"Pay attention" is a schoolhouse mantra, repeated at every level of school in every class (or at least in every class I was ever in, hmmm). But what does that even mean? Literally, I guess it means to be attentive to what is going on in the class, meaning that your mind is focused on the class rather than your bodily functions (tired, hungry, and in the case of high school boys, well, you know). OK, so how do you do that? It seems to entail an ability to block out most of the flood of information your nervous system is receiving at any given moment. I supposedly learned how to do it in what I would imagine is a fairly common way, I was reprimanded for not paying attention until my behavior fit a pattern that the teacher found acceptable. So I learned very well what paying attention isn't and how to avoid those behaviors. And that was good enough.
It was good enough at that time anyway. It's hard to imagine it now, but the world was much less distracting 40+ years ago than it is presently. Actually, it's probably impossible for today's generation of teenagers and young adults to conceive of what the world was like, unless they read some contemporary fiction from the middle third of the 20th century, before the technological revolution that fuels today's distractions. Take a look at what the people in those books are doing with their time. Notice anybody doing more than one thing at a time? The vast majority of activity was hanging out/talking/playing with family and friends, reading, occasionally listening to the radio or watching TV or talking on the telephone (teenagers were notorious for hogging the family's one telephone), maybe traveling, and solving mysteries.
Paying attention is, I think, focusing all of your thoughts and senses on one thing. Ponder that for a moment and think about how difficult it is. It's hard enough to do, even in a classroom, an environment designed with the goal of helping people pay attention. How about in the street, in your car, in your house? How often do you have total focus on just one thing?
The buzz today is multitasking. The busy folk among us have lives defined by multitasking. Here's the problem, though. Multitasking is bad for you. And we're bad at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Kids today are so much better at multitasking. Balderdash, I say. Maybe they're better, but they're still lousy at it. The human brain wasn't designed to do it and it doesn't do it well. If you've tried to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time, you know it's not easy to get your brain to control 2 things at once. So what makes you think you can study for that test while you're watching TV? You can't. I'm sorry, even if you think you can, you can't. Any time you are multitasking you are not really paying attention to anything you are doing.
The seminal invention in the history of multitasking is the portable stereo. The first one, a Walkman cassette player, was introduced in the 70's. When I got one, for years I thought, "Wow, it's like I can give my life a soundtrack." Portable stereos (I guess now you might as well say iPods) allow you to do almost anything while listening to music. While that may seem great, it enriches the experience of neither the music listening or anything else you're doing. Why do you need to need to listen to music while you're running, for example? If running is so unpleasant, then why are you doing it? And if you respond, “Because it's boring,” what do you think I'll respond? I’ll say, only if you aren’t paying attention.
Honestly, I can’t understand how anyone can find running boring. There’s a flood of stimuli when you’re running, both from your body and the surroundings, (and I’m talking about actual running, not running on a treadmill, which is only pretend running and you can do whatever you want when you’re playing pretend). So listening to music while running means partially substituting an imposed set of stimuli for what’s really there, which keeps you from being fully engaged in either the music or the running.
I’ve you’ve been running while listening intensely to music, how would you even answer the question, what were you just doing, running or listening to music? You can’t possibly get the full experience of both, which is the same as not getting the full experience of either. Is that okay? I guess, because running isn’t that important. But it's not just running, it's everything. The problem is that if you train yourself to not be fully engaged in one thing, it can start to leak into parts of your life where it doesn’t belong and can be truly damaging, like dealing with other people.
And since the single most important skill in dealing with other people is listening, and since listening requires paying attention, that brings us back to the original topic, the importance of listening. To be continued.
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