Attention Problems?

It’s interesting how the subjects of a conversation take such different paths over the short time of a discussion. Last night, when I went to the living room to try a Playstation 2 game (Dragon Ball :), I ended (and I don’t know how) having a conversation about the most diverse topics, with a friend of mine, Fábio, who is here living with us for some time.

Fortunately the topic of discussion was not football, not politics, neither religion. It started with small discussions about the behaviour of individuals according to their musical tastes, it evolved to drugs and their influences in groups of people (taking to the point including the neurological classification of its various types, in addition to the influence of their banality and illegality), then to how our brain and mind works, and the fact that they are really one; and following that we started putting differences between how our brain works and some analogies with how computers works.

I will not even begin saying how in this point we began talking about binary codes, alternating current, representation of numbers and how memory devices operate in both computers and in our neurons.

After so many interesting topics, a question that was bugging me for some time appeared: why the hell I couldn’t concentrate on certain things like before? Why my memory is so weak nowadays, even when I’m still so young? Then Fábio told me that he had the same kind of problem and that it was quite typical on people who grew up on the Internet.

But what it means? In my case, I can identify two very specific symptoms:

1. Lack of concentration to do only one thing. You can’t study or read something without always looking at something or thinking about other things too. In the past it was so easy to write so much things without any concern about everything else besides writing. But over time this changed and now the delay to write something is much greater. Maybe this explains why sometimes I think my productivity is a waste and because that I begin feeling useless.
2. The memory simply does not work very well. Maybe not because of the concentration, but because the majority of things in life becomes as “non-special” as it should be that the memory simply discards and leaves it hidden deep in the mind. For example, I just read the “trilogy of four books” of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, but I know that within an year, I’ll completely forget about those books. The only advantage of this is that if I read them again, it will delight me as if I were reading for the first time.

I believe that many people have these sumptoms, specially those, like myself, that grew up with the Internet and simply can not stop using it. Some scholars call this kind of behaviour Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), but I prefer to say that this is only an habit which people like me developed throughout their lifes. Perhaps this habit, for some reason, has become so unbearable that the person wants to change it and evolve his life in some way.

The first thing that we must do is to identify what are the causes of the problems that we want to eliminate. It’s the same as our computers get broken or defective: before fixing it you obviously have to find out in the middle of all those softwares and hardwares what is the problem and then attack this problem. It’s certain that most times people just use the incredible method of “try and error”, but this never works as intended. Well, I’ll try to find what are the causes for the main two problems described above:

1. Ah, computers. Computers have multi-tasking capabilities, we are multi-tasking too, but much more than they. The computers can have 2 or 4 processors, or even many processors in a Grid, but the human mind can process information in parallel much more like noone can. And no, these informations are not as exactly as the informations that a computer generates (because it does not work in the zero’s and one’s format), but this does not turn our brains less powerful. In the same time that I’m writing a text like this, I’m listening to music, I can tell that my friend Rafael is in the living room playing Resident Evil 4, and that two friends of mine are talking with me in MSN. Oh, in my browser I have Gmail open with some e-mails coming and some searchs on Google about various things including the name of the bastard vocalist of a brazilian band called Jota Quest (which a lady friend of mine really hates with all her forces, according to her) and the term “Attention Deficit Disorder”. Did you feel the drama? How someone can concentrate on something specific with all those things happening at once?Those windows flashing, Linux terminals always acessible with the keys alt+space (kudos to yakuake), e-mails coming… How can I possibly cncentrate on writing a text if I have to divide de load (in parallel) with all those stuff? Reading something and concentrate on the reading? Impossible. In a technical text, for example, you open the tutorial and goes doing many things at the same time as you read it.
2. Fábio concluded in a very concise form the cause of this, based on something that he saw and I don’t rememeber (LOL) on a text of someone that I don’t remember too. The things that I remember is that it talked about “cybernetic implants”, and the theme can be defined in the following form: “the Internet, with its infinite memory and with its incredible easy access to the information, gave an extension to the mind, an extension that you can always query your external memory with a tool like Google for example; with the search done and the results in hand, you use the information and discards easily thereafter, without knowing it much, because obviously you know that the information is still on the Internet (your external memory) and you can get it in any time again. Kudos to Google and Wikipedia.As the TV and its images turned up as a new “sense” of information’s input to people, the Internet turned up as new extension to the memory. Flood of information! As we do not know how to use our brain in the right way, we can not support this “everything” and then we discard a good part of what could be interesting to us. This explains why when I was young, my memory for Linux things was so much better. Maybe because I didn’t have so much information on the Internet, neither those efficient search engines that facilitates the access to this information, I used to do the things well done. When a problem appears, I used to fight a lot the problem, alone or asking help on mailing lists. Nowadays, when a problem appear, I copy and paste into Google and I get the answer in 27.3 seconds. Practical, but in the long-term, it spoils us.

After the problems are identified, here comes the most hard part: solve them! Well, this part I still didn’t discover very well, because, errrrr, I still didn’t solve the problem for myself 😛 Again, I’ll try to list some of the key points for each of the symptoms previously discussed in this text.

1. Stop using computers. NO! It can’t be, my social and professional life depends on it very much. But I believe that the main thing to do for easing the problem is to regulate using. Ah, this is also very hard. How about using computers less? Maybe it can be done. I believe this is the best way to solve the problem. Instead of working all day in front of computer doing many things at the same time without stopping, and when you go home, turn on the computer and spend all night doing the same thing that is staying in front of a computer, how about you simply go do something else? In preference, find someone and keep talking about things until you explode. Or better yet, find a woman/man (depends on your sexuality) and keep talking about exciting things until you explode. Doing this you get help socially and for the problem.Ah, and other nice thing: read before sleeping. Read anything. Lay yourself in the bad and keep reading until you get very sleepy. Mark the page and continue reading the other day. This part, for me, is very hard: when I begin to read I don’t want to stop until I finish it (in truth this is another one of my problems that does not correspond to this text), as in the time when I began reading Berserk at 8pm and finished it one billion of volumes later at the sunrise.

   Will you do something more specific, like writing a text or studying? Turn off temporarily the MSN or any instant messaging program. I’m not saying that you must stop using it forever, just turn off and turn on later after you finished what you are doing. And do not only put the Away status because nobody respects the status, even you. Turn off and go work on your task. In the beginning you’ll feel the necessity of clicking at the window to see if there’s someone interesting and/or important, or will keep trying to see if there’s someone talking to you every time. But after a while you get off this feelings and get used to the virtual silence.

2. Write. Write. Write. As an experienced instructor, I know very well what this means. When I say write, write to others. For example, I’m writing this text not only for me, but for you that is reading. Writing to others helps fixing the idea on your mind and you always search for other forms of communication on the subject, because the others will understand you better. The result of that is, as every teacher says, you learn much more yourself with this behaviour.And when you write to others, this means that you are sharing knowledge. And it’s certain that this knowledge of yourself will be admired by someone, and it does not matter the subject itself.  You can bet that if you write about how ants farts, even as it seems absurd (or not), someone will be interested in your text. If you can’t get out of the internet and its flood of information, use it for your own good! RÁR-RÁR!

   Ah, and when you forget something, go read what you wrote. Nobody to understand better what you wrote than yourself. And talking about writing, Carlos Castañeda in one of his books tells a very interesting method to improve the memory and even to get yourself out of some mind’s root that your brain has. The method consists on beginning to, at least one or two hours a day, sit dwn and write in a notebook or something the name of all people you met in your life, beginning on the most recent facts to the former ones. Think constantly and try to always write the names of those people in the paper. After that begin writing the happenings (even the “unuseful” ones) about those people. At the end, begin associating each person with another in your life. With this you’ll be training your brain to do better memory associations and basically helping how you remember things. This also has other effects, but it does not have anything to this text’s subject, so if you are interested, go read Castañeda’s books.

I believe that these are some of the most “easy” forms to correct this type of habit. Of course there are many forms much more radicals, like the Steve Jobs style: “go to India and search for personal illumination”. I believe that this kind of thing isn’t necessary, so instead of going to India searching for divine illumination, I’ll get some money and buy a Harley Davidson, searching for divine illumation riding at the road.

Maybe the only radical form of breaking the habits that I’m interested is the break of the person’s reality itself, to reconstruct another ego and a new perception of things, acquiring completely new habits. This is based on the premise of the phrase: “Nothing better than a great trauma for you to realize about something and change”. An example of this would be my ex-girlfriend, but you know, maybe this story can be told another time.

Meanwhile, good luck to all of us!