Below you will find a distilled reflection on the ideas we discussed in class. Please contribute more if I have filtered out some crucial point.
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Making the invisible visible - paying attention to those elements we might normally filter out of attention; to do so, we might need to make the visible invisible - consciously ignoring the habitual and obvious
The critical eye of observation - noticing changes, differences, newness; do we need to consciously focus in order for our critical eye to operate?
Expectations, conditionings, use - all play a part in how we filter attention; they lead us to make connections, to prime us to things certain ways and to activate certain schema
Our perspective is shaped by physical properties, everything from what space we inhabit in a location to our own feelings, emotions and perspectives (this is the heart of phenomenology - for we experience in full, though our perspective is but one dimension of the innumerable ways of seeing). Our backgrounds, our desires and intentions, who we are at any given time (and who we expect to be and who we expect others to expect us to be) and what we think the situation demands all prime us to attend to various things in diverse ways.
The key is to be aware of how we are responding to an environment, to a phenomenon, of our biases and expectations. Only be paying attention to how and to what we do pay attend are we able to exercise more authenticity in our observations and experiencing of a situation.
You raised a flurry of terrific points about your observation process. These include:
- analyzing while data collecting (Jay)
- how expectations, conditioning shape attention (Kelly)
- direct attention in an abnormal way - noticing the implicit and taken-for-granted (Rachel)
- pre-set patterns 'prime' us to notice things, even if they do not exist (Kelsie)
- emotions may over-determine perceptions (Jessica)
- noticing how the atmosphere/vibe affects you (Jacob)
- seeking out information/patterns rather than noticing them as they arise (Aimee)
- focusing on things that disturb or challenged expectations (Corrie)
- paying attention to others can make us reflect on ourselves (Andrew)
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Notes from the readings worth considering:
memory reconsolidation
- the act of remembering changes the memory
- 'misremembering until it made sense' - making our memories cohere
- "Based on his research, Bartlett concluded that the standard view of human memory – it’s a vast repository of stable facts – was completely wrong. “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces,” he wrote. “It is an imaginative reconstruction.”"
- "Reconsolidation constantly alters our recollections, as we rehearse nostalgias and suppress pain. We repeat stories until they’re stale, rewrite history in favor of the winners, and tamp down our sorrows with whiskey. “Once people realize how memory actually works, a lot of these beliefs that memory shouldn’t be changed will seem a little ridiculous,” Nader says. “Anything can change memory. This technology isn’t new. It’s just a better version of an existing biological process.”"
- from Sean Carroll: "We tend to assume that the brain must be like a computer — when we want to access a memory, we simply pull up a “file” stored somewhere on the brain’s hard drive, and take a look at its contents. But that’s not it at all. Schacter believes that pieces of data relevant to any particular memory — times, images, sounds — are stored piecemeal in different parts of the brain. When we want to “remember” something, another part of the brain assembles these pieces into a (hopefully) coherent picture. It’s like running a new simulation every time you need a memory, and it’s the same thing we do when we try to imagine some event in the future. Everyone has heard that memories can be unreliable, but many of us don’t appreciate the extent to which that is true. It’s not the case that “real” memories are stored once and for all deep in the darkest recesses of the brain, and it’s just a matter of digging them up. False memories — conjured from any number of sources, from gradual embellishment to direct suggestion by others — seem precisely as vivid and real to us as accurate memories do. For a good reason: the brain uses the same tools to construct the memory from the available raw materials. A novel and a history book look the same on the printed page."
- from The Guardian: "Memories are not filed away in the brain like so many video cassettes, to be slotted in and played when it's time to recall the past. Sci-fi and fantasy fictions might try to persuade us otherwise, but memories are not discrete entities that can be taken out of one person's head, Dumbledore-style, and distilled for someone else's viewing. They are mental reconstructions, nifty multimedia collages of how things were, that are shaped by how things are now. Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from information stored in many different neural systems. That makes them curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like ... In storyboarding an autobiographical memory, the brain combines fragments of sensory memory with a more abstract knowledge about events, and reassembles them according to the demands of the present. The memory researcher Martin Conway has described how two forces go head to head in remembering. The force of correspondence tries to keep memory true to what actually happened, while the force of coherence ensures that the emerging story fits in with the needs of the self, which often involves portraying the ego in the best possible light ... How many more of our memories are a story to suit the self? There can be no doubt that our current emotions and beliefs shape the memories that we create. "
adaptation; or, 'why we tune out' - For all of our senses, when a certain input is constant we gradually get used to it
believing is seeing
attention may be different than awareness
motivated reasoning - thinking is like a lawyer (winning arguments), not a scientist (exploring, rationally, the 'truth')
- from Cordelia Fine: "... we humans quickly develop an irrational loyalty to our beliefs, and work hard to find evidence that supports those opinions and to discredit, discount or avoid information that does not."
- from Joe Keohane: "In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information."
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For class S, O6:
- Write down fifty things about one trip/experience/chore.
- Keep a daily consumption or purchase log (for a week or between class sessions)
- Create a simple survey of at least five questions. Give it to a sampling of people. Document their answers in a way that is interesting and readable (like a graph or chart, spreadsheet, pictogram).
- Read Max van Manen "Beyond assumptions" and speech by Donald Schon (pdf's to be emailed, with guiding questions)
- We will return to the implications of 'motivated reasoning' as well
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