attention
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Notes On Shifting Attentions: From Practicing To Performing
“A categorization is a natural way of identifying a kind of object or experience by highlighting certain properties, downplaying others, and hiding still others…To highlight certain properties is necessarily to downplay or hide others, which is what happens whenever we categorize something. Focusing on one set of properties shifts our attention away from others. When Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Zeynep Tufekci On Attention
“We lived in a world in which mass attention was mediated through the mass media, was necessarily public and not largely uniform. Everyone saw the same thing on the same media. Now we live in a world mediated by a few giant understaffed companies, individualized based on data collected on the individual user and not Continue reading
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Books On Attention
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff.Nicholas Carr, The Shallows.Cal Newport, Deep Work.Greg McKeown, Essentialism.Nir Eyal, Indistractable.Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing.Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants.Winifred Gallagher, Rapt.Stefan Van der Stigchel, Concentration. Continue reading
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Right-Click Thinking
Attention is like clicking on something to select and focus on it —Click— but thinking is a click and hold to go one step deeper —Option-Click— and then a menu appears of things you can do, choices you have, more options for action. Continue reading
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Attention Over Time: Slow Noticing
“A ‘bit’ of information is definable as a difference which makes a difference. Such a difference, as it travels and undergoes successive transformations in a circuit, is an elementary idea.” -Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology Of Mind (1972), p. 315 When I’m working on music I often wonder whether I could work faster, but Continue reading
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Silent Music
On the moving train wearing headphones I mean to listen to sounds perfectly apropos to the moment wanting to be moved while moving but I forget to hit play. Continue reading
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Traces
trace – a mark, object, or other indication of the existence or passing of something Music is a space-generator, and one of the unexpected gifts of being a musician is that making music generates a space in which to think about it. When I play I’m usually thinking about several things at once, including moment-to-moment Continue reading
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Willy-Nilly Listening
Though it may not be the most accurate way to describe what I mean, willy-nilly listening captures the random element of how I often encounter music as it accompanies other things. It’s overheard in that loud car that zooms past, it’s background for those TV shows, it’s keeping strangers on the subway at bay by filling headphones, it’s Continue reading
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Notes On Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s “Footsteps: How Running Makes Us Human”
“When running, thinking plays sixth fiddle to sensing–for hearing, seeing and feeling how places present themselves to our consciousness takes precedence over careful consideration.” – Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Footsteps, p. 56 Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s Footsteps: How Running Makes Us Human is a lucid and literary exploration of running. Cregan-Reid is an academic (professor of English) who has turned Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: On Repetition And Baking Analogies In Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”
“We may find it not so interesting to cook the same thing over and over again every day. It is rather tedious, you may say. If you lose the spirit of repetition it will become quite difficult…Anyway, we cannot keep still: we have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very Continue reading
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