While the human mind may, at times, have a notoriously short attention span, it also has the uncanny ability to fixate on a task to the point that all sense of time is lost. For example, last night I was laying on my bed playing a new game on my phone. It's a simple, repetitive game where you have to prioritize tasks and click through actions as quickly as possible. I kept trying to move to higher difficulties and beat my past times and before I knew it, Daniel came in to announce that he was heading to bed. It wasn't until that moment that I noticed that when the game is running, the clock on my phone disappears. I'd been playing the game for over a half an hour without even realizing it. My mind had been so fixated on the game that it took some outside intrusion on my attention in order to break the spell.
I've seen this cycle of mental inertia played out many times before. A mind in motion can remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. Casinos know all about it. They don't give you any clocks or windows to judge the passage of time in the hope that you'll just keep pulling levers and placing bets. Television marathons play a similar game when they remove the opening sequence and closing credits from between episodes. This runs one show into the next and before I know it, I'm 3 hours into a Real World marathon and none of my laundry is folded.
The good news is that this tendency can also be used to an advantage. Nabisco knows this as good as anyone. In recent years, they have started marketing many of their long-standing products in special "100 calorie" packs. All food has the nutritional information is right there on the package, so it should be easy to exercise portion control for ourselves, but a full size package of Chips Ahoy cookies is too easy to eat right through in a few days time. While nothing is keeping people from eating several 100 calorie packages in a sitting, the act of having to stop eating long enough to open a new package is often enough of a break in your attention that you have to decide whether or not to keep eating.
Knowing how easy it is to get lost in certain tasks makes me want to be more mindful of my actions. I've always felt like every moment of every day is a new chance to make a new choice, but in reality, those choices usually get made while my brain is on "auto pilot." Sometimes all it takes to snap me back to reality is a little shiny object, whether it's in the form of a tap on the shoulder, the credits at the end of a tv show, or the 10 seconds it takes to get another package of cookies. My goal now is to be my own shiny object. I can't always rely on chance to keep me from getting sucked in. I have to take the initiative to either set myself up for distraction or do my best to minimize them so that, at the very least, I can say that my precious time was spent on something of my own choosing.
4 comments:
Sounds like a hard, but very noble task! For me the internet is my time sucker- the precious evening hours are suddenly gone after I log on. Good luck! :)
Well, Comcast taking away most of our channels helps a lot. I also started reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and that has given me a useful diversion when I would otherwise get sucked into tv or the internetz.
Oh man, I have the opposite problem. Every little thing can distract me from what I'm doing. I'm the like the human version of the mouse form If You Give A Mouse A Cookie.
How do you manage to get anything done?? The things I get sucked into are usually things I really don't want to get sucked into. Also, I'm convinced that most time wasting diversions are specifically designed to be psychologically addicting.
I almost made this post about an experiment I heard of in a psychology class once. It had to do with putting birds (or mice, maybe) in cages and having a little lever that released a food pellet. The bulk of the experiment revolved around changing the pattern in which pushing the lever actually resulted in getting a treat. When the success rate was irregular, the animals tended to get obsessed with pushing the lever over and over. In fact, the obsession grew when the rate of return decreased. On the other hand, if the animal knew the lever would give a pellet every 5th time, they would just wait till they were hungry, push the lever 5 times and be done. Maybe it's just me, but that sounds like every stupid facebook game I've ever played.
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