EPTIn order to hone my concentration skills I've begun to consume more long-form media. Podcasts, lectures, long articles, books, as well as strict goal tracking, and meditation.
A habit of mine that I'm not sure of is having to pause and think of something I've just read or listened to and try to really understand it. I mean really understand it. To try to fit it into my life. To see where it fits in the world. Not simply how the words combine to make a sentence.
It's a little bit frustrating that an article that might take another person 15 minutes to read takes me the same amount of time reading but an additional 15 minutes to think about what is being said. It's a lot like this video:
However, in this video I don't get the impression that the professor is going through the same motions, but rather slowing himself down so that the audience can benefit from more elaboration. I watched this video a couple of weeks ago, and I can't recall a single specific thing the professor said about the passage. In situations like these, I am 'robbed' of my own learning because I'm not making the conclusions myself, but am rather given them.
I understand that it's yet another skill that I have to practice, and that it will get better with time, but I feel like I'm playing catchup due to my habit of comparing myself to the pinnacle of humanity in any given field. It puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself, and yet 'I like the way it hurts' because it gives me a point to strive towards.
The motivation to write this blog, and actually to reach out to people on this matter was an article about the life of philosopher Derek Parfit after he died. I had to, as I often do, entirely stop reading and think about what was being said in this quote:
He has few memories of his past, and he almost never thinks about it, although his memory for other things is very good. He attributes this to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.)
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good
My perspective in life is the same way. When I close my eyes and try to imagine something, say an apple. I only see black. I can describe to you the shape of an apple, or if it has a stem or not, and I definitely am thinking about apples, but there is nothing visual to go off of. It's strange to me. Just like Parfit, I cannot visualize a flag. I can describe in detail many flags, and yet when I close my eyes and think about one, I find no image forthcoming.
A similar experience is mirrored with internal monologues. On a hot summers day, I never enter a convenience store and verbally think to myself 'Oh good they have refrigerated drinks here', but it would be a lie to say that I'm not grateful that I can't buy a cold drink at that moment.
I rarely dream, but when I do it is extremely sensory rich. I see in detail the world I have imagined around me, and can feel sensations such as falling down or water rushing over my body, but there is no colour. It's all grey scale. If I walk past a street in my dream full of shops, I couldn't tell you how many there were. Just that there were shops.
As I want to reach out to some other people, I have two questions for you:
1) Is it often that you'll be consuming some media, and simply have to pause it to think about what is being said?
2) What is the split on people with consciousnesses that are imaginative and not? By that I mean, what % of people have no internal monologue and cannot visualize something, and what % of people can see vividly a memory or object in their minds eye?
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One thing that is not really relevant to the above post, but I was listening to a criticism of Donald Trump based on the way he talks. To paraphrase the speaker 'the way that a person talks is the same way that they think.' So if Trump says crazy things at the grammatical level of an 11 year old, that is likely his actual stream of consciousness.
One of the things I hope to also fix with concentration practice is jumping around in both my speech and in my writing. I'll be speaking about one subject, and know how it relates to another thing and bring it up. That is fine behaviour, but not ideal when poorly articulated. I might think I'm a genius, but my audience will think I'm incoherent.
One of the things I hope to also fix with concentration practice is jumping around in both my speech and in my writing. I'll be speaking about one subject, and know how it relates to another thing and bring it up. That is fine behaviour, but not ideal when poorly articulated. I might think I'm a genius, but my audience will think I'm incoherent.
