This TEDTalk on “flow” and the Jonah Lehrer post quoted in my previous blog post, got me thinking about longterm focus and distraction. Reading Your Brain at Work, which I raved about before, (it’s kind of nice to have writings be able to self-reference…) explained a lot about why our brains crave novelty. To quote from the book, “…as scientist and philosopher Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia says, we are the descendants of people who paid a lot of attention when there was a rustle in the bushes” (Location 922).
But this concept of flow shows that we have developed beyond this. (And I do think it’s partly an issue of development whether on the evolutionary or individual level: children are known to be much more swayed by novelty than adults — which is why they have issues focusing). So this issue of flow seems like a good topic to be interested in and it’s great to see the facts that Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi shows about people who rate “flow” as playing a key part in being happy.
But it also reminds me of good blog post I read about a month ago that discusses how contemporary consumerist culture pushes distraction and novelty as it benefits them:
…built into consumerism is an incentive to make sure people scatter their attention as wide as possible on the greatest number of things and experiences, all of which have now been successfully packaged (often thanks to technological change) as exchangeable commodities. When a person’s attention is fixed on a certain specific activity, it registers as lost opportunities to make sales—one for each infinitely divisible moment that passed in which the person could have been distracted, could have consciously shifted attention, but didn’t.
The author follows up all of this by saying, “Thats why… I see concentration rather than distraction as an act of cultural resistance.”
Right now, I’ve been living in a society and culture (in Taiwan) that is very consumeristic — one of the things my students will say to me to show that they are picking up English outside of the classroom is “iPhone 4,” to use one quick — and somewhat cute — anecdote. There a lot of reasons for this. But as a wise friend of mine pointed out last weekend, it does have to do with a more communitarian lifestyle.
Flow and deep concentration in a certain activity or field that you are passionate about are intensely individualistic experiences. Where as being distracted by the normal everyday things that everyone else is distracted by is not, but these distractions allow you to relate better to your community members as you share the same cultural language and knowledge.
As a Westerner who places a high premium on individuality it’s a little hard be at peace with this though this is not to say I view one culture/society as being better than another. In fact, I see the same distracted, more communitarian tendencies in myself — I follow sports and politics which provide a lot of short bursts of novelty — which may be a synonym with instant gratification — but don’t require a lot of deep concentration or effort.
What I will note, and what I think is important to note that deep concentration and flow are becoming harder and harder to maintain, even in the context of having evolutionary impulses that make it hard. That’s a factor of today’s culture and technology. I’m pretty sure that being an individual has always required effort; regardless, I’m glad to see this type of effort being discussed more as it is one that has a lot of resonance with me and I’m sure with others as well.
* Yes, this title is a play on words of the Terrence Howard film, Hustle and Flow, which I haven’t seen but would like to.
