Animalistic Attention

I had an interesting conversation with Smallsteps tonight, as we were playing a game of "talk-a-bounce" - where we sit on the floor, bouncing a ball to each other, and talking about random topics. She normally chooses and today, like many days, it started with animals, except with a spin I wasn't expecting.

What makes animals and people different?

Woof.

Now, I am no expert on this, but it was a great discussion, which had very little to do with animals, and a lot to do with people. More accurately, a skill that people have that is very limited in animals - the ability to pay attention. It is not that animals can't focus their attention at all, but humans have the ability to choose focus, hold focus, and change focus at will, with a high degree of success.

For instance, we can listen to a piece of music and choose which instrument we put our focus on, meaning that we are able to pull the sound apart and hone in on one, pushing all the rest away from our attention. And, as you can likely recognize, there can be a range of skills in this ability, with some better than others. But, better and worse isn't set in stone, because we can train our attention through exposure, where for example, someone who learns music, will likely have better abilities to pick apart the instruments, than someone who has no training, because they are able to recognize which instrument is which, but an inexperienced person just hears different sounds.

This is a classification skill, where having the labels helps us to draw our attention. This is where for example an interest area topic, and when we have the labels, we are better able to focus on various parts of what we are seeing, relegating what we don't have labels for into the background. For example, my wife likes dogs, which means that she is constantly scanning for dogs in her surrounding, even if it is unconscious. She loves dachshunds, so these take precedence in her hierarchy, and she can spot a sausage dog from a mile away, like a hunter with a scoped rifle.

When we have background knowledge, we are likely to pick out more details than if we don't, even if we see what we are after. Because of this, our attention is spent in different areas. For example, if I am walking through the forest with a friend, we will essentially experience the same things on our trip. But, if my friend is an ornithologist, they will hear the birds in the trees and have a deeper understanding than I do of what is happening.

Background knowledge is like image resolution, the higher the knowledge, the more you can "see" in the experience, and therefore, the more you can get out of it in that particular context. This is part of the reason why eyewitnesses are unreliable, because their attention can be drawn to one detail, but miss many more. However, a bunch of eyewitnesses could piece together a pretty good image of something, if we are able to take only the pieces they were paying attention to, and create a composite from them.

The most valuable resource.

In my opinion, for human experience, attention is likely the most valuable resource we have, because without it, we notice nothing, so there is no experience. It is our ability to use our attention to roam from one point to another, that allows us to navigate our world in the most fundamental of ways. But, it is also what allows us to concentrate our energy where we need it most, or where we think we need it most, as the case may be.

For instance, When I was about nine I was on my brother's bike and rode it into a big bushy tree, with low branches. I was going relatively fast, so I went all the way in and hit the trunk. When I clawed my way out, my knee was stinging a lot, and I looked at a graze where it had scraped the bark. It was pretty painful and I gingerly reached down and touched it. That is when I noticed that there was blood pouring down my arm, and as I rolled up my short sleeve, there was a gaping tear where a branch had dug in and ripped my bicep open. My attention shifted.

My knee no longer hurt, because I wasn't paying attention to it.

Smallsteps had an example of focusing attention on good things, using a friend of hers at school who tends to see the negative, and blame others for her experience. She said, that while "Jane" sees the bad, she can focus my attention on the good things, and have fun. And then added how she can choose to only focus on the fun things she likes.

Close.

But unfortunately, our attention doesn't work that way, because no matter how focused we might be, there can be events that pull us out of our focus, forcing us to attend to them instead. The example I used with my daughter was focusing on eating marshmallows, and then the house catching on fire and I asked her what she would do then. "Toast the marshmallows!"

Smartass.

But, she then added that of course she would have to act differently. And this is something that I feel we are missing a lot of time these days, as our attention is drawn into all kinds of things, but we might be avoiding spending on the things that actually matter. The proverbial house is on fire, and we are still stuffing our face with marshmallows.

Animals act on various degrees of instinct in combination with conditioning, but the human ability of being able to choose what we focus our attention on at any particular point in time, gives us the opportunity to learn what we want. The people who are at the pinnacle of particular skills, are that way because they have been able to focus their attention and learn at depth, which also comes at a cost, because they have to filter out other things that might also require attention. Many genius level people, seem to be lacking in some fundamental skills.

And, it is because of this attention scarcity that we have to be careful with where we spend ours. If we spend it on what we like and what feels good in the moment, we are likely missing building the knowledge that helps us experience something more deeply, more fully later. And what that means is, we have less resolution to experience our future moments. We can still listen to music and walk through the forest with a friend, but what we take out of it can be very different. In some ways, a lack of knowledge is like a blind person walking through that forest, or a deaf person listening to the music. Perhaps they can smell and hear the forest, maybe they can feel the vibrations, but the experience is fundamentally different than someone who has a lot more "knowledge", meaning that they can absorb more inputs.

A dog can pay attention to the movement of a bird, but it will never learn to fly. Yet, we are able to pay attention to the bird, build our knowledge across millennia, experiment with various techniques, shift our focus billions of times and eventually, while we can't flap our arms and take to the skies, we can develop a workaround. And we can do this for increasingly complicated processes, because we are able o keep shifting our focus.

I love talk-a-bounce time with my daughter, and I love how she goes about trying to make sense of her world, by filling in the gaps in knowledge, whilst still keeping a high sense of humor. She is far smarter than me, it is just that for now, she doesn't have the same level of resolution on life yet. It won't be long though, and if she pays attention, she will have very high definition perspectives on life.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]