Awareness Archives - Farther to Go!

You Can’t Live Anywhere
BUT in a Bubble

October 28, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A character in a story I wrote a long time ago imagines zipping himself closed inside a transparent bubble. As it turns out, we are all living inside our own transparent bubbles; most of us just don’t realize it. We take our experiences at face value. We assume everyone accesses the world the same way we access it, pays attention to what we pay attention to, sees the same colors, and has the same understanding of basic concepts.

Yes, we disagree with some people, but they’re so obviously wrong. The rest of us are on the same page, right?

The topic of the Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain) this month was imagination. One of the participants commented that he has difficulty creating and sustaining visual mental images. The inability to form mental images is called aphantasia. It was identified in the 1880s but only named a few years ago, perhaps because it affects such a small percentage of the population. I can’t imagine being unable to create mental images! Visual mental imagery is an integral aspect of my sense of self and of how I function in the world. I couldn’t be me if I couldn’t do that.

Several years ago I learned about misophonia, also called soft-sound sensitivity. For people with this condition, ordinary sounds the rest of us easily tune out, such as chewing noises, tapping, or rustling paper, can be deeply disturbing. People with misophonia may have such strong physical and emotional reactions to certain sounds they curtail their activities to avoid them. Many more people are affected by misophonia than by aphantasia.

A few months ago I created a handout with a chart using four different colors, including a dark green. So many people saw the color that was clearly green to me (and my computer program) as black or gray or brown that I changed the shade for subsequent copies. These weren’t instances of color blindness, just different visual interpretations.

And then there’s the experience of anger. A lot of people believe anger to be a negative emotion, to be avoided, mitigated, or managed—certainly contained. But others, including me, find that anger can be energizing and even motivating at times. When I described getting angry about an aspect of my health/heart conditions to a friend earlier this month, she tried to persuade me of the value of acceptance. (If you know me, feel free to laugh now.) But I often experience anger that is about something—as opposed to anger at someone—as productive rather than destructive.

That Pesky Four-Letter Word

Lastly there’s a word common to all of us, and whether we use it or someone else uses it, we assume we know exactly what it means. The word is goal. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz begins one of his chapters* with this paragraph:

Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals. And the first choice you must make is between the goal of choosing the absolute best and the goal of choosing something that is good enough.

Does this paragraph make sense to you? Did you sort of nod (at least mentally) in agreement? Apparently it made sense to him.

You could call what Schwartz is talking about a preference, a strategy, a drive, an inclination—you could call it a lot of things, but goal is definitely not one of them. The definition of goal is:

the state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it.

A goal has an end point. (Visualize a goal post if you can.) It represents a significant change from your current state of affairs, which is why it requires a plan. Once you reach that end point, you no longer need to keep taking the steps you outlined in your plan to get there.

Semantics, you may say. So what?

Well, Schwartz is talking about taking an action that involves choosing something. The most important thing to determine when you’re choosing something is what is your desired outcome not what is the method you are going to use to make the choice. And that’s a lot more than semantics.

So you may know what a goal is and how to set and achieve one. Or you may think getting gas on the way home from work—or making the absolutely best choice—is a goal. In any case, you probably assume others define the word the same way you do.

My Particular Bubble

I can and do create vivid mental images (don’t have aphantasia). I’m bothered by the reverberating bass sounds coming out of speakers in cars next to me at stoplights or the apartment next to mine, but I don’t have misophonia. I can distinguish dark shades of green from black or brown. I don’t experience anger as an entirely negative emotion. And I have a good understanding of what a goal is and how to achieve one.

These are all things I now know are not the same for everyone else. But there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of things I must assume to be the norm for everyone. It’s part of the human condition. It’s also one of the reasons I have always been interested in learning about temperaments or personality types—not for the purpose of “putting people in boxes” but to understand perspectives that are so different from my own.

Your view from your bubble, like my view from mine, is unique. The conditions inside your bubble, like the conditions inside mine, create our personal experience. Rather than taking everything at face value and assuming our experiences or interpretations are valid for everyone else, we might be better off adopting the perspective of one of my former clients, which is:

Isn’t that interesting?

*The subject of this chapter of Schwartz’s book will also be the subject of my next blog post.

A Case for Lucid Waking

September 7, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

lucid dreaming

You have to hand it to humans. As a species, we are seriously and committedly wrong-headed about so very many things. And we have a high level of confidence about our beliefs and convictions regardless of how much or how little that confidence is warranted.

For example, we think we’re aware (we understand what’s going on) while we’re awake, so it isn’t that much of a leap for some of us to want to be aware of our dreams while we’re dreaming. A Google search for “lucid dreaming” brought up about 673,000 hits, whereas a similar search for “lucid waking” brought up about 10,200. I’m surprised there were that many.

Reportedly, the person who coined the term lucid dreaming—Frederik van Eeden—considered lucid to be synonymous with mental clarity. And therein lies one of the problems. Mental clarity is sorely lacking in the waking lives of most people. This is a fact, not an indictment. We spend most of our days operating on autopilot, at the effect of biases, triggers and cues, and mental processes we have no conscious knowledge of. Most of what’s going on around us is happening outside our awareness. However, we don’t let that diminish our sense of certainty.

We’re very good at coming up with plausible sounding explanations for behavior and events. But just because we can come up with explanations doesn’t mean they’re accurate. Our stories and explanations are developed after the fact to create a cause-and-effect stream that feels like real life. We don’t do it intentionally—at least not usually. It happens automatically, with no effort on our part. It’s how we make sense of the world. Our stories and explanations provide us with a false sense of complacency, comfort, and security. They give us the illusion of mental clarity but not much of the real thing.

And it’s from this vantage point that we set out to develop mental clarity—or the illusion of mental clarity—about our dreams.

My thought is that we might want to redirect our efforts toward lucid waking. If, as a species, we developed greater mental clarity about how we operate while we’re awake, we might be able to take a stab at solving some of the serious problems we face. That seems like a more practical and worthwhile focus for our attention.

Mindfulness vs. Habits: Game On?

April 3, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

According to the respective press they receive, habits are bad, and mindfulness is good. We ought to be as mindful as we can, as much of the time as we can, and do what we do as thoughtfully and mindfully as possible. This is a nice idea, but it doesn’t actually jibe with the way the brain works—or with the world in which most of us live.

Mindfulness, the conscious direction of attention or awareness, is a generally a positive thing. Certainly, most of us could use more mindfulness in our lives. Mindfulness training helps us pay attention to our own thoughts, feelings, and experience without judgment. It helps us focus on the present moment, on what we are taking in through our senses.

A few of the benefits claimed for mindfulness are:

Decreased stress levels
Decreased ruminative thinking
Decreased cell damage
Bolstering of the immune system
Increased longevity
Improved concentration

This is unquestionably great stuff.

However, when it comes to habits, mindfulness both helps and harms. It is beneficial in terms of helping us focus our attention on our behavior, specifically on those habits we want to start or change. Since habitual behavior, by its nature, is unconscious, in order to change it, we have to become conscious of it.

On the other hand, being too mindful—yes, apparently there are scientific measures for this—can get in the way of forming new habits, both bad and good. The formation of habits involves implicit learning, learning that is not consciously acquired. We have to let the unconscious part of our brain do its thing if we want to create and strengthen good habits. Too much mindfulness can impede that process.

In two studies of adult participants presented at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, people who scored high on a gauge of mindfulness (and were less distracted) performed poorly on sequenced learning tasks, which involve implicit learning—in this case, pattern detection. People who scored low on the gauge of mindfulness (and were more distracted) had quicker reaction times and performed much better on the same tests.

The very fact of paying too much attention or being too aware of stimuli coming up in these tests might actually inhibit implicit learning. That suggests that mindfulness may help prevent formation of automatic habits—which is done through implicit learning—because a mindful person is aware of what they are doing. –Chelsea Stillman

This sounds like good news for dealing with bad habits. The problem is that when we think of habits, those are the only ones we tend to think of: the ones we wish we didn’t have. But habits are a device the brain uses to conserve precious energy. In general, habits are not only useful, they’re essential. In fact, the more good habits we create, the more conscious attention we have available for other mental activity, such as mindfulness.

So, no, habits are not always bad. And yes, you can have too much of a good thing, in this case mindfulness.

A Mind Really IS a Terrible Thing to Waste

August 25, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

A snag amongst other living trees. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Science is telling us something we already knew—even if we hadn’t put it into words. We have a limited amount of conscious attention, and when we’ve exhausted it on a task, there’s nothing we can do to immediately replenish it.

But we don’t just exhaust conscious attention on important matters or complex tasks. We squander it bit-by-bit on dozens of things throughout the day. As if that weren’t bad enough, we often squander it on the same darn things day after day after day.

I’ve had an annoying problem with my car for what I thought was the past year and a half but then found out was the past two and a half years. It isn’t as though I hadn’t tried to get it taken care of because I made multiple unsuccessful attempts to do so. In the meantime, I learned to put up with the problem. I didn’t have to think about it unless I wanted or needed to drive my car. But every time I started my car and attempted to drive it, I was forced to put my conscious attention on a routine my basal ganglia normally handles.

Recently, I had to take my car into the shop for an unrelated issue. This time I told the mechanic I didn’t care what it took to resolve the other longstanding problem, I just wanted it fixed once and for all. And lo and behold, it has been fixed! It took about a week before starting the car and driving it stopped snagging my conscious attention each and every time.

The experience led me to notice other things I’ve been putting up with in various areas of my life—things that snag my conscious attention repeatedly. I made a list of various minor but highly visible things that need to be taken care of in my apartment and gave it to the maintenance manager of the complex the other day. These issues all resulted from a series of upgrades that were done about two years ago. At least I thought it was two years ago. Turns out I was wrong about that, too. It was actually three years ago.

I began to notice that every time one of these things-I’m-not-taking-care-of rears its head, I have to give it conscious attention if only to disregard it. That’s true whether it’s something visible in my apartment, something I’ve been wanting to do, something I haven’t finished, or something I’ve been needing to take care of in another area of my life. It’s as if “not now” has become the mantra for these things. Compared to some, my list of things-I’m-not-taking-care-of may be relatively small, but that doesn’t matter. Everything on it still takes up headspace, still snags my conscious attention. There are things in life we do have to tolerate (put up with, if you will), but we don’t have to tolerate these kinds of things. And we do ourselves no favor by tolerating or putting up with them.

So my intention for the rest of 2013 is to clear up every item in my backlog of things-I’m-not-taking-care-of, no matter how large or small. I have only a dim idea of what it might be like to face a new year without these things taking up headspace and without regularly giving my conscious attention away to them. But I can’t wait to find out.

Attention Is Essential

July 19, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

Intention is a great catalyst. It gives us something to aim at, a focus, a goal. But after creating an intention to do something, we also need to pay attention to what happens—to what we do, what we think, and what we feel. Paying attention helps us override the brain’s autopilot so we don’t simply fall back into familiar patterns and habits.

Attention is the same as awareness or mindfulness. Since much of what we do is done automatically, we tend not to be very mindful of our own thoughts, feelings, words, and behavior, let alone the effect we might be having on other people. We aren’t fully present most of the time.

There are various kinds of mindfulness practices, including mindfulness meditation. Meditation has many great benefits and is an excellent habit to develop and maintain for general health and well-being. But it isn’t the only way to be mindful, aware, or attentive. In terms of following through with an intention, a practice or a tool that helps us focus on the behavior we’re trying to generate may be more useful. Here are three suggestions:

Self-Awareness Pie Chart

Draw a circle a couple of inches in diameter and divide it into three slices that represent how much of your attention in that moment is on your feelings (F), your thoughts (T), and your body (B). Put the letter designations inside the appropriate pie slices. Then write your answers to these questions:

How do I feel emotionally?
What am I thinking about?
How do I feel physically?

You can write as much or as little as you like. If you use this exercise to help with an intention, the best time to do it is when you have done—or not done—what you intended to do.

Theme Word or Phrase

Come up with a word or phrase that reminds you of what you’re trying to achieve. Write it on Post-its or index cards and put them where you’re most likely to see them. You don’t have to limit yourself to a word or phrase. You can come up with a theme song, an image, a string around your finger, or anything else that focuses your attention.

Questions

Create two or three questions you can ask yourself each day, such as:

What is my intention?
Why do I want to do [whatever it is]?
Am I committed to doing [whatever it is] today?

You can ask and answer the questions on paper, in your head, or you can invite a friend to ask them.

It doesn’t really matter what you decide to do, as long as you do something to keep your attention focused on your intention. It takes many repetitions for your brain’s autopilot to get the message.

That Pesky Four-Letter Word

My Particular Bubble

Self-Awareness Pie Chart

Theme Word or Phrase

Questions

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