When you concentrate you also ignore stuff.
(we all concentrate, for work, play, reading, studying, school … we practice it in school … people who are good at it are “good workers”…)
But you call it CONCENTRATION instead of IGNORING because the stuff you concentrate on gets easy-to-see but the stuff you ignore sorta fades away (and then you stop thinking about it, and then it disappears).
The stuff you concentrate on is relatively small. A book. An idea. A game. An attractive girl’s butt. A plan for the future. A tv show.
And that stuff getting ignored is relatively HUGE. Like a whole invisible universe there.
It’s spooky when you think of it. Like a little bit of DIY brain surgery that everybody does but nobody talks about. Like we’re all a bunch of Harry Potters casting obliviate upon ourselves.
And then we forgot that we cast it, because it’s obliviate.
So tell me what you think.
How high are you OP?
No, it’s hi, how are you?
I ain’t sure if I’m high or OP is but this is fucking with me
Just the right altitude
Concentration is always about removal. Concentrated orange juice has water removed, for example. You remove what you don’t need so you can devote more effort to what’s important.
Nah, concentrated air in a bottle didnt need anything to be removed :-)
Which is why we call it compressed air bottles, not concentrated.
except all the space between the molecules
You are in a dark room with a flashlight.
You cast a circle of light. You see a bit of rug, the edge of the couch.
Outside that it’s dark. No information. Not even thought about. Nonexistent.
The whole universe exists inside the circle of light.
Then you see something interesting. A detail on the fabric of the couch. You focus. The circle of light narrows and brightens. The darkness grows…
Now the universe is a bit of pattern on a bit of cloth.
Repeat…
And here’s a question : how would you reverse this process?
Unfocus. Move your head / fladhlight around. Take a step back.
I know how to focus my attention on a thing. But that other stuff, I don’t think I’ve seen actual directions on how to do that.
How do you unfocus your attention, or move it around in a way that isn’t “focusing it on a thing”? Drugs?
I often remind my significant other to participate in mindfulness exercises along side me to take a moment to look at “the bigger picture” what that is for her or for you is in my mind personal. For me I like to just observe everything in my environment, I try not to focus in on any particular feeling or sight or thought etc. One practice that has helped with this immensely has been Chinese Gong Fu Tea. Every weekend my partner and I take about 2 hours to sit and have tea and be observant of our lives and worlds in a way that doesn’t focus on any one particular thing. It’s almost like meditation, which is something Buddhist monks practice for decades and sometimes never achieve their enlightenment. For you your enlightenment might be achieving that defocused state and becoming more present with what’s around you.
Practice with eye gazing. You can shift looking mode. We tend to forget this because our modern landscape keeps us mostly in a narrow gaze
Literally shaking your head helps. Meditation helps. Literally taking a few steps back so more things enter your field of view and details blur helps. Coming into a room from a different door can help. Laying on the floor, bending over backwards, crouching, standing on a chair, anything that puts you in a physically different perspective.
Your brain will shortcut around things it expects to focus in on important details. Getting a new perspective prevents this, because your brain doesn’t have those shortcuts in place yet.
Ignoring the fact that you’re clearly high as a kite - it’s all tricks your brain does to conserve resources. Without any focus or filter, your brain would very quickly spread it’s resources too thinly, and subsequently burn out.
It is much easier for your brain to process a lot of data about a small number of things, than a small amount of data on many, many things.
Ignoring the fact
Bro, you just concentrated!
I work in the field of AI.
“humans are excellent at ignoring” is something I like to tell students, because its computationally impossible for any intelligence (human or AI) to remember and process 24k-resolution-esk information every millisecond. Data must be thrown away, and humans are actually exceptional at it.
If AI could ignore the correct things, we would already have AGI.
Also search “invisible gorilla” on youtube if you haven’t already heard of the phrase.
There are many aspects of life that are amazing, but since they are routine they seem commonplace. The amount of processes that occur within the body automatically are staggering, like heart rate, blood pH, body temperature, digestion, immune response, etc. Everyone of those is nearly magic, but we have no control or are not usually conscious of them, so it’s mundane. We are piloting these incredibly complex biological machines.
I’m no expert, but I believe when people are suffering from chronic oversensitivity to external stimuli (individuals on the autism spectrum which have lower functioning commonly suffer from this) they are lacking this ability you speak of op. They are the nonmagical users to continue with your harry potter analogy.
Given that we must direct and (to a degree) concentrate our attention to perform even minimal actions like reading, posting on lemmy, making a bowl of cereal… I think it’s less black-and-white than you portray.
It’s a fuzzy thing. And changable with effort and practice.
Except that it’s sometimes changeable only with medication, not everything can be fixed by trying really hard
i dont see anything weird about this. its just standard operating procedure for human.
its like the idea that the ‘miracle of birth’ is magical… but how magical can something be that happens 5 times per second.
It is a standard operating procedure for most animals with higher level thinking.
Animals don’t have multi core processors able to handle multiple high level activities.
The fact that everybody does it doesn’t seem to make it less crazy.
i say the same thing about republicans existing.
the fact there are so, so many racist/fascist humans or those will to bend the knee to those qualities seems objectively insane.
Ya those guys are the worst. I’m so glad that we’re us.
are we though? were just bowls of electrified meat in little boney containers with minimal sensory perception. meeat
I’m a sausage
Yeah, yeah, I’m not sure. I’d like to hear more about this attractive girl’s butt, though…
Ignoring stuff is hard for me unless I have Ritalin. I’m very easily distractable without it.
I have a friend with no brain at all. Got it scooped out at birth. Posting on lemmy takes him all day.
Is there an actual question here that you want answered? Or are you just using this sub to shitpost your drug-induced showerthoughts?
I really do want to know what you think.
You have tons of experience with it after all.
So deliver your view.
Okay: No. Concentration isn’t “some kind of magic conspiracy”. It’s just a thing the human brain does.
You need to read less Harry Potter and touch more grass. There’s no such thing as magic.
Thanks. Nobody can accuse you of etc.
But what do you mean by “magic”?
I mean, it’s funny to talk about something like that.
You’re the one who brought up magic. While I respect the “nostupidquestions” mindset, I think the line has to be drawn that there’s really no point in asking whether or not something is supernatural in nature. Because obviously it isn’t.
So you would say that magic is supernatural. Like “outside of nature”.
Or to put it more plainly, “something that does not fit nicely within conventional models of nature/reality”
Personally I would define magic as “physical phenomena which cannot be explained by science”.
I like this definition because it doesn’t exclude things we have simply not yet been able to explain with science. In other words, nothing. There are no physical phenomena in the universe which science is not equipped to explain. Magic isn’t real.
Assuming that any real phenomenon can be rendered by my (scientific etc) model, any phenomenon that cannot be thus rendered must be unreal.
Hmm?
As a DM I 100% thought this was going to be D&D related given “concentration” and “magic”
I think the brain power of the individual human is not that great. You’re lucky to be able to think about anything at all.
Seems like most people need to get high to think about things like this. Interesting.
I just ignore the magic conspiracy thing, but the thought itself is interesting.
Yes, not exacly magic or conspiracy
But my title needed to be comprehensive yet accurate yet bite-sized… compromises were made.
It is kind of surprising how we can come to some truly interesting thoughts/ideas when high. But at the same time can struggle to process simple things going on or have our mind blown by the magic that a microwave seems to be when stoned.
A conspiracy implies conpirators. Did you have anyone in mind?
Think about it like this: There is an almost endless amount of stuff around us at any given moment that we could be aware of. If we factor in the things that are not actually there but we can still think about, then there are infinitely many things we could be paying attention to at any moment.
But we only have a finite amount of energy to do it. The more energy we use to think about one thing the less energy remains to think about everything else.
I wouldn’t say that we are ignoring things when we concentrate. Because to me when you ignore something you are actually aware of it but choose to ignore it. When you concentrate, you just don’t have enough energy left to be aware of other things.
Yes, I see the reason for doing it. But it’s the appalling, universally-ignored and massively-powerful side-effects that I’m looking at here.
It’s like going blind, except for that tiny important speck in focus.
It’s invisible. Whole universes disappearing… maybe lingering in memory for a while, then poof.
And everybody does it. And nobody talks about it. A 360 degree blindspot called reality.
Re your last paragraph. Call it a side-effect blindness then. Maybe a bit conscious at first. Then habitual and unconscious thereafter.
(Ah, there’s another kind of blindness : unconscious action. I did it but I didn’t see myself do it)
What one focuses-on is the key.
Concentrating on distraction, on counter-productive-meaning, on digging-the-dysfunction-deeper, on ideology/prejudice ( 2 sides of the same “coin” ), etc,…
- develops concentration
- in the wrong direction/way
Concentration, however, in dismantling one’s unconscious identity-crystal, underlying one’s ego can be vastly life-improving.
( Modern AwakeSoulism/Buddhism forgot that it is the unconscious-mind’s identity-crystal, not the “conceptual ‘I’” that is the obstacle distorting our Soul/Continuum’s life.
Just because modern Buddhism is ignoring the essence of its own root-teaching, doesn’t mean we need to do the same.
The root-instruction was important! )
The book “The Worm At The Core” is, in spite of being existentialist, and missing/ignoring the fact that all herd-animals have the same death-denial-mechanism our minds have, the key to understanding just how manipulating this denial-of-IDENTITY-death mechanism is.
Once one understands how one’s whole life is just an exercise in pretending-away one’s identity-crystal’s death, then one can get at attacking the false-identity, the identity-crystal, itself, & see what awareness-expansion lives when awareness isn’t shackled/crushed into fitting that identity-crystal.
AwakeSoulism/Buddhism seems to have forgotten that it is the annihilation of the identity-crystal, the “self”, that liberates AWARENESS.
All the disputes between branches of Buddhism over whether non-thinking is valid, etc, whether non-awareness is the goal ( idiocy, that ), etc, it is annihilating/dismantling-absolutely the identity-crystal, leaving AWARENESS that is the goal, and only right-concentration can produce progressing in that direction.
Concentration’s a tool, and it is neutral.
Same as violence is neutral: violence against cancer, against rabies, against parasites, is good, right?
Most people presume that neutral-factors/tools are inherently-bad or inherently-good, because their ideology/prejudice already-decided on that nature, but when you see what-is as it actually is, you realize the eating a bowl of porridge is doing-violence to it, and you realize that painting is doing-violence to the blankness of the paper, then you realize that all actions eradicate alternative-potential.
This is true of mental-actions as much as it is true of physical-actions.
Concentration is, itself, neutral.
Invest it in what grows your Soul/Continuum, & it’ll do your Eternity good.
_ /\ _
I think that what you concentrate on is not key. I think that the shape of your awareness is key, the shape assumed via concentration being one such shape.
Like clenching a small object in your fist. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a penny or a pebble. It’s the same shape.
