On not noticing rather too many things
jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com
jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com
For example, my wife has a much keener recognition for something that's messy - a full sink or a shirt laying on the floor of my office will "scream" at her louder that it does at me. Although, I suspect the mess still "affects" me - eg I might be less focused/happy in the messy environment despite not thinking about it consciously.
Something completely wild is what my 3 year old sees. A few days ago I was stopped at a red light and he said "daddy, what are all these arrows?" My first response was "what arrows?" Then I saw the arrows on a sign that explained the intersection. Then I saw the arrows on the overhead exit sign. Then I saw the ones drawn on the lanes itself to show which ones can turn and which ones go straight. Then I saw the one-way street sign. Then I saw the red arrow on the traffic light. And probably a bunch more other stuff, including my blinker signal. So at the instant he asked me about arrows, I was consciously aware of 0 arrows, while in reality there were like 12 in our field of view. Now obviously this is because I've been driving for a long time and I don't need to be consciously aware of the arrows to process their information. But it also tells you how much we might omit / filter out because our minds don't think it's worth surfacing to conscious attention.
I would argue, even better said than the blog post.
It hit too close to home.
I pictured driving down the road through town, the "turn only" lane indicators painted on the asphalt, the wash of signage, lights, traffic cones—the background noise of our civilization that provides passive information we've grown so familiar with it fades out of our vision.
Thank you both for this! Love it!
I noticed that this wasn't because I didn't know what to pay attention to, but I didn't know what to ignore. I knew very well that I needed to pay attention to my speed, attitude, etc, but there was so much sensory overload that I didn't know what to process and what to just ignore.
Sure, knowing what to notice is good, but knowing what you can safely ignore so you can free up bandwidth for processing the useful information is critical.
The NOVA episode 'Human Brain: Perception Deception' really shows well how much we don't see
Yep! This is key to a lot of things.
We build up tacit knowledge which influences this ignorability in multiple facets of our lives.
Now, a lot of getting better at driving was just building up muscle memory and good habits, yes, but I think a lot of it was really improving my selective perception and being able to quickly filter out the irrelevant to focus on exactly what was needed to drive safely and effectively.
I also play a lot of fighting games in my spare time, like Guilty Gear, and I feel this there as well. Pick up a new fighting game - especially if it's your first one - and quickly get overwhelmed by all of the things happening on the screen and all of the precise button presses you're expected to make. But then over time, you filter out all the noise and just track the minimum information - the positions of characters, the strategies, the higher-level gestalts at play - and end up spending much less cognitive effort for more effect.
I was once driving on a 3 lane highway with a semi going slowly in the middle lane. I was in the left lane and passed him but needed the right lane for an upcoming exit. I pass the semi, slide into the middle lane and then wait. I realized I was waiting on a small blue car that, sure enough, popped out of the right lane going faster than either one of us.
And I realized I had processed that a small blue car was also passing the semi going faster than either the semi or myself and that I needed to wait for them before completing my move into the far right lane.
I think often times things get processed at a subconcious level and I imagine that's what was happening with the anecdote about arrows.
A fixed-wing pilot may have an easier time transitioning to the V-22 Osprey because he doesn't have the helicopter pilot's training/habit of constantly fiddling with the controls. <http://web.archive.org/web/20120914073208/defense.aol.com/20...>
Relatedly, gliders are really good at flying themselves. I heard a story about an aerotow where due to a miscommunication the instructor and student thought each other were on the controls. They only discovered this once the instructor praised the student for their best take-off yet. Similarly, learning to land feels like it's about doing the minimum possible. Keep the nose up and just wait. So not only are good pilots paying less attention to distracting inputs, they're also spending less effort controlling the glider on the output side.
That does make a craft very stable in flight, to the point where some RC craft I've used land themselves (albeit a bit hard) when they lose power.
As far as pitch, elevators tend to be close to neutral or produce negative lift. There's generally not a noticeable pitch on the aircraft simply because you want the fuselage as closely aligned to the airflow as possible to reduce drag.
This may be because she's trained more that there are negative consequences for her, or that she's responsible for that stuff. I don't really pay attention to tickets I'm not assigned, for example, unless they're on stuff that I'd be the go-to-guy for if anything broke. I figure stuff like that works the same way: at least when I was growing up it was ok for me to be a bit lackadaisical with my living quarters whereas my sister was considered filthy for leaving a makeup brush unwashed too long.
She puts a higher premium on solving problems right now and doesn't mind solving the same problem multiple times, whereas I am more interested in solve-it-once-and-for-all type situations, and please less emphasis on something being fixed right now vs a bit later.
Not surprisingly, her personality is a perfect match for emergency medicine while mine for engineering and product management.
I look back at pictures from before cars with envy, they're so clutter free in comparison
From the times I’ve walked there in nice summer weather, it’s utopia.
(1) https://www.thestar.com/life/want-to-rent-on-toronto-islands...
There's a strange song I heard that talks about noticing things like that and just considering them. It's called My Dog's Eyes by Zammuto. There's a line towards the end that says, "These were children who hadn't yet lost their sense of wonder.", and to me, that beautifully encapsulates what I want to do: Maintain that child-like sense of wonder for everything in the world for as long as I can!
I tried it once, just for just a few seconds, and it did seem to have an effect. Need to try really doing the exercise one of these days.
But uh - back to the topic at hand - I also try hard to spend at least some time just being open and perceiving. Looking around for no purpose but to absorb and observe what is there to be absorbed and observed. I think sometimes I take it too far - missing my turn because I was examining the construction off the highway too closely, wondering what that construction worker holding the sign was thinking of to have that curious expression on his face - but I think it's better to overcorrect a little than to not try.
In a lot of mental health diagnoses, its the persistent inability to "cope" that warrants treatment rather than the little laundry list of symptoms (which are often very common and relatable). Lots of people don't learn that and needlessly feel alien or pathological when actually experiencing a very everyday and relatable sort of life.
Another example: hyperfocusing on something (again, usually programming-related... thinking about a project). Need to do a simple task. Autopilot doing a different task because I'm too busy stuck in my head thinking about the thing.
It pays off during interviews, oddly enough - the anxiety and novelty have me super sharp. Same thing during incident response when things are broken.
It's the classic executive dysfunction and novelty-seeking stuff. I don't have the hyperactivity symptoms though.
For me ADHD means being physical twitchy and constantly thinking about everything.
The zone is the opposite but I never heard someone constantly being in the zone. It's a lot of procrastinating and then hyperfocusing 6h before the deadline
Lots of zone time, very little aimed at the targets you'd prefer.
The diagnosis has at a minimum put a lot of context on to large parts of my life and the medication leaves me with some energy left over at the end of the day instead of collapsing like a zombie into the sofa. Still a work in progress.
- The Wisdom of Life, Arther Shopenhauer.
To enjoy life you have to pay attention to it.
Not to nitpick but that ain't necessarily so.
In meditation we study attention and do neat tricks with it.
One trick is a refinement of plain old concentration.
The other trick is breaking the habit of always paying attention to something.
That second one is especially neat.
I use the terms (awareness , attention) synonymously.
To put it another way.
It's like a flashlight. I shine the beam upon a river of experience-stuff (sights, sounds, thoughts...)
When I pay attention to a thing, I direct the beam at that thing.
When I concentrate, the beam narrows.
When I refrain from all directing and concentrating, the beam widens.
I agree that broadening the beam is, among other benefits, enjoyable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory#Memory...
It's a miserable place for a date and everywhere smells like piss, but two uninvolved walkers are unlikely to be killed in the middle of the street.
If anything, the narrative should be that clearly being inattentive in safe scenarios isn't selected against and thus can't be that detrimental to reproducing successfully.
That said, the commenter who describes not remembering that his relative Cindy had died has a pithier story.
People with autism generally have less of a filter for familiar or ignorable stimuli. Where neurotypical people are generally able to tune out things they know or decide to not be relevant, people with autism have less ability to do that, and doing it is more draining for them.
If anything, it sounds more like ADHD to me. But armchair diagnosis is always fraught with peril, and the couple of dozen labels in the DSM-V are nowhere near enough to describe the millions of ways that brains can be different.
* I'm saying writing, not journaling, because I wasn't always writing about my own experience. Even when I wasn't, though, the impulse for the writing probably usually came from those experiences.
Because the degree to which you concentrate upon a thing (ex : a puzzle, thoughts about a puzzle, thoughts in general... to name some common ones) is the degree to which you ignore everything else.
And this state can be habitual.
Which is why brilliant, creative, industrious types are... well, you are familiar with the stereotype.
Sounds like the OP was in the United States of Silicon whereas pooping man was in the Democratic Republic of the Tenderloin. His g/f breached instead of unseeing it like any natural citizen of the US would have done.
Great book, one of my favorites. Really draws attention to the absurdity of borders and legal status. (I’m not saying we should do away with borders. Just that they carry some weird weird consequences.)
And some people who are closer to "hyperobservant" in many contexts might've also missed that sight -- because they were in a social context, and focused almost entirely on the conversation with the other person.
If this secures your income and your environment is able to fill in for the more attentive parts, you're well set.
There are enough possible settings and helpful augmentations in our current society to survive and prosper with any kind of focus/attention distribution. Given they are applied to a somehow matching problem/problem space, this makes up much of this society's success.
So the most positive, and therfor naturally sympathetic, aspect of the post might be the happy acceptance of one's own configuration without the need dismiss that of others. While there has always been a tendency of generalist dismissing specialists and vice versa, the insight that we only (or at least much better) progress with the right combination should not be forgotten, even if we feel unsecure or a bit greedy or envious when the opposite talent of ours was a much better fit for a certain situation, or position, again, and got all the praise this time. (Everything else will make you look Dunning-Kruger anyway.)