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.

  • Dr_Satan@lemm.eeOP
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • lad@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      Except that it’s sometimes changeable only with medication, not everything can be fixed by trying really hard