I've been thinking about this a lot more recently, especially because I've been trying to quit social media. One of the more insidious parts of spending all day scrolling, tweeting, and swiping, is that you become what you pay attention to. I think it was Frederick Douglas, the 19th century abolitionist, who said: "A man is worked on by what he works on." We don't live in a vacuum, conjuring thoughts on our own. The things we do have a huge impact on the things we think, whether we realize that or not.
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.
My life context made me sensitive to the negative side of digital devices and internet.
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 We used to have long and deep, it's been replaced by short and thin.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.
Well said, especially: "...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.
It didn't "become" that. The internet was hyper-tuned to exact that exact addicting behavior. It was by design optimized for exactly that because that was the way to get the most eye balls on ads, and the most data to scrape and leverage for ads.
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 is no one way to use the Internet that was "hyper-tuned". The most addictive way of using the Internet recreationally is naturally the one that most people fall into patterns of doing. If "a shallow stream of ads disguised as content" is the only Internet you're aware of, that's a commentary on you, not the Internet.
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
Internet wasn't made for this, it was a resilient serious information distributed system. WWW added hypertext convenience on top of it. Only post web2.0 shifted toward business first approach
I will extend your sentiment and suggest that the time-sucking nature of the internet can be weaponized by nefarious actors as part of a multi-pronged approach to neuter the capacity for growth of a nation.
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.
Exactly. I don't know much about the "Law of Attraction", but I imagine it's something that gets waved away by a lot of people. That might be for the better, I honestly don't know. A basic google search seems to mention a lot of "pure energy" and other things like that. I'm usually on the defensive when I read things like that.
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?
Viktor Frankl (wrote a book about finding meaning in concentration camps from his personal experience) described the wish as the father and the fear as the mother of an event.
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.
Thought exactly the same, too lazy to write it though. After some time of thinking about a proper logical argument of why and how the secret works, it's just because your mind is focused mostly on that thing that you're wishing for, and you start picking up cues all around from the real world.
>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 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.
> The internet is becoming more obviously homogeneous and obviously a hive mind.
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.
I think your interpretation for bible passage is exactly correct, and why it stood the test of time. It is even more relevant in modern days as our ability to make artificial world is so powerful that we can make our wildest dream and worst nightmare to come true at the same time, in virtual reality or even in reality.
I agree with you. I think a lot of the recent desire, especially in Silicon Valley / San Francisco, surrounding zen buddhism, meditation, yoga, and other "ancient" traditions and practices stems from a feeling that your mind is being invaded by some aspects of modernity. We're not quite sure what to do, but maybe some of these older texts had some answers? Nothing absolute, but maybe something that can help you contend with this current onslaught / ambush in every corner and crevice of your mind. I'm feeling more and more everyday that I want to do nothing but retreat to older books, older music, and some older traditions.
Hmm. You're reminding me of the quote that a person becomes the average of the five people closest to them. Well, if two of those people are Facebook and Instagram... yikes.
(BTW, I think the point of the bible verse you quoted is prayer, not just having your eyes open.)
That's a brilliant way of thinking about it. I'd say I honestly spend 80% of my free time (defined as time not spent working or sleeping) scrolling the internet mindlessly and passively. In that case, 4 of my 5 friends are the internet. I definitely have to change this ratio.
I wish I could edit my comment, but it looks like HN takes away the ability after some time. What I wanted to do was to recommend everybody read two books: "Shop Class as Soulcraft" (cheesy title, I know) and "The World Beyond Your Head." Both books are my Matthew Crawford, a "knowledge worker" turned mechanic / author in Virginia.
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.
Haha that’s right. But unlike Logan, we should make an effort to connect to the world, lest we lose ourself in his thoughts and obsession like he did!
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.
I don't think they make you more violent, but I do think they condition you to expect a certain reward for a certain input. In that sense what they're priming your brain for is an exploitable addiction cycle. I used to play online first person shooting games all the time, but lately I've noticed that I'm playing them just for the sake of playing them. I'm no longer deriving any enjoyment from the activity; in a sense I feel like a conditioned rat inside a maze. The final sensation isn't one of fulfillment but rather one of helpless attachment.
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.
>Do you give any credence to the claim that playing violent video games makes people violent?
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.
There’s another way to see it: violently playing games fosters violent behavior.
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.
If you are trying to quit social media, you have to find something more interesting and engaging to do so that social media becomes the gorilla that you fail to pay attention to.
Thanks for the advice. I think you're right. I've been trying to "white-knuckle" it for the longest time, and it just hasn't been working. I find myself staring at the wall or the train, spiraling into a cycle of intense boredom. Well, I might as well check Instagram, is what I tell myself, but that isn't good for me, because I end up falling into a different sort of vicious spiral.
> 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.
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
Yes. I've always had trouble with goal setting mentalities, preferring opportunism. Maybe I'm a lucky bastard in the survivorship bias game, or maybe I'm just keeping my eyes open. It's always a bit of both. Setting goals feels too much like tunnel vision. Take what you can get
Attention has long been studied in cognitive science, and has been a feature of computational cognitive models literally ever since there have been such things. Here's a paper from 1997 that explicitly uses attentional focus: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/1997v21/i03/p0305p0350/MAIN...
My take on this is that to eliminate distractions, the given task should be interesting enough to engage attention.
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.
I think it depends on the situation and on what the gorilla is representing. If a teacher is trying to teach addition and the student focuses on the symbols instead of the overall concept, they're attending to the wrong task. They don't know what the gorilla is or that they're missing it.
So much for my focus; I'm only five paragraphs in and already my mind is wandering to "hmm, attention, this reminds me of 'The Rock Warrior's Way' which itself draws from Carlos Castaneda's 'The Teachings of Don Juan', and oh crap, I haven't finished that book either . . . "
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."
FWIW the American psychologist/philosopher William James once compared long spans of attention to weight lifting. The more you do, the more you can do easily.
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.
Unfortunately I seem to have the passed the point of no return: I can't focus long enough to read an article on how to learn to focus for longer times :-(
> No, I think "writers" just write because they are paid to, so they use 10000 words instead of being precise and getting to the point.
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.
One issue is that the vast majority of our writing education is intended to teach language skills more than it is to teach effective communication of ideas. You get points for writing with rhythm, provoking emotion, using interesting new words.
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.
Not really. Maybe the book does, but the article is pretty light on detail. It mentions 3 different types of attention, video games can increase attention and the gorilla experiment again.
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.
I was initially dismissive due to the obvious title, but I'm glad I read it. Lots of great information in here, including the famous Gorilla experiment. Lots of pointers to interesting brain stuff.
Yes, the filtering systems of the brain are amazing, and the Invisible Gorilla experiment is particularly fun!
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.
I've often thought that a similar mechanism underlies people forgetting names right after and introduction. A new introduction creates at least some level of anxiety in most people (we want to make a good first impression for the sake of social acceptance), and so we turn our attention inward on ourselves just like the cat turns its attention on the mouse. The result is that attention to the outside world is reduced and the name or other details are forgotten. This holds true for any anxiety-provoking experience. Memory is severely degraded, to the point of complete black-outs of truly traumatic experiences. It could also be the mechanism that causes depersonalization-derealization (DPDR), which is a reaction to anxiety. The sensory experience of the outside world becomes attenuated and one feels detached from reality.
I've had anxiety issues for over a decade and I'm well acquainted with DP/DR. I'm intrigued by your articulation of why it may be an adaptive trait for humans. Do you have any references to research that pursues this line of inquiry?
Great article and a very convincing case that modern offices should offer noise cancelling headphones to employees who are organized with an open floor plan.
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?
I assume that's a lot more expensive. It might pay off in increased productivity, but it's not as simple as "just don't do it". Where I work, I believe it would be tens of thousands dollars more per month in rent.
Lots of things change the shape of our brains and learning that a mechanism exists doesn't make the effects more significant than before. But despite the headline, this looks like a solid article about attention mechanisms.
Not the same but along these lines, from Greek, to be enthusiastic is literally to be filled with god, if you squint you can recognize the theos in there.
Awareness is not gained with money. Awareness is gained with investment of effort. Pay and investment have older senses of work and outcome. They've come to also apply to money as a proxy for work and outcome, but the origin of the meaning is different.
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.
That's interesting. In the 3 Indian languages that I know, it roughly translates to "devote attention". Not so different from pay I guess, but pay is more transactional compared to devotion, and devotion to something feels more heartfelt than paying for something.
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 Farsi, it roughly translates to "have your senses present" or "gather your senses". It implies your senses can be focused elsewhere, and you need to purposely concentrate them on the issue at hand.
Pay does not necessarily have anything to do with money; it can mean "give" or "bestow upon".
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.
Maybe I should post in /r/therewasanattempt/ instead :)
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....
This is not a good analysis imo. You don't necessarily gain any new awareness by paying attention to something or someone, you gain information. Whether or not you were aware of that information beforehand, or if it is new information has little to do with paying attention except for the fact that you might become bored or uninterested if it's not new information.
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.
I don't understand this statement: "You don't necessarily gain any new awareness by paying attention to something or someone, you gain information."
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.
This felt like you were pushing a modern usage of "pay" onto an older phrase, so a quick google search of the origin of "pay attention" comes up with this --> https://english.stackexchange.com/a/388607
Agree that "pay" has non-monetary meanings, which are whispered in "pay a visit" or "pay court to". But I just noticed that we say in English both "pay attention" and "spend time". Hm... paying and spending....
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?
When the article came to the part about teachers encouraging students to be attentive, I couldn't help but think of a schoolmarm chiding a child to "attend to their lessons."
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.
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.