“Focus” is Bullshit

You can't just point your consciousness at arbitrary stuff and hold it

The majority of people today have a problem “focusing” on tasks which they need to perform. They get distracted, they try multi-tasking, they take amphetamines, and they seek out “tips” like the ones being quoted in the following tweet—listen to weird out-of-sync “binaural” frequencies on headphones to change your brainwaves and swill some creatine tinctures!

Twitter poster owen cyclops cuts straight to the chase with his joke that a guy—who we will assume has an ADHD diagnosis—“who has only eaten a burrito and a banana today is about to clock fifteen hours straight playing civilization V in the dirtiest apartment you’ve ever seen.”

If our embodied relation to our material environment is one of finding and holding equilibria against surfaces or interfaces or affordances within that environment, then this hypothetical guy does not have an issue with “focus.” He has an issue of selectiveness regarding which surfaces, interfaces, and affordances he has equilibrated himself with!

He is good at playing the video game Civilization V. He is not good at chores, or cooking.

Bodies and Skill Issues

I can’t watch basketball or hockey because I never played and I never bothered to learn the rules in depth to judge strategy or referee calls. I can obviously tell when someone scores a goal, or makes a good pass or whatever. But these are just little blips of coherence in an overall noise of incoherence that fails to hold my attention for longer than a minute or two. The best part of a sports channel, when I catch one playing in public, is the highlights reel. That’s how I get my sports.

My all-time favourite match. I cheer for the gorilla.

Medication and meditation and omega-3 supplements are not going to magically make me understand the nuances of basketball. Once I get started enough to find a groove, or a flow-state, in learning to perceive the larger picture, these techniques may help me continue to apply effort.

First, I must transfix myself within the world of basketball. I need all my senses, inner and outer, to converge on some new focal point of cybernetic loops. This cradle, hanging in some abstract mind-point between the rules I read, the voice of the commentary track, and my memory of throwing and catching and dribbling a ball, is the incubator within which basketball-watching-Clinton’s-inner-homunculus can grow and develop. It’s a relationship of my illusory-ego to my body, which has assumed the basketball-watching position in my basketball-watching environment, with basketball-knowledge still fresh in my working memory.

The guy playing Civilization V has perfected his Civ5-playing-environment, and is completely comfortable dwelling there in the being of his Civ5-playing-homunculus. He melts into the keyboard and mouse and chair, and his dirty apartment sinks into the ground, completely out of his perception. His whole body is reduced to numbness, and he does everything via arm and finger gestures. He’s so used to just being arm-and-finger gestures that the rest is completely absent to his conscious focus. He doesn’t even realize he needs to take a piss until the breaking point.

Read My Lips

But let’s flip to the opposite extreme. The thing people most-often claim they can’t focus on is reading. If you’re this far into the post, I guess you don’t have this problem so I can speak more plainly: these people probably can’t read phonetically. They don’t have a trained relation to the sounds of individual letters on a page. Their relation to an environment with words in it is different than yours and mine. They guess at whole words, and can only easily read words they’ve already seen a hundred times and are used to seeing.

Every parent in Newham should sue over this garbage.

There is absolutely no point in treating an inability read as a generic matter of “focus.” To do so is a misapplication of an optics metaphor. The four-part metaphor implied is that the minds ability to dwell in a certain effortful state is like a magnifying glass’s ability to converge light to a point.

But when you’re bad at something, the challenge is in getting good enough at it that you don’t get thrown off. It’s in the tedious work of returning back to the task when “distracted” by extraneous details.

And not knowing every fifth word in an advanced text is a pretty damn distracting to the flow of silent-reading when you haven’t learned to break it into individual letters and sound it out in your head. Or break it into components like prefixes, roots, and suffixes.

Your brain isn’t a convex lens of polished glass. It is plastic and dynamic and always changing. You need to learn perception of your environment, just as I need to learn basketball to watch basketball. Focus comes after the long, arduous task of introducing clumsy-ass self into the new environment which you will eventually find it comfortable to dwell in after a few years.

(Yes, years. You’re not an infant with a bajillion neurons waiting to be pruned anymore.)

Focus is best understood in negative terms. In terms of what you’re ignoring, or what your “sensory gate,” as cognitive scientists say, keeps out. Because what you’re so-called “focusing” on is absolutely nothing like the blinding point which immolates ants on sunny days.

Stop respecting the term “laser focus” as an analogy for concentration! It’s bullshit! When you’re “focusing” on a task, it surrounds you. It becomes you. It takes up all of you, like water in a saturated sponge! You are not focused, you are immersed. You are captivated, as in a good movie. The larger world has sunk to ground, sunk to unconscious. It only looks like “focus” to those on the outside, who you are ignoring.

Stop obsessing over “focus” in the abstract. Start interfacing with the environment in new ways, with enough persistence to get good enough to enter the flow state.