#note/sourcereview/article | #note/sourcereview/book ## What is the thesis? ### Chapter 1: Breaking the myths of attention What is the anatomy of attention? Attention is not one area of the brain, instead it is a distributed network that is responsible for 3 features: 1. Alerting - staying open to stimuli that tell you to pay attention to this 2. Orienting - what is this thing you are paying attention to 3. Executive Control - manages interference of unimportant stimuli A metaphor: You are a member of an orchestra: alerting is the paying heed to the conductor's rhythm, orienting is knowing where you are in the score, Executive Control keeps you on task when there are distractions. Executive Governance: dealing with multiple tasks, interruptions, etc. The governance tells us what to attend to. This takes a lot of energy. When you rely on executive governance in difficult situations it fatigues and has a hard time keeping on task and on goals. Largely this ends up playing a limiting function, continued energy spent on _NOT_ doing distracting things. When you are on your computer there are infinite possible distractions that you need to _not_ do. There is a limited daily energy available for the executive function ability for your brain, you have fewer attentional resources available to maintain alertness and stay on task. [[cognitive load]] plays a role here, more cognitive load tires our executive governance faster. Cognitive resource theory - tasks that require and compete for the same resources have more interference, you'll have difficulty doing both without errors, but if there are different resources (eg. visual vs cognitive) it is easier. Talking on the phone and walking in the woods is less difficult than reading and processing something difficult while you are reading and processing email. Some ways of replenishing resources are intuitive: - a good night sleep with a good amount of deep and REM sleep - vacation in a peaceful environment - 20 minutes in natures - a simple mindless game When we switch between different [[schema]], or scripts, we expend cognitive energy. We have a schema for checking email, for checking our texts, for reading and processing. This task switching is reconfiguring your internal schemas at a rapid rate. Attention can be stimulus driven like a "ding" or pop-up, but it can also be internally driven. Kinetic attention is a rapid switching between platforms, moments, attending, etc. It is a maladaptive response to our current environment that is part learned, part habit, and part response to the over-abundance of information sources and types. It is exhausting. ### Chapter 2: The battle for your attention [[attention economy]] is in here, I don't want to hear yet another description of this problem. ### Chapter 3: Types of attention - Attention is dynamic and fluctuant. We don't exist in sustained periods of attention, instead we have "perceptual moments" where we are in moments of deep processing. - We can think of these as existing in a system with our choices. When we feel our focus falling, I often make choices that unintentionally harm our wellbeing, falling into moments of checking email or news, which unintentionally drains my psychological resources by being activating and stress inducing. Then my attentional resources are not replenished, instead they are chipped away at through the day. Table 1: Types of attention, not just focused or not, also exists on the dynamic of how challenged we are: | engagement/challenge | high engagement | **low engagement** | | ---- | ---- | ---- | | **high challenge** | [[focus attention]] | frustrated | | **low challenge** | rote | boredom | #### Action: - In her interview with Ezra Klein she describes taking a stepwise approach to improving one's wellness by directing attention: - [[yohaku no bi]] - the beauty of open spaces. Our brain needs sufficient breaks. So use a process like a pomodoro timer or something like that to schedule yourself some breaks and have those breaks be sustaining instead of draining - try to be aware when your attention feels the pull of distraction, when a distraction is "brewing" and use that as a time to take an effective break - determine your chronotype, we exist in a distribution of [[chronodiversity]] - I am an "early bird" - schedule my best work to be in synchronicity with the chronotype - use forethought to determine how you want to feel at the end of the day, how do you want [[Future Lon]] to feel. Do you want him to feel accomplished? Energized? Or depleted and exhausted. [[Design your life]] so that you keep the goals in mind, since [[goal setting]] helps the goals be in mind, to ensure you are making the decisions you want to make through the day. Chapter 3 continues with a deep dive into the research around attention and attention span in knowledge workers, digital age children and adolescents, and the meteoric and historic decline in attention span among digital workers, from about 3 minutes in the early 2000's to about 47 seconds today. That is, the average digital worker spends 47 seconds on a digital task before switching to another task. ### Chapter 4-8: Why, how, and how much we multitask, the internet, social media, AI, etc. I'm sure this is a great section, I don't want to allocate time to it. ### Chapter 9: Personality and self-regulation - Our personality influences how we act, some people are very good at self-regulation, others less so. - The marshmallow study is one form of studying self-regulation, [[Self-Regulated Learning]] is part of this idea. - Personality can change with context, extroversion/introversion is dynamic depending upon the context (familiar vs unfamiliar, for example). - There can be both a stable underlying personality system, but personality can be deployed differently across different contexts. #### The Big 5 Personality Traits: - Extroversion - Agreeableness - Conscientiousness - Neuroticism - Openness Personality is expressed differently in different contexts, but it does not differ across cultures particularly. There have been shown to be minor differences in gender. Personality on the axes of self-control and conscientiousness intersect to impact individual responses to access to social media, habits around checking email, etc. For example, people with high conscientiousness tend to be continuous email checkers. Using app-based content blockers takes away the opportunity for individual choice and for developing agency around distraction choices. Fatigue and other contextual elements also play a role. People with more sleep debt are more prone to keep checking social media because their executive governance resources are low. Thus, as shown in updates to the marshmallow study, people's ability to demonstrate delayed gratification is not just a measure of their impulse control, but also the social stability, and other factors that go into low stress/high rest. Checking facebook (studies were done in 2010's) is a schema that people have that governs their action. _What this means for me, is that as I try to make decisions about how I want to interact with information technology, it is key to develop the schema that I are healthy and promote the activity I desire. My behavior is also part of a system that intersects with my overall executive capacity and wellness. I suspect I am high conscientiousness and probably high impulse control, but moderate or even maybe low perseverance. All that being said, I've done a much better job creating healthy schema by substituting actions, like typing in Obsidian vs. consuming content by reading._ ## Part 3: Focus, Rhythm, and Balanace ### Chapter 12: Free Will, Agency, and our Attention She summarizes the philosophical discussion of free will vs behaviorism and determinism. This is really a philosophy. Maybe it is not a dichotomy (have or have not), maybe this is the wrong model to look at the problem. There are contextual factors that play a role in how much free will we can apply to a situation, how well rested we are, our cognitive reserves, our social formation, the technical availability of certain choices, etc. Do you have to be a pure free will advocate or a pure determinist? The middle path is [[soft determinism]], where we do have some ability to control our actions, but there are also antecedents that play a role. Like [[path dependence]], the antecedents make certain actions or choices more or less likely. ### Chapter 13 Achieving Focus, Rhythm, and Balance Her proposal is that combining [[meta-awareness]] combined with developing self-efficacy is the key to mastering the skills required to live in harmony with your attention. ## Am I convinced and why? Gloria Mark has a world view that is steeped in a career of research in attention span, however her world view is that of a gen-X-er. I am convinced, I see the world like her, however I wonder if this works for everyone? In big picture, she isn't really trying to tell you how to behave, more how to think about [[metacognition]] of your relationship with technology. In many ways, this resonates with #people/calnewport and his [[Digital Minimalism]], which also argues that a digital detox is not going to be that helpful, instead doing a values-based assessment of your life, and ensure the tools you use are in alignment with those values. ## Summarize the argument Goal: a harmonious co-existance with the world, and the way attention directs your attentional rhythms to craft the experience of your life by [[Design your life]] so that you are not only maximizing for daily productivity, but also maximizing for how you experience the world. Consider that means developing self-awareness of your personal rhythms, personality traits, and putting in place the plans, [[boost]]s and [[Nudge]]s so our days flow the way we want. For me, this is greatly synchronous with my goal for 2024 - [[be like water]]. ## What is the other side of the argument? The price to pay for falling out of step with society is too great, if you aren't on tictok you aren't part of the culture, for example. You can't be "bad with email" alone, you are part of a bigger work and social system, and you need to ensure that you come to terms with your job, as well as the people around you. ## What else do I wonder about? ## Action **When designing my weekly template, don't only ask what do I want to accomplish, but also "How do I want to feel both during and at the end of the day, week or quarter?"** Add this question at the top of my weekly and quarterly review notes. In some ways, this is like feedback, if it's done only at the end it's not as helpful. Add in checkpoints for [[meta-awareness]] throughout the day. ## When do I want to stumble across this? #on/plan #on/attention #on/design #on/productivity #on/habit ## Source: Mark, G. (2023). _Attention span_. HarperCollins Publishers. Show’, ‘The Ezra Klein. (2024, January 5). Opinion | Tired? Distracted? Burned Out? Listen to This. _The New York Times_. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gloria-mark.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gloria-mark.html) ## References, Quotes, Ideas %% ```dataview table file.mtime.year + "-" + file.mtime.month + "-" + file.mtime.day as Modified from [[ ]] and !outgoing([[ ]]) sort file.mtime desc ```