CONCENTRATION

Thoughts on this, Veeky Forums?

theglobeandmail.com/opinion/i-have-forgotten-how-toread/article37921379/

Personally, having grown up with the internet, I don't have this problem. If I put my phone on silent, put my headphones on with some ambient music playing, I can read for a while without getting distracted. However I know a lot of people who are simply unable to concentrate, or more interestingly who "need" the television on in the background whenever they're doing anything. The article is another POV from someone who didn't grow up with the internet.

What do you think, is this a big problem with societal/cultural consequences due to new tech. or are people just being lazy and unmotivated or both?

I'm not sure, but I feel the same way, I used to stay up all night totally engrossed in books and now I can barely read for an hour.

>is this a big problem with societal/cultural consequences due to new tech
Almost certainly. There's a reason tl;dr is a well known acronym on the internet.

>However I know a lot of people who are simply unable to concentrate, or more interestingly who "need" the television on in the background
Aren’t you the same if you need music to concentrate?

But people aren’t just lazy, the brain definitely adapts to the internet with it’s constant hits of stimuli. I don’t have it as bad as the guy in the article, but I do feel it. When I was a kid I could read 100 pages in one go no problem, now I reflexively pick up my phone as soon as a chapter ends. It kind of sucks.

Short attention spans. Why settle for long drawn out novels for a dopamine reward when we can get our fix far more easier and quicker from a scrolling through Veeky Forums or twitter.

The modern mind is highly wired for instant gratification. We've lost the idea of self restraint. We cave into the easiest way to get our fix and do everything we can to avoid what is markedly unpleasant.

Solution? Mindfulness meditation. In partiuclar, mindfulness of the body meditation. By dropping all extraneous streams of distraction and thought, be it external or internal, for a singular object of focus, we train the minds capacity of attention. It also cures the modern ailment of lacking focus and constant distraction by always returning to the object of focus when we inevitably forget why we are meditating. You will see a strong resistance to thisnprocess. By settling down and by being more quiet you will see just how loud and noisy our minds are. The echoes of old songs, unfinished thoughts, regrets, chores, plans, ruminations, and so on... they bombard our mind, never giving it the full and deep rest it so deserves. The monkey mind they call it. The bet way to train this mind by giving it a job, that is concentrating on a single point of focus. It's benefits are bliss, relaxation, attention, and most of all, when the mind has settled into a deep peace, the subconscious brings out insights and truths that will capture your attention.

The music is more necessary when there are people talking around me. Should have explained that better.

I notice that when people have the television on in the background, they're constantly switching their attention to it. When I've tried to read in a room with just me and the TV on, my reading pace slows down to a crawl and I have to keep going back and reading again.

So it's a bit different but yours is a fair comment, I do regularly need that help from ambient music to concentrate on a book.

Isn't the act of reading a kind of meditation in itself? You're focusing on a single object for an extended period of time.

It definitely improves concentration. But mindfulness is different from concentration. It's the capacity to know you've gone astray from your object of focus, that is reading, eating, walking, or just sitting.

It's our first defence when when we've become unheedful or unfocused.

It is also an essential quality to cultivate in Zen. Those monks take everything mindfully that even drinking tea becomes meditation. The idea is to consider the present as the only reality. You'll find that as we drink or at we have a lot of thoughts and even put up our distractions. We teach our mind to never enjoy what's in front us. We teach it to oak elsewhere when the present moment is all there is.

Well.. there's a lot of merit in what you're saying, but "the present moment is all there is" is a little contentious.

If I *don't* stop enjoying what's in front of me in order to plan for *future moments* then I'll be fucked. For example if I don't plan for my meeting later today at work, I'll be in a bad place. The present moment is not all there is.

> as we drink or eat
Pardon the phone typos.

Not him but: I think he means the present moment is all there is in the most literal sense. As in the future is potentiality unrealized and the past is set in stone, therefore every present moment is all that exists.

I get what you're saying though.

It's not so much that you shouldn't look to the future.

The thought is that when your eating, you shouldn't be planing your next meal. When you're reaeing, you shouldn't be ruminating or hashing over your meeting from today.

When you're planning for your ftuture, do only that and give it your all!

Ah ok I understand what you were saying now.

Like anything , he's just dropped a habit he can easily pick up again. Well the first day might be hard but it gets easier. If he stopped his online stuff for two weeks it would be weird and hard for him at first to recover that too, I know I've done it.

My solution was cutting off internet cable at home. Now when I need the internet i go to library/whatever. That gives me ability to read/work distraction free at home.

It's interesting that he mentions how the brain isn't designed for reading. Personally, I take that as a relief, since we're not losing any essential quality of our nature by the switch to social media. What is alarming though is that the system we live in is designed explicitly for literate and informed populations.
That's true. Spend a couple weeks without internet and you'll find yourself plowing through all those old novels on the shelf.

I just finished a very satisfying meditation.

Started off with 15 minutes of death meditation where I visualized my death, from my mom finding my cold dead body , to the morgue where they drew blood to analyze the cause of death, to the funeral home where they clothed me and laid me in my final coffin, to the very last moment of incineration to my final form of a million particles of dust being scattered in the wind. It always relaxes me that the problems we create for ourselves are wholly insignificant in the face of the ultimate truth of death.

The I listened to a brief dharma talk on bringing light to the darkness. The theme was illuminating the darkness within. “We may have dwelled all darkness all our lives but it only takes a spark of light to remove it”. The darkness here being ignorance and wisdom and truth being the light.

After that I did a simple breath meditation. I exceeded the timer of 15 minutes and went for another 15. Halfway I felt a wave of euphoria but I didn’t let it get to me and merely noted it as pleasure. Later on a lot of thoughts came, especially thoughts about my sexuality , past regrets, and the fact that I was a very stuck up kid who couldn’t take a joke. I asked myself am I the thoughts in my head? Am I what my mind thinks I am? Then I realize that I was in a tangent. A meta analysis of a virtual reality based off a distraction. I returned my focus to the breath. A warm calmness covered me. At the end of it I did my metta. I spread well being to all beings in the universe.

Maybe. But I honestly think some of it has to do with screens vs. pages. I used to have difficulty concentrating for more than three or four hours on books, but with practice I can read basically all day now (exceptions sometimes - mood isn't always accountable). But I find myself now totally unable to concentrate on the internet. I'll read the Critique of Judgement for three or four hours, but I find myself unable to get through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the same. I can't even really finish a wiki. Literally the only thing keeping me on Veeky Forums is the fast pace.

>put my headphones on with some ambient music playing
pleb

It's not a problem for me to read in silence hours on end, and I've spent most my life online.

what if the greatest writer of our generation is wasting time posting on internet forums instead of putting his thoughts down on paper and getting them published?

what if

Can't you just read something you're genuinely interested in?

Nice! A new pasta

I read while walking, using a kindle. Works pretty well for me, although it might look autistic. Also pretty healthy

*rolls eyes*

I was hoping this would be more literal than it actually is.

>I just finished a very satisfying waste of time.

An empiricist?

Well, let me tell you that I have observed a lower average blood pressure ever since I regularly practiced meditation.

Many studies will also show you that the number of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for executive functioning and willpower, significantly increased over time.