2012-01-31
post/16828082539
Richard Brautigan reading All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.
(Source: youtu.be)
2009-11-01
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2009-02-12
The Concentration Anomaly
A couple of days ago, I posted a few links, the last of which was about attention and how we’re losing the ability to concentrate:
When you’re scattered and diffuse, you’re less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it’s hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking.
Today, Vaughan at Mind Hacks posts a pretty good rebuttal to the post:
If you think twitter is an attention magnet, try living with an infant. Kids are the most distracting thing there is and when you have three of even four in the house it is both impossible to focus on one thing, and stressful, because the consequences of not keeping an eye on your kids can be frightening even to think about.
I think Vaughn’s onto something, especially when he says “the ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, is the strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development”. This reminded me of a BBC Four programme I watched via iPlayer on Tuesday evening, called “Why Reading Matters”.
Carter explains how the classic novel Wuthering Heights allows us to step inside other minds and understand the world from different points of view, and she wonders whether the new digital revolution could threaten the values of classic reading.
Of course, at no point during her long exploration of the brain and reading does the presenter consider how recent reading for pleasure, or even just the form of the novel, are. (There is another programme in the season, “How Reading Made Us Modern”, which looks at the period during which mass literacy was getting started.)
Now, I’m not saying the programme’s hypothesis is totally worthless. Maybe both camps have a point. Distracted mothers have always existed, but perhaps that’s part of the reason that creative fields, like art, literature, and science, have historically been male-dominated: because it’s only when you can escape children that you can concentrate on a work.
Meanwhile, the hundred-odd year aberration of (still mostly male) knowledge workers sitting in an office, unconnected to the world, going home to relax by reading novels, listening to recorded music, or watching uninterrupted television, is just long enough for people to believe it’s the way things naturally are, whilst actually being deeply unusual for the span of human civilisation.
