cut in the neighborhood, and there's no connectivity whatsoever I feel my brain expand. I feel times dilates, I feel motivation coming back, small ideas and curiosity.
Today's web is a weird pivot on intellectual energy. We used to have long and deep, it's been replaced by short and thin. They factor to a somehow similar amount of stimuli but in reality the latter is shallow and wearing off your, now deprived from depth, mind.
Modern social media seems to me a lot like fast food. You feel good while eating it; it fires off a lot of pleasure-seeking receptors in your mind and body; and it's addicting. But then, like with fast food, you feel the crash.
The problem with the internet is that the crash is mental, not obviously physical, like gaining weight would be. In the past two months I'm realizing that the constant, jittery nature of social media is genuinely affecting other aspects of my life. I used to love hanging out with my friends and family, watching movies, playing video games, and reading books. Lately I've been finding that I want to do none of that--all I want to do is lie down and scroll through YouTube. The irony, of course, is that while I'm doing that, I wish I was doing something else.
It's a weird cycle I've found myself in that I'm trying desperately to break now.
I want to consciously pay attention to other things, specifically my friends and family, my work, and "meaningful" leisure e.g. good films, not instagram pictures.
I find it quite sad that internet "promise" became a shallow stream of ads disguised as content
This wasn't some passive process. The fact that nobody ever solved micropayments made the internet what it is today. It's really that simple. You can have any system this sized without funding, and people wont pay for subscriptions for text content, so it's either frictionless micropayments or datamining and ads. And we all know how that ended.
I would pay $40 a month for my entire internet to be ad free and non data-mined. Facebook makes what 50c a month of people? Maybe $1?
All this BS we have to deal with for a dollar a month??
There are a million other ways to use the Internet regularly in a healthy and valuable way, and millions of people do it. I probably spend a moderate amount of time using the Internet recreationally, and I can think of half a dozen ways to do this. As one example, paying for ad-free YouTube (included with a GMusic streaming subscription) and spending your passive Internet time on the huge wealth of educational videos available, covering the entire spectrum from low-content entertainment to relatively dry[1] pure education.
Note that the tracking side of the Internet is more complex, and a lot less under an individual person's control. But that's a slight non sequitur from what we're talking about, which is the direct user experience and quality of content.
[1] Dry in the context of recreational Internet time; ie, not stimulating for a brain that's trying to be somewhat passive
I think about reddit. Questions get asked on askreddit that pander to the common denominator opinions.
If you can use up a fraction of idleness of a nation, you reduce productivity and the potential of individuals to actualize their lives.
Most people think they are crazy for wishing and imagining things to happen but what you described is exactly what underlies all their teachings.
You can’t find something if you’re not looking for it, simple as that.
I really think this can open up another discussion about your thoughts and how you see yourself. This is another powerful tool to enable change.
That does sound simple; and wrong. Have you really never found something you weren't looking for, my wife for one.
I just don’t see myself stumbling into a successful, fulfilling and rewarding career without atleast making some sort of effort here...
I think it's possible to have very disordered wishes or to wish for the wrong reasons. Wishing for something you don't really aim or desire to achieve as a shared behaviour in a book club, is probably a waste of time. Wishing for the right reasons is probably a valuable part of human nature. The disregard for wishing likely needs to be brought into order.
But you're correct--the underlying aspect is appealing and true. You can't hit something unless you're aiming at it. You will undoubtedly have serendipitous moments in your life where you think, "Wow, this wonderful and unexpected thing happened!", but I imagine for anything long term those will be few and far between. It's hard to stumble your way into getting in shape or eating healthy. It's hard to stumble your way into a long and fulfilling career too, without a series of reflective steps along the way. Is luck a factor? Certainly. But just the mere act of aiming might help us get a lot closer than we would otherwise.
EDIT:
Even stumbling onto meeting your future wife, as the person commented in another comment, likely has a lot to do with thinking of things beforehand. Were you fit and healthy when you met her? Were you in the middle of a promising career or education? Did you take care of yourself? I'm not saying you woke up and said, "Today, I'll meet my wife!" But there were a series of things beforehand that facilitated it. Like the saying goes, "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity." Preparation is part of deciding what to pay attention to. If you consciously decide to be more open and friendly, then you might have more "coincidental" social moments. What changed? The universe, or you?
Do you give any credence to the claim that playing violent video games makes people violent?
Contrast that with another game I played recently, God of War. That game ended after about 30-40 hours. I completed the story, and I never returned to it. When I think back on it, I have a lot of satisfaction attached to it. It was a wonderfully told story that eventually ended, whereas Call of Duty is designed to be an infinite time sink, both for your attention and for your wallet. The difference, for me, is playing basketball with your friends versus going to a slot machine.
How you play and what you think while playing games matters more than the exact content of the game.
It’s easily seen in how the same games can be played in completely different ways depending on the people: the last Zelda is inherently a fighting game for instance, but you’ll have people focusing on the world and the story, other people just enjoying beating strong ennemies, and others cooking and looking for hiding spirits for half of the game.
That does not necessarily follow from what OP said. It is entirely possible (and very plausible) that video games do have an impact on the way we think, whether we realize it or not, but they do not make us violent (or at least, it does not make people who aren't predisposed to aggression violent). The claim that there is some effect does not mean that it is a specific effect (making players violent). You need to do more research to show a specific claim.
Other possible observed effects of playing violent video games can include a particular attitude towards gaming and technology, expecting certain events in a game, expecting certain content in a game, or reduced empathy for characters in a game. Whether that affects the real world equivalents isn't obvious.
> I wish I hadn't done that. I just wasn't seeing what my coworkers were seeing.
That’s the best way I’ve heard my feelings toward the same topic. I’m kinda envious of those who are able to not get cynical about it, because it’s definitely what is holding me back
I needed to read that. Thank you.
The internet is becoming more obviously homogeneous and obviously a hive mind. It's been trending that way for years, but it's going to lead to They Live being remade or a war of independence or both.
Not at all the case. What has happened is that more people have gotten online, and we've realised how convenient it is to only spend time with the group of people that are exactly like us, so we're not actively looking for the out-of-tribe experiences that came to us naturally before. But they're still there.
The youtube ceo in an interview has mentioned that media needs to converge. It already is doing so.
(BTW, I think the point of the bible verse you quoted is prayer, not just having your eyes open.)
He writes wonderfully about this whole idea of what to attend to, what to pay attention to, and how those two things end up influencing your own thoughts and feelings. He's far more articulate and in-depth about this "phenomenon"--how social media is, in a way, dethroning your usual mental faculties.
Both very appropriate books for Big Hat Logan to suggest, though isn't the point of the hat to drown out the world beyond your head?
> I wish I could edit my comment, but it looks like HN takes away the ability after some time.
Yep, it's around an hour or two, and getting replies factors into that as well.
Thanks for the comment. It genuinely made me smile. Always good to run into another Souls fan. I can’t quite explain why, but that franchise means a lot to me.
Like in the gorilla experiment, the main task was to count the number of passes of the white team and the participants did good at coming up with the right number.
In my opinion missing the gorilla actually makes sense if it's all about paying attention because the task was to count the passes and not look for a gorilla.
Had the task been about watching out for a gorilla then one could say that there was lack of attention in spotting the gorilla.
To help students learn effectively, the content and method of delivery has to be interesting enough to eliminate distractions i.e. the gorilla.
ETA: I'll leave these for the curious:
> "Proper use of attention, in warrior-speak, is impeccability."
> "When acting impeccably, a warrior directs all of his attention toward his ultimate quest: to gain self-knowledge and personal power."
> "Essentially, a warrior is an impeccable hunter of personal power."
ETA2: Gah! I keep getting distracted. Now the mention of "Alerting; Orienting; and Executive Attention." makes me think of John Boyd and his OODA loop, another thing I've been meaning to look into.
ETA3: Well, fuck. Looks like I need to start gaming again:
> "Far from reducing our ability to concentrate, video games can actually increase it. They are a powerful stimulant of attention."
In meditation we address attention directly. It is what we study. It is the wood we whittle.
We get great control over attention. What we attend to and how perfectly we hold our attention upon it.
Also, we have another trick. To refrain from paying attention to anything. It is named variously Vipassana, Zazen, Asamprajnata Dhyana... depending on the tradition.
It's impressive.
Consider how paying attention is a reductive process. Ie : given your perspective, choose some part of it and restrict your attention to that. Thus your perspective is reduced.
You might say that Vipassana achieves the opposite.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPPW105XkAEG9F2?format=jpg&name=...
(from this thread, in french, https://twitter.com/BenhammouCom/status/1221556188032258048)
"surprising" regression. Sorry for the tangent.
I wish people could just state their idea and be done, instead of padding it out to make it look more "official"
Writing for sport and writing as a means to transmit an idea are very different practices.
I took one class in technical communication in college which was radically different than any English/writing class I had taken before it. I had to throw out a lot of my academic writing habits and focus on brevity and clarity above all else.
There is validity to this - "brevity is the soul of wit." but some things need deep, long thought to properly comprehend. Combine this with the attention deficit that it is all but obvious modern media has pushed us towards, and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to some articles, particularly articles that address this problem.
Edit: Upon gathering my attention and finishing my read of TFA, I concur with your analysis. I further postulate that it appears to be a teaser for the author's book.
If you've been on HN for a while you've probably encountered those ideas before. I had Jordan Peterson nailed into my head that there is an infinite amount of facts in the world so your brain picks and chooses, and what you see is what you value. This stuff is of a similar vein with likely better detail in the book.
Another striking experiment I learned of in neuroscience courses shows how deep it goes. A particular setup of electrodes can show how a sound stimulus is processed by successive nodes in the auditory processing areas of the brain. When hooked up to a cat near a metronome, for example, the traces from different electrodes tracking different auditory processing nodes, will spike in sequence, like an earthquake wave passing various seismic stations at different locations on the ground.
The wild thing is that when a mouse is now brought into view of the cat, the cat's attention becomes so focused that the metronome traces disappear -- the cat's brain filters them out at such a low level that the cat doesn't just ignore the metronome, it literally no longer processes the sound at a low level -- as far as the cat's brain is concerned, the experimenter might as well have turned off the metronome.
The big question for me is how do you avoid paying attention to your internal state? Are there findings here that can help those with anxiety problems?
You can always see your nose.
And now you'll notice it. But thanks to unconscious selective attention it'll soon disappear again.
Naw, we should ban advertising.
In Hebrew awareness is gained with emotion (put heart) - שים לב
Any native speakers of other languages able to chime in? Sapir-Whorf revived?
Edit: used word awareness to clarify what is being gained.
Awareness is gained by that action that differs between languages.
It is interesting the degrees noted. In Hebrew there's the sense of investing your desire, which goes beyond effort to controlling what it is you want. People will naturally expend effort toward things they desire.
tl;dr: In English awareness is gained with effort (not money). It is a trade.
And, like another poster pointed out, this information is not gained with money, the "paying" is a metaphor and the currency is your attention itself. You give your attention away for the value of receiving the information.
On top of that there isn't just 1 metaphor in English (and I suspect other languages as well) for even the word "attention". You can fix your attention to something, or direct your attention, we speak of attention spans, etc.
How does anyone gain awareness of anything, then? Surely not by ignoring it?
I'd urge you to sit in the forest for a day (or the prairie or the desert -- anyhow, in nature, away from buildings and cars and phones) and pay attention. What do you gain from doing so?
You will find you simply notice different and new things if you spend the time (again, pay/spend... interesting). Perhaps you'll be able to codify this into "information". I'd be interested to see your notes.
but pay https://www.etymonline.com/word/pay#etymonline_v_10195
has roots before and outside of currency
To the point:
1. Obviously the meaning of words change over time.
2. If this difference in metaphors has real bearing on how people act than the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in its weak form, stands. That is something worth paying attention to....
now maybe "pay attention" emerged recently, that is based on the material/financial connotation, or maybe the idiom came before
If that's a literal translation (I realize you said "rough"), "devote" connotes to me more along the lines of "devotion" such as a "devoted husband" or "devoted follower of <X> religion."
In Hindi it is just "ध्यान देना", i.e. "giving attention".
"Friends, Romans, countrymen: lend me your ears."
That would match the current German version below and makes sense as languages evolved from same tree.
In Finnish, one could say "Keskity!" and since "keski" is "center" it has some idea of centering oneself? But this is more like, "Focus!" Or you could say, "kiinnittää huomiota" -- to fasten your attention?
This is what's wrong with applications of Sapir-Whorf -- it's always used to argue for evidence of some preexisting prejudice. If you really want to test it, you'd have to look at a language and make predictions about the people who speak it before meeting them.
I guess when I initially wrote I was thinking more from the position "обращайся" which has more interact flavor and made more sense vis a vis attention.