{"id":473,"date":"2009-08-20T09:15:40","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T08:15:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/?p=473"},"modified":"2009-08-20T09:19:18","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T08:19:18","slug":"attenzione-e-distrazione-spunti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/?p=473","title":{"rendered":"Attenzione e Distrazione: spunti"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interessante articolo del NYMagazine<\/a> sull’impatto che le nuove tecnologie hanno sull’attenzione e sulla modifica del modo di apprendere. Diversi spunti interessanti pro\/con (in parte anche impliciti nel “Flow”\u00a0 di Csikszentmihalyi ).<\/p>\n

Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: \u201cWhat information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention<\/strong>, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.\u201d<\/p>\n

…. Are we living through a crisis of attention? <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Before I even have a chance to apologize, Meyer responds with the air of an Old Testament prophet. \u201cYes,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I think it\u2019s going to get a lot worse than people expect.\u201d He sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic\u2014a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought<\/strong>. He compares it, in fact, to smoking. \u201cPeople aren\u2019t aware what\u2019s happening to their mental processes,\u201d he says, \u201cin the same way that people years ago couldn\u2019t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

…Over the last twenty years, Meyer and a host of other researchers have proved again and again that multitasking, at least as our culture has come to know and love and institutionalize it, is a myth. When you think you\u2019re doing two things at once, you\u2019re almost always just switching rapidly between them,<\/strong> leaking a little mental efficiency with every switch. Meyer says that this is because, to put it simply, the brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate \u201cchannels\u201d\u2014a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel, and so on\u2014each of which can process only one stream of information at a time. If you overburden a channel, the brain becomes inefficient and mistake-prone.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

The tech theorist Linda Stone famously coined the phrase \u201ccontinuous partial attention<\/strong>\u201d to describe our newly frazzled state of mind. American office workers don\u2019t stick with any single task for more than a few minutes at a time; if left uninterrupted, they will most likely interrupt themselves. Since every interruption costs around 25 minutes of productivity, we spend nearly a third of our day recovering from them. We keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds. When we read online, we hardly even read at all\u2014our eyes run down the page in an F<\/em> pattern, scanning for keywords. When you add up all the leaks from these constant little switches, soon you\u2019re hemorrhaging a dangerous amount of mental power. People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana. Meyer guesses that the damage will take decades to understand, let alone fix.<\/p>\n

…The ability to positively wield your attention comes off, in the book, as something of a panacea; Gallagher describes it as \u201cthe sine qua non of the quality of life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.\u201d It is, in other words, the Holy Grail of self-help: the key to relationships and parenting and mood disorders and weight problems. (You can apparently lose seven pounds in a year through the sheer force of paying attention to your food.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t be happy all the time,\u201d Gallagher tells me, \u201cbut you can pretty much focus all the time. That\u2019s about as good as it gets.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The most promising solution to our attention problem, in Gallagher\u2019s mind, is also the most ancient: meditation. Neuroscientists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Buddhists, whose attentional discipline can apparently confer all kinds of benefits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psychologists predict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we\u2019ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute \u201csecular attentional workouts.\u201d) Meditation can make your attention less \u201csticky,\u201d able to notice images flashing by in such quick succession that regular brains would miss them<\/strong>. It has also been shown to elevate your mood, which can then recursively stoke your attention: Research shows that positive emotions cause your visual field to expand. The brains of Buddhist monks asked to meditate on \u201cunconditional loving-kindness and compassion\u201d show instant and remarkable changes: Their left prefrontal cortices (responsible for positive emotions) go into overdrive, they produce gamma waves 30 times more powerful than novice meditators, and their wave activity is coordinated in a way often seen in patients under anesthesia.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Gallagher stresses that because attention is a limited resource\u2014one psychologist has calculated that we can attend to only 110 bits of information per second, or 173 billion bits in an average lifetime\u2014our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives<\/strong>. Rapt<\/em>\u2019s epigraph comes from the psychologist and philosopher William James: \u201cMy experience is what I agree to attend to.\u201d For Gallagher, everything comes down to that one big choice: investing your attention wisely or not.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

. The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction. As B.\u2009F. Skinner\u2019s army of lever-pressing rats and pigeons taught us, the most irresistible reward schedule is not, counterintuitively, the one in which we\u2019re rewarded constantly but something called \u201cvariable ratio schedule,\u201d in which the rewards arrive at random. And that randomness is practically the Internet\u2019s defining feature: It dispenses its never-ending little shots of positivity\u2014a life-changing e-mail here, a funny YouTube video there\u2014in gloriously unpredictable cycles<\/strong>. It seems unrealistic to expect people to spend all day clicking reward bars\u2014searching the web, scanning the relevant blogs, checking e-mail to see if a co-worker has updated a project\u2014and then just leave those distractions behind, as soon as they\u2019re not strictly required, to engage in \u201chealthy\u201d things like books and ab crunches and undistracted deep conversations with neighbors. It would be like requiring employees to take a few hits of opium throughout the day, then being surprised when it becomes a problem.<\/p>\n

…One of the weaknesses of lifehacking as a weapon in the war against distraction, Mann admits, is that it tends to become extremely distracting. You can spend solid days reading reviews of filing techniques and organizational software. \u201cOn the web, there\u2019s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need,\u201d he says. \u201cBut when I get to the point where I\u2019m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I\u2019m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it\u2019s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lot of people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there\u2019s very little advice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit. My wife reminds me sometimes: \u2018You have all the information you need to do something<\/em> right now.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

…It\u2019s important to remember, however, that the most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction<\/strong>: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls \u201cvoluntary memory\u201d\u2014the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness\u2014in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects<\/strong>. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

My favorite focusing exercise comes from William James: Draw a dot on a piece of paper, then pay attention to it for as long as you can<\/strong>. (Sitting in my office one afternoon, with my monkey mind swinging busily across the lush rain forest of online distractions, I tried this with the closest dot in the vicinity: the bright-red mouse-nipple at the center of my laptop\u2019s keyboard. I managed to stare at it for 30 minutes, with mixed results.) James argued that the human mind can\u2019t actually focus on the dot, or any unchanging object, for more than a few seconds at a time: It\u2019s too hungry for variety, surprise, the adventure of the unknown. It has to refresh its attention by continually finding new aspects of the dot to focus on: subtleties of its shape, its relationship to the edges of the paper, metaphorical associations (a fly, an eye, a hole). The exercise becomes a question less of pure unwavering focus than of your ability to organize distractions around a central point. The dot, in other words, becomes only the hub of your total dot-related distraction.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is what the web-threatened punditry often fails to recognize: Focus is a paradox\u2014it has distraction built into i<\/strong>t. The two are symbiotic; they\u2019re the systole and diastole of consciousness. Attention comes from the Latin \u201cto stretch out\u201d or \u201creach toward,\u201d distraction from \u201cto pull apart.\u201d We need both. In their extreme forms, focus and attention may even circle back around and bleed into one other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interessante articolo del NYMagazine sull’impatto che le nuove tecnologie hanno sull’attenzione e sulla modifica del modo di apprendere. Diversi spunti interessanti pro\/con (in parte anche impliciti nel “Flow”\u00a0 di Csikszentmihalyi ). Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders … <\/p>\n

Leggi tutto “Attenzione e Distrazione: spunti”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,20,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scienza","category-societa","category-spunti"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":475,"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions\/475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giovannimartini.it\/giardino\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}