AnHero
Traveler
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2023
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(This is a mix of my own writing and things I've read. I'll credit where appropriate.)
(I also posted this on Hidden Internet. @h00 told me I could post it here for more visibilty.)
I'm a young guy, so I never actually lived pre-internet, and barely remember life pre-smartphone, but I think I've got a unique experience compared to some of my peers. This is because I went to boarding school for several years, and the boarding schools I've been to were generally low-tech. I used computers either for only an hour a day or not at all. No phones or any other tech, either. All I really had for entertainment was books. They let us watch TV too sometimes, but that was mostly dominated by the whims of people who wanted to watch the latest Marvel movie or music videos, so I rarely went.
Basically what I'm saying is that I was very bored, but I think that kind of boredom was actually good for me. I did all sorts of stuff to occupy myself, some of it was like weird 'mental gymnastics' stuff, and actually quite creative-- basically I 'made my own fun' the way I've heard older people say they did. I went on walks (some of these schools had huge compounds), I read, I dozed off, I hung around my friends, who were in the same boat, I made u rock riffs and disco beats in my head, I remembered, almost in full, songs I hadn't heard in years, I wrote stories, I drew and I noticed that around this time, my artstyle suddenly took a weird and distinct turn, I worked out religiously... Every few days the librarian would get the newspaper and I would read that. I remember I even did this weird thing where my friends would gather around and I would tell, in detail and in full, the story of some obscure anime or arthouse film I'd watched that they liked the sound of. It actually took a few tellings to get it all down, but people were willing to listen. Obviously if we went to a day-school they would just go home and watch it, but since we were all stuck in with each other I became like some village elder telling tales of the ancestors. I even read the damn course books, just for something to do.
I realized how unusual some of this sort of was, and then I realized that this is basically how it was all the time for people who grew up pre-Internet. I started thinking that living this sort of life is what led to the seemingly crazy amounts of creativity seen back then, and I figured that probably the access to literally everything whenever we wanted was kind of a stifler for creativity, and a stifler for the appreciation of creativity. I feel like people kind of need an 'incubation' period, with low stimulation, for them to get their own totally original ideas, and to avoid feeling jaded by the glut of pop culture currently available. For a while this was just kind of a crackpot theory, I figured It was just my obscure justification for nostalgia of a period I'd never lived thru and wanted to feel connected to through my vague approximation of it. But over the years I started reading about stuff like Dopamine Detox, Internet Overstimulation and Religious Fasting and Meditation and I started think that there might be something to it.
First I read a book called 'Retromania' by Simon Reynolds, which confirmed to me that my feeling wasn't just idle speculation; there were people who grew up in the 20th Century and could directly confirm the difference:
"A while ago I felt a strange pang of nostalgia for boredom, the kind of absolute emptiness so familiar when I was a teenager,or a college student, or a dole-claiming idler in my early twenties. Those great gaping gulfs of time with absolutely nothing to fill them would induce a sensation of tedium so intense it was almost spiritual. This was the pre-digital era (before COs, before personal computers, long before the Internet) when in the UK there were only three or four TV channels, mostly with nothing you'd want to watch; only a couple of just-about-tolerable radio stations; no video stores or DVDs to buy; no email, no blogs, no webzines, no social media. To alleviate boredom, you relied on books, magazines, records, all of which were limited by what you could afford.
You might have also resorted to mischief, or drugs,or creativity. It was a cultural economy of dearth and delay. As a music fan, you waited for things to come out or be aired: an album, the new issues of the weekly music papers, John Peel's radio show at ten o'clock, Top of the Pops on Thursday. There were long anticipation-stoking gaps, and then there were Events,and if you happened to miss the programme, the Peel show or the gig, it was gone. Boredom is different nowadays. It's about super-saturation,distraction, restlessness. I am often bored but it's not for lack of options: a thousand TV channels, the bounty of Netflix, countless net radio stations, innumerable unlistened-to albums, unwatched DVDs and unread books, the maze-like anarchive of YouTube. Today's boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time."
Next, I read a book called 'Stolen Focus' by Johann Hari, where he talks about the importance of 'mind-wandering' a sort of unstimulated, meandering sort of focus, instead of the stimulant-driven, 'spotlight' focus many of us are used to.:
"In my life before I fled to Cape Cod, I lived in a tornado of mental stimulation. I would never go for a walk without listening to a podcast or talking on the phone. I would never wait two minutes in a store without looking at my phone or reading a book. The idea of not filling every minute with stimulation panicked me, and I found it weird when I saw other people not doing it. On long train or bus journeys, whenever I would see somebody just sit there for six hours,doing nothing but stare out of the window, I would feel an urge to lean over to them and say, 'I'm sorry to disturb you. It's none of my business, but I just wanted to check – you do realise that you have a limited amount of time in which to be alive, and the clock counting down towards death is constantly ticking, and you'll never get back these six hours you are spending doing nothing at all? And when you are dead, you'll be dead forever? You know that, right?' (I never did this, as you can tell from the fact I am not writing this book from a psychiatric institution, but it crossed my mind.)
So I thought that in Provincetown, stripped of distractions,I would gain one benefit – I would be able to be even more stimulated, for even longer periods, and retain even more of what I inhaled. I can listen to longer podcasts! I can read longer books! That did happen – but it occurred alongside something else, something I didn't see coming. One day I left my iPod at home, and I decided to simply go for a walk along the beach. I walked for two hours, and I let my thoughts float, without my spotlight settling on anything. I felt my mind roam – from looking at the little crabs on the beach,to memories of my childhood, to ideas for books I might write years from now, to the shapes of the men sunning themselves in Speedos. My consciousness drifted like the boats I could see bobbing on the horizon.
At first I felt guilty. You came here to focus, I said to myself, and to learn about focus. But what you are indulging in is its opposite – a mental detumescence. But I continued. Before long, I was doing this every day, and my periods of meandering started to stretch to three,four, sometimes even five hours. This would have been unthinkable to me in my normal life. But in that time, I felt more creative than I had since I was a child. Ideas started spinning out of my head. When I would get home and write them down, I realised I was having more creative ideas – and making more connections – in a single three hour walk than I usually had in a month. I started to let smaller moments of mind-wandering in too. When I finished reading a book,I would just lie there for twenty minutes, thinking about it, staring out to sea.Weirdly, it seemed like letting my spotlight disappear entirely was improving my ability to think and to focus in some way I couldn't articulate. How could that be? I only began to understand what was happening when I learned that over the past thirty years,there has been a sudden bubbling up of research into this very topic: mind-wandering.
To understand this better, I went to Montreal in Quebec to interview Nathan Spreng, who is a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University, and to York in England to interview Jonathan Smallwood, who is a professor of psychology at the university there. They are two of the people who have studied this question in most depth. It is a relatively new field of science, so some of its basic ideas are still quite contested, and more will become clear in the coming decades. But in their dozens of scientific studies, they had discovered – it seemed to me – three crucial things that are happening during mind-wandering.Firstly, you are slowly making sense of the world. Jonathan gave me an example. When you read a book – as you are doing now – you obviously focus on the individual words and sentences, but there's always a little bit of your mind that is wandering. You are thinking about how these words relate to your own life. You are thinking about how these sentences relate to what I said in previous chapters. You are thinking about what I might say next. You are wondering if what I am saying is full of contradictions, or whether it will all come together in the end. Suddenly you picture a memory from your childhood,or from what you saw on TV last week. 'You draw together the different parts of the book in order to make sense of the key theme,' he said. This isn't a flaw in your reading. This is reading. If you weren't letting your mind wander a little bit right now, you wouldn't really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you. Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book.This isn't just true of reading. It is true of life. Some mind wandering is essential for things to make sense. 'If you couldn't do it,' Jonathan told me, 'so many other things would go out of the window.'He has found that the more you let your mind wander, the better you are at having organised personal goals, being creative, and making patient, long-term decisions. You will be able to do these things better if you let your mind drift, and slowly, unconsciously, make sense of your life.
Secondly, when your mind wanders, it starts to make new connections between things – which often produces a solution to your problems. As Nathan put it to me, 'I think what's happening is that,when there's unresolved issues, the brain tries to make things fit,' if it's just given the space to do it. He gave me a famous example: the nineteenth-century French mathematician Henri Poincaré was wrestling with one of the hardest problems in maths, and he had narrowed his spotlight down onto every squiggle of it for ages, and he was getting nowhere. Then one day when he was away on a trip, suddenly, as he was stepping into a bus, the solution came to him in a flash. It was only when he turned off the spotlight of his focus, and let his mind wander on its own, that he could connect the pieces, and finally answer the problem. In fact, when you look back over the history of science and engineering, many great breakthroughs don't happen during periods of focus – they happen during mind-wandering.'Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that's emerged from your brain,' Nathan told me. 'It's a new association between two things that were already there.' Mind-wandering allows 'more extended trains of thought to unfold, which allows for more associations to be made.' Henri Poincaré couldn't have come up with his solution if he had remained narrowly focused on the math problem he was trying to solve, or if he had been totally distracted. It took mind-wandering to get him there.Thirdly, during mind-wandering, your mind will – Nathan said –engage in 'mental time-travel', where it roams over the past and tries to predict the future.
Freed from the pressures of thinking narrowly about what's right in front of you, your mind will start to think about what might come next – and so it will help to prepare you for it.Up until I met these scientists, I thought that mind-wandering –what I was doing in Provincetown so much, and so pleasurably – was the opposite of attention, and that's why I felt guilty about doing it.I realised I was wrong. It is actually a different form of attention –and a necessary one. Nathan told me that when we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes 'a certain amount of bandwidth', and when we turn off the spotlight,'we still have the same bandwidth – it's just we can allocate more ofthose resources' towards other ways of thinking. 'So it's not like attention necessarily goes down – it just shifts,' to other, crucial forms of thinking.
This, I realised, is quite challenging to the whole way I had been raised to think about productivity. I feel instinctively like I've done a good hard day of work when I have been sitting at my laptop,spotlight-focused on tapping out words – at the end of it, I feel a little Puritan rush of pride at my productivity. Our whole culture is built around this belief. Your boss wants to see you sitting at your desk every hour of the day; this is what she thinks work is. This way of thinking is implanted in us from a very young age when, like Marcus Raichle, we are told off at school for daydreaming. That's why, on the days I spent simply wandering aimlessly on the beaches of Provincetown, I didn't feel productive. I thought I was slacking,being lazy, indulging myself. But Nathan – after studying all this – had found that to be productive, you can't aim simply to narrow your spotlight as much as possible. He said: 'I try to go for a walk every day and just let my mind kind of sort things out... I don't think our full conscious control of our thoughts is necessarily our most productive way of thinking. I think loose patterns of association can lead to unique insight.' Marcus agreed.
Focusing on what's right in front of you, he told me, gives you 'some of the raw material that has to be digested,but at some point, you need to stand back from that'. He warned: 'If we're just frantically running around focusing on the external world exclusively, we miss the opportunity to let the brain digest what's been going on.'As he said this, I thought about the people I had looked at on the train, staring out the window for hours. I had been silently judging them for their lack of productivity – but now I realised they may have been more meaningfully productive than me, as I frantically took notes on one book after another, without taking time to sit back and digest. The kid in the class who is staring out of the window mind wandering might be doing the most useful thinking.
I thought back over all the scientific studies I had read about how we spend our time rapidly switching between tasks, and I realised that in our current culture, most of the time we're not focusing, but we're not mind-wandering either. We're constantly skimming, in an unsatisfying whirr. Nathan nodded when I asked about this, and told me he is constantly trying to figure out how to get his phone to stop sending him notifications for things he doesn't want to know. All this frenetic digital interruption is 'pulling our attention away from our thoughts', and 'suppressing your default mode network... I think we're almost in this constant stimulus-driven, stimulus-bound environment, moving from one distraction to the next.' If you don't remove yourself from that, it will 'suppress whatever train of thought you had'.So we aren't just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus – we are facing a crisis of lost mind-wandering. Together they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world – and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.'
And here are various posts from Quora, about how the dearth of information helped people communicate, and come to their own conclusions--(I wish I could credit them, but I actually copy-pasted them in a Word Doc, so I don't remember who wrote them):
What I think is that our brain is the bottleneck to communication, and not the communication system itself. Meaning that I don't think the Internet majorly revolutionized knowledge-seeking for most people, unless you consider making a hard swerve into various radical ideologies as a revolution.
Postal mail carried letters that were delivered anywhere within your country in 3-4 days. For most communication needs, this speed was just fine (think of today, and how many instantaneously sent e-mails are sitting unread in your inbox even weeks later). We are actually more constrained by the speed at which our brain can handle these information bursts.
Libraries, newspapers and bookstores managed the functionality of web. While Google has indeed brought libraries at the speed of light, it has also made us slackers in storing essential bits of info in our brain. Between our imagination and finely bound books, a whole range of innovations was built, including the Internet itself. Again my opinion is that the bottleneck when it comes to innovation is our brain and not the channel of communication.
At libraries there were other classmates who were sometimes researching the same stuff. Occasionally you had to share limited resources. That could lead to working together and even collaboration. There were encyclopedias. Of course, encyclopedias had rather limited information, which led to people filling their reports with opinions and critical examination instead of blindly rephrased quotes and lengthy reference sections. I think we may not have learned as much, but I think we learned it deeper, if you know what I mean.
And another short one:
"The resources were available in the 1970s to obtain in-depth knowledge about various subjects. Libraries and universities and journals were readily available, but it took work and skills to use them, so the people with knowledge tended to be serious and focused. Today, knowledge is easy to get but much harder to place in an appropriate context because many people using it lack seriousness. Knowledge in the '20s tends to be wide but very shallow."
(I also posted this on Hidden Internet. @h00 told me I could post it here for more visibilty.)
I'm a young guy, so I never actually lived pre-internet, and barely remember life pre-smartphone, but I think I've got a unique experience compared to some of my peers. This is because I went to boarding school for several years, and the boarding schools I've been to were generally low-tech. I used computers either for only an hour a day or not at all. No phones or any other tech, either. All I really had for entertainment was books. They let us watch TV too sometimes, but that was mostly dominated by the whims of people who wanted to watch the latest Marvel movie or music videos, so I rarely went.
Basically what I'm saying is that I was very bored, but I think that kind of boredom was actually good for me. I did all sorts of stuff to occupy myself, some of it was like weird 'mental gymnastics' stuff, and actually quite creative-- basically I 'made my own fun' the way I've heard older people say they did. I went on walks (some of these schools had huge compounds), I read, I dozed off, I hung around my friends, who were in the same boat, I made u rock riffs and disco beats in my head, I remembered, almost in full, songs I hadn't heard in years, I wrote stories, I drew and I noticed that around this time, my artstyle suddenly took a weird and distinct turn, I worked out religiously... Every few days the librarian would get the newspaper and I would read that. I remember I even did this weird thing where my friends would gather around and I would tell, in detail and in full, the story of some obscure anime or arthouse film I'd watched that they liked the sound of. It actually took a few tellings to get it all down, but people were willing to listen. Obviously if we went to a day-school they would just go home and watch it, but since we were all stuck in with each other I became like some village elder telling tales of the ancestors. I even read the damn course books, just for something to do.
I realized how unusual some of this sort of was, and then I realized that this is basically how it was all the time for people who grew up pre-Internet. I started thinking that living this sort of life is what led to the seemingly crazy amounts of creativity seen back then, and I figured that probably the access to literally everything whenever we wanted was kind of a stifler for creativity, and a stifler for the appreciation of creativity. I feel like people kind of need an 'incubation' period, with low stimulation, for them to get their own totally original ideas, and to avoid feeling jaded by the glut of pop culture currently available. For a while this was just kind of a crackpot theory, I figured It was just my obscure justification for nostalgia of a period I'd never lived thru and wanted to feel connected to through my vague approximation of it. But over the years I started reading about stuff like Dopamine Detox, Internet Overstimulation and Religious Fasting and Meditation and I started think that there might be something to it.
First I read a book called 'Retromania' by Simon Reynolds, which confirmed to me that my feeling wasn't just idle speculation; there were people who grew up in the 20th Century and could directly confirm the difference:
"A while ago I felt a strange pang of nostalgia for boredom, the kind of absolute emptiness so familiar when I was a teenager,or a college student, or a dole-claiming idler in my early twenties. Those great gaping gulfs of time with absolutely nothing to fill them would induce a sensation of tedium so intense it was almost spiritual. This was the pre-digital era (before COs, before personal computers, long before the Internet) when in the UK there were only three or four TV channels, mostly with nothing you'd want to watch; only a couple of just-about-tolerable radio stations; no video stores or DVDs to buy; no email, no blogs, no webzines, no social media. To alleviate boredom, you relied on books, magazines, records, all of which were limited by what you could afford.
You might have also resorted to mischief, or drugs,or creativity. It was a cultural economy of dearth and delay. As a music fan, you waited for things to come out or be aired: an album, the new issues of the weekly music papers, John Peel's radio show at ten o'clock, Top of the Pops on Thursday. There were long anticipation-stoking gaps, and then there were Events,and if you happened to miss the programme, the Peel show or the gig, it was gone. Boredom is different nowadays. It's about super-saturation,distraction, restlessness. I am often bored but it's not for lack of options: a thousand TV channels, the bounty of Netflix, countless net radio stations, innumerable unlistened-to albums, unwatched DVDs and unread books, the maze-like anarchive of YouTube. Today's boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time."
Next, I read a book called 'Stolen Focus' by Johann Hari, where he talks about the importance of 'mind-wandering' a sort of unstimulated, meandering sort of focus, instead of the stimulant-driven, 'spotlight' focus many of us are used to.:
"In my life before I fled to Cape Cod, I lived in a tornado of mental stimulation. I would never go for a walk without listening to a podcast or talking on the phone. I would never wait two minutes in a store without looking at my phone or reading a book. The idea of not filling every minute with stimulation panicked me, and I found it weird when I saw other people not doing it. On long train or bus journeys, whenever I would see somebody just sit there for six hours,doing nothing but stare out of the window, I would feel an urge to lean over to them and say, 'I'm sorry to disturb you. It's none of my business, but I just wanted to check – you do realise that you have a limited amount of time in which to be alive, and the clock counting down towards death is constantly ticking, and you'll never get back these six hours you are spending doing nothing at all? And when you are dead, you'll be dead forever? You know that, right?' (I never did this, as you can tell from the fact I am not writing this book from a psychiatric institution, but it crossed my mind.)
So I thought that in Provincetown, stripped of distractions,I would gain one benefit – I would be able to be even more stimulated, for even longer periods, and retain even more of what I inhaled. I can listen to longer podcasts! I can read longer books! That did happen – but it occurred alongside something else, something I didn't see coming. One day I left my iPod at home, and I decided to simply go for a walk along the beach. I walked for two hours, and I let my thoughts float, without my spotlight settling on anything. I felt my mind roam – from looking at the little crabs on the beach,to memories of my childhood, to ideas for books I might write years from now, to the shapes of the men sunning themselves in Speedos. My consciousness drifted like the boats I could see bobbing on the horizon.
At first I felt guilty. You came here to focus, I said to myself, and to learn about focus. But what you are indulging in is its opposite – a mental detumescence. But I continued. Before long, I was doing this every day, and my periods of meandering started to stretch to three,four, sometimes even five hours. This would have been unthinkable to me in my normal life. But in that time, I felt more creative than I had since I was a child. Ideas started spinning out of my head. When I would get home and write them down, I realised I was having more creative ideas – and making more connections – in a single three hour walk than I usually had in a month. I started to let smaller moments of mind-wandering in too. When I finished reading a book,I would just lie there for twenty minutes, thinking about it, staring out to sea.Weirdly, it seemed like letting my spotlight disappear entirely was improving my ability to think and to focus in some way I couldn't articulate. How could that be? I only began to understand what was happening when I learned that over the past thirty years,there has been a sudden bubbling up of research into this very topic: mind-wandering.
To understand this better, I went to Montreal in Quebec to interview Nathan Spreng, who is a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University, and to York in England to interview Jonathan Smallwood, who is a professor of psychology at the university there. They are two of the people who have studied this question in most depth. It is a relatively new field of science, so some of its basic ideas are still quite contested, and more will become clear in the coming decades. But in their dozens of scientific studies, they had discovered – it seemed to me – three crucial things that are happening during mind-wandering.Firstly, you are slowly making sense of the world. Jonathan gave me an example. When you read a book – as you are doing now – you obviously focus on the individual words and sentences, but there's always a little bit of your mind that is wandering. You are thinking about how these words relate to your own life. You are thinking about how these sentences relate to what I said in previous chapters. You are thinking about what I might say next. You are wondering if what I am saying is full of contradictions, or whether it will all come together in the end. Suddenly you picture a memory from your childhood,or from what you saw on TV last week. 'You draw together the different parts of the book in order to make sense of the key theme,' he said. This isn't a flaw in your reading. This is reading. If you weren't letting your mind wander a little bit right now, you wouldn't really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you. Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book.This isn't just true of reading. It is true of life. Some mind wandering is essential for things to make sense. 'If you couldn't do it,' Jonathan told me, 'so many other things would go out of the window.'He has found that the more you let your mind wander, the better you are at having organised personal goals, being creative, and making patient, long-term decisions. You will be able to do these things better if you let your mind drift, and slowly, unconsciously, make sense of your life.
Secondly, when your mind wanders, it starts to make new connections between things – which often produces a solution to your problems. As Nathan put it to me, 'I think what's happening is that,when there's unresolved issues, the brain tries to make things fit,' if it's just given the space to do it. He gave me a famous example: the nineteenth-century French mathematician Henri Poincaré was wrestling with one of the hardest problems in maths, and he had narrowed his spotlight down onto every squiggle of it for ages, and he was getting nowhere. Then one day when he was away on a trip, suddenly, as he was stepping into a bus, the solution came to him in a flash. It was only when he turned off the spotlight of his focus, and let his mind wander on its own, that he could connect the pieces, and finally answer the problem. In fact, when you look back over the history of science and engineering, many great breakthroughs don't happen during periods of focus – they happen during mind-wandering.'Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that's emerged from your brain,' Nathan told me. 'It's a new association between two things that were already there.' Mind-wandering allows 'more extended trains of thought to unfold, which allows for more associations to be made.' Henri Poincaré couldn't have come up with his solution if he had remained narrowly focused on the math problem he was trying to solve, or if he had been totally distracted. It took mind-wandering to get him there.Thirdly, during mind-wandering, your mind will – Nathan said –engage in 'mental time-travel', where it roams over the past and tries to predict the future.
Freed from the pressures of thinking narrowly about what's right in front of you, your mind will start to think about what might come next – and so it will help to prepare you for it.Up until I met these scientists, I thought that mind-wandering –what I was doing in Provincetown so much, and so pleasurably – was the opposite of attention, and that's why I felt guilty about doing it.I realised I was wrong. It is actually a different form of attention –and a necessary one. Nathan told me that when we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes 'a certain amount of bandwidth', and when we turn off the spotlight,'we still have the same bandwidth – it's just we can allocate more ofthose resources' towards other ways of thinking. 'So it's not like attention necessarily goes down – it just shifts,' to other, crucial forms of thinking.
This, I realised, is quite challenging to the whole way I had been raised to think about productivity. I feel instinctively like I've done a good hard day of work when I have been sitting at my laptop,spotlight-focused on tapping out words – at the end of it, I feel a little Puritan rush of pride at my productivity. Our whole culture is built around this belief. Your boss wants to see you sitting at your desk every hour of the day; this is what she thinks work is. This way of thinking is implanted in us from a very young age when, like Marcus Raichle, we are told off at school for daydreaming. That's why, on the days I spent simply wandering aimlessly on the beaches of Provincetown, I didn't feel productive. I thought I was slacking,being lazy, indulging myself. But Nathan – after studying all this – had found that to be productive, you can't aim simply to narrow your spotlight as much as possible. He said: 'I try to go for a walk every day and just let my mind kind of sort things out... I don't think our full conscious control of our thoughts is necessarily our most productive way of thinking. I think loose patterns of association can lead to unique insight.' Marcus agreed.
Focusing on what's right in front of you, he told me, gives you 'some of the raw material that has to be digested,but at some point, you need to stand back from that'. He warned: 'If we're just frantically running around focusing on the external world exclusively, we miss the opportunity to let the brain digest what's been going on.'As he said this, I thought about the people I had looked at on the train, staring out the window for hours. I had been silently judging them for their lack of productivity – but now I realised they may have been more meaningfully productive than me, as I frantically took notes on one book after another, without taking time to sit back and digest. The kid in the class who is staring out of the window mind wandering might be doing the most useful thinking.
I thought back over all the scientific studies I had read about how we spend our time rapidly switching between tasks, and I realised that in our current culture, most of the time we're not focusing, but we're not mind-wandering either. We're constantly skimming, in an unsatisfying whirr. Nathan nodded when I asked about this, and told me he is constantly trying to figure out how to get his phone to stop sending him notifications for things he doesn't want to know. All this frenetic digital interruption is 'pulling our attention away from our thoughts', and 'suppressing your default mode network... I think we're almost in this constant stimulus-driven, stimulus-bound environment, moving from one distraction to the next.' If you don't remove yourself from that, it will 'suppress whatever train of thought you had'.So we aren't just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus – we are facing a crisis of lost mind-wandering. Together they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world – and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.'
And here are various posts from Quora, about how the dearth of information helped people communicate, and come to their own conclusions--(I wish I could credit them, but I actually copy-pasted them in a Word Doc, so I don't remember who wrote them):
What I think is that our brain is the bottleneck to communication, and not the communication system itself. Meaning that I don't think the Internet majorly revolutionized knowledge-seeking for most people, unless you consider making a hard swerve into various radical ideologies as a revolution.
Postal mail carried letters that were delivered anywhere within your country in 3-4 days. For most communication needs, this speed was just fine (think of today, and how many instantaneously sent e-mails are sitting unread in your inbox even weeks later). We are actually more constrained by the speed at which our brain can handle these information bursts.
Libraries, newspapers and bookstores managed the functionality of web. While Google has indeed brought libraries at the speed of light, it has also made us slackers in storing essential bits of info in our brain. Between our imagination and finely bound books, a whole range of innovations was built, including the Internet itself. Again my opinion is that the bottleneck when it comes to innovation is our brain and not the channel of communication.
At libraries there were other classmates who were sometimes researching the same stuff. Occasionally you had to share limited resources. That could lead to working together and even collaboration. There were encyclopedias. Of course, encyclopedias had rather limited information, which led to people filling their reports with opinions and critical examination instead of blindly rephrased quotes and lengthy reference sections. I think we may not have learned as much, but I think we learned it deeper, if you know what I mean.
And another short one:
"The resources were available in the 1970s to obtain in-depth knowledge about various subjects. Libraries and universities and journals were readily available, but it took work and skills to use them, so the people with knowledge tended to be serious and focused. Today, knowledge is easy to get but much harder to place in an appropriate context because many people using it lack seriousness. Knowledge in the '20s tends to be wide but very shallow."
