Anyway... this morning, I'm reading "Why Aren’t We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About?/You’ve been clickbaited by your own brain" by the psychologist Daniel T. Willingham. I resist the subtitle. I think it's a positive thing that you can't force your brain to pay attention. It's a free spirit. It rebels, and it should, and you'd be a ghastly bore if it didn't.
But I don't to be a complete Unwillingegg. Let's give Willingham a chacnce:
When I’m surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe’s political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about?...The easy answer is that you don't want what you're telling yourself you want. You only want to think of yourself as someone who wants that, and you're therefore already getting exactly what you want.
Willingham understands attention-paying through evolution:
Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments; a forager that occasionally skipped a reliable feeding ground to explore might find an even better place to eat....So take your evolution-formed brain to "better foraging grounds." Willingham recommends "for example, JSTOR Daily, Arts & Letters Daily or ScienceDaily." He seems to accept the brain as it is, subject to "click bait," and gives a tip for getting better results from the impulses we inherited from ancestors who were motivated by problems we solved long ago.
[E]volution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don’t expect any concrete payoff....
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17 comments:
I found the Alcatraz menu pretty interesting. Thursday in Alcatraz sounds like St. Patrick's Day at my house.
That reminds me, I have Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants.
It’s much easier for me to pay attention to what people say on a phone call or virtual meeting. In person, I get distracted from what they’re saying by all those gestures that indicate what they actually mean.
Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about?
You are, but your subjective and misleading sense of consciousness and free-will (~ super-ego) might steer you toward subjects associated with higher social status, e.g. complicated history or physics rather than mundane food.
ScienceDaily is on my daily list but it can be rather click-baity, not quite real science reporting but still far better than MSM attempts at science reporting.
This is the concept of revealed preference- a fancy way of describing, "Watch what people do, not what they say."
I’ve asked myself the same questions this guy is asking, and I really like the professor’s take on the whole thing.
Looks like the Alcatraz cook's menu made good use of the leftovers from the Dinner (lunch to us nowadays) menu for the Supper menu. Thrifty use of the food budget. Nice meals too!
As the the Psychologist. Why is he fighting being interested in things that he wants to be interested in? Does he think it is beneath his dignity to be interested in what prisoners in Alcatraz ate in the old days? Is he too "smart" and "edumacated" to be interested or intrigued by mundane things?
What a snob.
Going down the rabbit holes of the Internet is by far more interesting and enlightening
I wonder what one would have found if they compared the menu to the actual meals themselves at Alcatraz?
I think it's a positive thing that you can't force your brain to pay attention. It's a free spirit
I think that’s an interesting idea. I’ve found it to also true in reverse- when your free spirit brain is forcing you to focus on something it wants you to. A few years ago I was sitting in the airport where CNN was on. Normally I tune it out but it was like my brain banging on the inside of my head telling me to pay attention to the screen. They were showing some runway show in Paris...it took me a minute but one of the models was someone I dated in high school...WTF?
This reminds me of a poem by Mary Oilver:
“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver
He has discovered that smart people are drawn to subjects that they want to learn more about...over...and over again. Always adding another layer of factoid bricks on top of the last layer. But the foundation must have been laid well to hold it. If not, all must be ripped out and started over re-laying the layers of factoids.
Look! Squirrel!
"This reminds me of a poem by Mary Oilver."
To each his own but I've got to say that's dreck.
Ann Althouse said...
"This reminds me of a poem by Mary Oilver."
To each his own but I've got to say that's dreck.
Indeed. Why the hell must one always be TALKING?
Great cite to Mary Oliver. Poetry is all about paying attention. And if you really do pay attention you are being a poet: in the deep sense, of poesis, of creating the world anew. If you don’t get down to that level, you deal in a slurry of cliches, and are too easily led.
Althouse pays attention. Her pictures tell us that.
95% of photography is paying attention. Then you notice things.
The rest is execution.
The chance of the person going to look for new foraging grounds then falling into a pit or being attacked by predators or other humans and being grievously injured is as or more likely than finding better foraging. The evolutionary psychology angle is probably therefore a miss. One need only briefly look to observe that the smart people - who often choose a life of talking as public intellectuals - have routinely been very unhappy with the under-appreciation of their offerings by the public as reflected in their diminished incomes when not gotten through affiliations with kings, state apparatuses, and moneyed connected benefactors and resulting bad attitudes.
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