Mindfulness and smartphones

Something I have believed in but never been able to articulate the way this author has.

http://thecreativelawyer.typepad.com/the_creative_lawyer/2013/03/mindfulness-and-smartphones.html

Mindfulness and Smartphones

It has been said that the fundamental adult skill is deferred gratification.  Children who master this skill usually become successful adults, and those who don’t, don’t.
You’d be hard-pressed to discern this truth from any ad for any commercial product, since nearly everything is marketed on the basis of promising immediate gratification.  “There’s an app for that!”TM means “more instant gratification for you.” 
Instant gratification is, indeed, gratifying, but only for an instant, in the same way that eating a potato chip is gratifying.  It doesn’t last, and there are consequences.
In the case of smartphones, texting, checking emails, IM’ing, and internet surfing, there are a few costs associated with the “convenience” and occasional pleasure of doing whatever you want whenever you want. This constant momentary checking taxes you in specific ways.
First, there are task-switching costs.  When you switch from one mental activity to another, there is a loss.  There is no such thing as “multitasking.”  It’s just task-switching – when you multitask, tasks take more time and have higher error rates. Here’s the research.
Second, seeking instant gratification actually makes you less happy:  it impedes development of fulfillment and associated feelings of satisfaction and well-being.  Fulfillment shows up when we have "flow," a term first identified by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi as an experience of total engagement.  Flow occurs when we are so immersed in something that we don’t notice the passage of time.  Csikszentmihalyi explained that we can find flow by “doing great things, or doing everyday things with greatness.”  The ingredients to flow are:  (1) a high challenge; (2) skills matched to the challenge; and (3) constant feedback.  One of his findings is that people find more flow – and therefore more fulfillment – in work, rather than in leisure.  This is because work requires us to engage.  Instant gratification is pretty much the opposite of engagement.  Flow comes from challenge, not ease.
Third, instant gratification is the opposite of mindfulness, which you might say is the one requirement for being content in life.  Mindfulness means being present – living, experiencing and relishing the present moment, rather than being distracted by other thoughts or feelings.  Mindfulness involves observing how the mind acts – when it gets bored, distracted, annoyed, fearful, etc – and is based on the idea that the mind is not you.  It’s part of you, but it’s not the whole you.  It’s the tool, not the master. Buddhism calls the urge to get out of the moment, to move to something else, whether good or bad, "The Monkey Mind."  The Monkey Mind is endlessly dissatisfied.  When you're having dinner with a friend or loved one and decide you need to check your phone, that's the Monkey Mind in action.  
Smartphones and their ilk are basically The Monkey Mind in physical form.  With their constant ringing, buzzing and urges to “check me! check me! check me!” they are a ceaseless force urging you to leave the present moment and do something else.  Your urge to check your smartphone feels like your real mind, but it's really your Monkey MInd.  The false message of the smartphone is:  “whatever reality you’re experiencing now is not as good as the reality I’m promising you.”  So in addition to your natural Monkey Mind, when you carry around and are a servant to your smartphone, you have created a second, outsourced Monkey Mind.
Feel like slipping out of the moment and checking your device?  Gawker will just have another snarky, celebrity story, similar to a hundred others you’ve read. Facebook will have some updates, but nothing as real as the reality you're in. That email might be good or bad, but it’s just another email.
Just as that additional potato chip is not really going to make you happier.  Just fatter, and experiencing a salty aftertaste. And setting up the urge to do it again in 30 seconds.  

The art of observation

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/12/on-looking-eleven-walks-with-expert-eyes/

“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life — in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the purple pants, past life itself, cut off from the breathing of the world by iPhone earbuds and solipsism. And yet: “The art of seeing has to be learned,and it can be learned".

Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you.
By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.

This adaptive ignorance, she argues, is there for a reason — we celebrate it as “concentration” and welcome its way of easing our cognitive overload by allowing us to conserve our precious mental resources only for the stimuli of immediate and vital importance, and to dismiss or entirely miss all else. 

While this might make us more efficient in our goal-oriented day-to-day, it also makes us inhabit a largely unlived — and unremembered — life, day in and day out.

“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”:

A better way of thinking about attention is to consider the problems that evolution might have designed “attention” to solve. The first problem emerges from the nature of the world. The world is wildly distracting. It is full of brightly colored things, large things casting shadows, quickly moving things, approaching things, loud things, irregular things, smelly things.
Thus, evolution’s problem-solving left us modern humans with two kinds of attention: vigilance, which allows us to have a quick and life-saving fight-or-flight response to an immediate threat, be it a leaping lion or a deranged boss, and selective attention, which unconsciously curates the few stimuli to attend to amidst the flurry bombarding us, enabling us to block out everything except what we’re interested in ingesting.

Much like French polymath Henri Poincaré argued that to invent is simply to choose ideas, to attend, it turns out, is simply to choose stimuli — but what sounds so deceptively simple turns out to be marvelously complex.

Horowitz tickles this latter type of attention to unravel all the unseen, unsmelled, and unheard miracles of a city block, the wonderlands of sensation and awareness that bloom behind the looking glass of our evolutionarily primed everyday inattention.

Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we are able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, sound — but to function, we have to ignore some of it. The world still holds these details. Children sense the world at a different granularity, attending to parts of the visual world we gloss over; to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them.

Part of toddlers’ extraordinary capacity for noticing has to do with their hard-wired neophilia — the allure of the new and unfamiliar, which for them includes just about everything that we, old and jaded, have deemed familiar and thus uninteresting. 

Eventually, we made it from A to B, but not before visiting all of the later letters of the alphabet. … Objects and people on our route became possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction, as the urban pedestrian might define them.

I had not noticed, until forced to by Kalman’s sociability, how I was engaging in a fundamentally social activity by walking out in public.

 our minds are constantly coerced into reading the “dull, tedious words” that bombard us from storefronts, billboards, and computer screens nearly every waking moment — but besides the linguistic burden, embedded in each letter we ingest is also a design one, for typography can quietly convey an unwritten message, set a mood, create an ineffable sense of something being either terribly wrong or terribly wonderful. There is a humanistic quality of words.

We learn that on every square inch of surface, entire microcosms oscillate between vibrant life and violent death. (“If a driveway holds an ecosystem,” Horowitz ponders, “what of a parking lot? Perchance a universe.”)

“Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking.”
Once you have an eye for these things, even when you’re not looking for them, they just jump out at you. Everything is a sign of something.

Every single crack, hole, and slit between buildings is part of a vast and elaborate transit system of urban wildlife passageways.

Part of what restricts us seeing things is that we have an expectation about what we will see, and we are actually perceptually restricted by that expectation. In a sense, expectation is the lost cousin of attention: both serve to reduce what we need to process of the world “out there.” Attention is the more charismatic member, packaged and sold more effectively, but expectation is also a crucial part of what we see. Together they allow us to be functional, reducing the sensory chaos of the world into unbothersome and understandable units.

Humans are visual creatures. Our eyes have prime positioning on our faces. We have trichromatic vision, which is sufficient to paint a Technicolor, million-colored landscape of the world. Our brains’ visual areas, with hundreds of millions of neurons designed to make sense of what we see, takes up a full fifth of each of our cortices. The resplendent scene our eyes carry to us is entrancing. As a result, we humans generally do not bother paying attention to much other than the visual. What we wear, where we live, where we visit, even whom we love is based in large part on appearance — visual appearance. 

I imagined that someone who has lost her sense of sight could lead me, however superficially, into the invisible block that I miss with my wide open eyes.

Gordon navigates swiftly along the sidewalk, masterfully using her cane — a sort of sensory extension of herself .

Our brains are changed by experience — in a way directly related to the details of that experience. If we have enough experience doing an action, viewing a scene, or smelling an odor to become an “expert” in a field, then our brains are functionally — and visibly — different from nonexperts.

And yet:

The brain is plastic, and can creatively adapt to a new situation, but it changes right back when it no longer needs to be creative.

 The dog nose has hundreds of millions of receptors in that nose; All animals house hormones, which are involved in bodily and brain activities, and those hormones we emit, called pheromones, are detected by the vomeronasal organ. This is how a dog could detect another dog’s stress or sexual readiness in a spray of her urine left on the ground.
Dogs are called macrosomatic, or keen-scented, while humans are called microsomatic, or feeble-scented.

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http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/07/annie-dillard-the-writing-life-1/

In our obsession with optimizing our creative routines and maximizing our productivity, we’ve forgotten how to be truly present in the gladdening mystery of life.

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http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/29/the-art-of-observation/

Why genius lies in the selection of what is worth observing.

“In the field of observation,” legendary disease prevention pioneer Louis Pasteur famously proclaimed in 1854, “chance favors only the prepared mind.” “Knowledge comes form noticing resemblances and recurrences in the events that happen around us,”

 Aristotle commented that on observing that the bright side of the moon is always toward the sun, it may suddenly occur to the observer that the explanation is that the moon shines by the light of the sun.

The thing noticed will only become significant if the mind of the observer either consciously or unconsciously relates it to some relevant knowledge or past experience, or if in pondering on it subsequently he arrives at some hypothesis.

what is more important and more difficult is to observe (in this instance mainly a mental process) resemblances or correlations between things that on the surface appeared quite unrelated.

“real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know”

One cannot observe everything closely, therefore one must discriminate and try to select the significant. When practicing a branch of science, the ‘trained’ observer deliberately looks for specific things which his training has taught him are significant, but in research he often has to rely on his own discrimination, guided only by his general scientific knowledge, judgment and perhaps an hypothesis which he entertains. Most of the knowledge and much of the genius of the research worker lie behind his selection of what is worth observing. It is a crucial choice, often determining the success or failure of months of work, often differentiating the brilliant discoverer from the … plodder. 


 Training in observation follows the same principles as training in any activity. At first one must do things consciously and laboriously, but with practice the activities gradually become automatic and unconscious and a habit is established. Effective scientific observation also requires a good background, for only by being familiar with the usual can we notice something as being unusual or unexplained.

“chance favors the connected mind.”