Last week, I wrote about how we don't use our minds as much as we should because it is so much easier to rely on emotion, instinct, and memory. I referenced the kerfuffle about Karen Swallow Prior on Russell Moore's podcast. This week, I'd like to address how hard it is to sustain prolonged use of our minds, a thought that started in my mind while listening to that same episode. Russell talked about how difficult it is for us to focus on Bible reading because it has become difficult to sustain focus on anything. It's easy to blame this on the pandemic (and I'll return to that soon), but I think we have to back up several years before Covid to really diagnose this issue.
When I was in college, professors sometimes referred to "the Sesame Street effect," suggesting that our attention spans were shortening due to the way children's television shows were filmed, including rapidly changing angles and scenes, bright colors, and lots of sound stimulation. While I don't think any scientific research had been done on this thought, the logic seemed pretty sound. And, man, did they have no idea what was coming.
The early internet was slow to load images and mostly screens of text. But as transmission speed increased, our patience decreased. We started expecting things to load instantaneously, correct our errors for us, and show us what we wanted to see when we wanted to see it. We began consuming news in video clips, reading blogs and articles rather than books, and scrolled past anything we didn't care to see. Twitter's character limitations took away all sense of context or nuance because there just wasn't space for it. It bled outside of the online world; I have impatiently tapped my fingers waiting for the microwave to cook something in four minutes. Mind you, this is something that would have taken an hour just a few decades ago and would have required the building of a fire in prior centuries.
Enter the smartphone. Any reliance we had on others evaporated in a matter of months. Take the wrong exit while driving? No need to stop and ask for directions anymore. Can't remember a fact, you don't need to be near a book, a knowledgeable person, or a computer because the computer is in your pocket. Want to listen to a song while watching a video and reading a news article simultaneously, no problem. At least with Sesame Street, you were limited to what the directors/editors had produced; now you could change scenes at your own control. While adults fretted over what this would do to their children's attention span, they ignored what it was doing to their own. And in short order, they handed them to their children and let them take them to school. Let it be the teachers' problem to out-engage this extremely consuming technology.
Some parents did have limits on "screen time," but they implicitly sent their kids the message that screen time was valuable by making it a reward for everything from chores to grades to good behavior. The pandemic didn't help; screen time limitations went out the window. I'm not judging parents here, by the way, because I cannot imagine what trying to work from home while having kids would have been like. My own screen time was enormous as I taught virtually. When it first started, I thought I would do a lot of reading since I was at home all of the time, but I found that my eyes didn't want to focus at that distance after a day online. When we started back to school, I just didn't have the mental bandwidth for anything other than getting through the day. Then I came home and watched Stephen Colbert and an episode of Would I Lie to You while playing online poker. The human brain isn't capable of multitasking, so I was just training my brain to consume things in shorter and shorter chunks. We all did. Consequently, traffic is more upsetting than it used to be, and waiting in line for anything annoys us more than ever. I haven't even addressed that we were being politically stoked at every turn during this time, but our patience for other people's opinions is down to zero.
Okay, we know we have a problem. What do we do? It has to start with wanting to do something. It's not enough to complain about it or think of it as someone else's problem. Older generations like to talk about it as a Millenial or Gen Z problem, but there were a number of people texting DURING the Tony Bennett concert I attended in February of 2020 (a concert in which I was the youngest person by quite some margin). At a family event, one of the grandparents showed me a meme on his phone bemoaning the fact that kids don't play stickball or something. I don't remember because I was distracted by the fact that he was showing me a meme. . . on his phone. With no sense of irony whatsoever, he used tech to complain about tech. They used to say recognizing that we have a problem was half the battle, but I'm not sure if that's true because we recognize it as a societal problem rather than one in ourselves.
The second thing we need to do is make a plan. Choose a challenging book and plan to work your way up to it. I'm not saying jump into Steinbeck or Dickens right away, but make it something worth your time and move your way up from your current reading length from now to some goal date. Treat it like training for a marathon or weight lifting; increasing your mental effort each day or week. Watch an entire television show with your phone in another room. Do you really want to challenge yourself? Leave your phone at home for a day. I promise you won't die, and neither will your children; you will just have to remember to pick them up from soccer practice without a reminder alarm. Do the work to memorize something - a scripture passage, the Hamlet soliloquy, or the Gettysburg Address. It doesn't matter, just exercise those parts of your brain to help you sustain mental effort for the future.
Do something. Do anything. Work out your brain.
No comments:
Post a Comment