Paying attention to avoiding paying attention

When I was studying at high school and especially university, I noticed a strange internal process that happened to me. I was never a great student anyway with a lot of the reason being that my memory for the types of things taught in the way they were presented is not very good. I also don't remember song lyrics, no matter how many times I read them and sing (very poorly) along.

What I did notice quite early on though was that I tune out. It isn't daydreaming as it is more active than passive although I am not consciously doing it. It doesn't just happen in classes or lectures where I must listen, it also happens when I study alone.

As my mind tunes out, I find myself hearing or reading the words but nothing much soaks into memory at all. What I quickly discovered was that the times that this happened, it was those very topics that were on the exams and I didn't hold the information to answer adequately .

I did a little of my own thinking about this process as I tend to do and came to the conclusion that my mind just didn't want to know these things. But I did.

The brain is a lazy thinker and as capable as it is, does not actually want to consider very much at all. If it can create a heuristic for a process it will and given the chance, will stick to it until it is physically impossible to do so. This supposedly saves precious calories from a time when fast food and soda was not readily available.

But why, if 'I' am invested in trying to learn something would my brain decide, 'nope, not going to do the work'? The problem I figure is that when the brain meets information it doesn't know or doesn't want to think about, it falls into a default mode. And that default is to save calories.

This is probably why many people click through warnings and fine print while knowing that they should read them even more carefully. Too much work, not going to do it says the brain. Knowing and doing are two very different things as we all know, but do not do the adjustments for.

So, my brain was avoiding either gaps in knowledge or perhaps things that conflicted with its own position. I would suggest gaps because it seems that when it comes across cognitive dissonance, my brain is more than ready to burn all the energy it can get a hold of in an attempt to remove the conflict. Win or learn (often painfully).

So the things I actually want to learn, my brain doesn't. Handy for someone that is trying to pass the tests required to go on and have a fabulous career as a middle manager, which is where I think my degree would lead most people.

I can't imagine that I am the only one who has experienced this phenomena and I am quite sure that it appears in other areas also. Perhaps when we read a headline and entry of an article for example, and as the article develops in detail and places we do not know, we tune out and say, 'I know enough'. We think we have a good understanding but have actually stopped the learning process no far past where we were already comfortable, where we already knew.

We learned just enough to feel like we learned something, but probably not enough for it to be useful. Lot's of gaps still exist but we have decided that 'now we know'. This likely feeds a great deal of confirmation bias dilemmas.

I found that the only way for me to combat this background process from kicking in and affecting me was to actively look for it, kind of like a background scan process. At school, I would enter into the class knowing that I am likely to hear things I don't know so I would remind myself to switch on the scan.

Taking the effort to actually think through this meant that more often than not, I was able to recognize it happening early enough to bring focus back to the lesson and consistently enough to reduce the consequences of letting the process operate unhindered.

Even still now, while listening or reading I hear my mind saying 'aha, aha' as it tries to trick me into thinking it is thinking. It is a wily little process. I wonder how much in my life I have missed because I believed my brain was doing it's job when all it was doing was pretending?

A lot of the training I do for clients is finding gaps in skillsets and closing them. I find it kind of ironic that my own brain is essentially trying to avoid filling the gaps itself. Perhaps, this is why my clients have such gaps to begin with, perhaps we all work in this way.

Most us would rate our own thinking ability higher than average (which is of course impossible) yet, we base this evaluation on very little actual observation and feedback. We judge ourselves on how we feel about it without investigating if our feelings are accurate or, maligned with reality.

Even now, you may have read all the way through this article and feel that you know but, do you?

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]