What Goldfish Can Teach Us!
Focus
Is attention nothing more than a fish story?
The mind specializes in open-and-shut thinking, simplifying complexity by accessing what it knows to be accurate, force-fitting the new information into this mental database, and producing a cut-and-dried response. To your mind, things are rapidly self-evident. Moreover, once your mind has made up its mind, it believes itself to be correct.
Score one for the evolution of human cognition.
Still more, this fancy footwork of your mind happens automatically, mostly outside your immediate awareness. Again, much of how you process the world around you happens at a level deeper than conscious thought. This phenomenon explains the public’s attraction to sound bites, catchphrases, buzzwords, snappy slogans, and, let’s not forget, emojis.
Do you see the challenge?
Your mind operates on a master feedback loop. It absorbs information and creates patterns or categories of information. In cognitive psychology, this step is known as chunking. Binding small pieces of information together to form more extensive and familiar wholes is your mind's virtuoso talent. After the data is chunked, it is dumped into your short or long-term memory banks. Next, having accomplished its mission, your mind goes dormant until notified by your private thoughts, public quandaries, or creative sparks.
Explained playfully, when new information arrives, your mind employs a “notice and name” strategy instead of musingly deliberating on its merits. Think of novel data as a shiny object. To your mind, it’s just doing its job: receiving data, chunking, dumping, and moving on. The outcome of your mind obeying its internalized code gives you a sense of snap enlightenment. Remember, however, that much of your inner scholarship and wisdom stems from shiny objects.
Let me break this down a bit further.
Learning begins with attention. If something doesn’t attract your attention, by definition, it is ignored or dismissed. Consider the coaxing influence of shiny objects. Anything new or “shiny” has a greater chance of catching your eye. On the opposite end of the spectrum, this explains why things that become routine appear to happen without thinking. This also answers why marketing specialists defy expectations by introducing quirkiness, strangeness, and the unexpected in their campaigns. If something grabs your attention, in that moment, nothing else matters. This illustrates what humans and goldfish have in common; both have an attention span of less than ten seconds. Truth be known, because humans spend much of their time connected to portable technology, according to a 2015 study completed by Microsoft Corp., goldfish have a slight edge in the attention span area, beating humans by one second.
Once something grabs your attention, your mind takes over. Remember the order? It’s a shiny object followed by chunking, dumping, and catching a snooze.
What’s the lesson from above? To optimize your brain functioning, you should mimic what goldfish do. In short, you’re better off exploring your surroundings (e.g., “Look, there’s a castle and a floating tree!”) than nosediving into your phone or computer. Also, it’s critical to understand how much influence digital lifestyles advanced by the mobile Internet shapes thinking, colors perception, reinforces beliefs, and leaves you disadvantaged. The challenge becomes, what do you do next to catch up to the goldfish?
The short answer is to unplug. When you put down your phone, look around, find something that catches your attention, and then engage, you optimize your brain.
Congratulations on catching up to goldfish.
Press the button below to learn more about how your mind works as described in Dr. Zierk’s book, Mind Rules: Who’s in Control, You or Your Mind?