A big thank you to Carla and Aunt Amelia for sending me the link to the Attention / Distraction article I spoke of in my last blog. What wonderful readers I have!

I finished the article this past weekend on a train heading toward Baltimore—I was visiting my roommate from college. I feel like I need to read the article again to really retain everything (or at least absorb more). What I picked up the first time around is that the human mind isn’t made for full focus—even if you’re far away from your computer and simply listening to a speech or reading a book, it’s natural for the mind to drift into a daydream. So we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves for surfing the Internet within reason. That’s the tough part—telling the difference between normal distraction and full cyber addiction. Let me know what you take away from the article should you have a chance to read. Here are more great pull outs from the second half:

~ This is what the web-threatened punditry often fails to recognize: Focus is a paradox—it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic: they’re the systole and diastole consciousness. Attention comes from the Latin “to stretch out” or “reach toward,” distraction from “to pull apart.” We need both. In their extreme forms, focus and attention may even circle back around and bleed into one another. Meyer says there’s a subset of Buddhists who believe that the most advanced monks become essentially “world-class multitaskers”—that all those years of meditation might actually speed up their mental processes enough to handle the kind of information overload the rest of us find crippling.

~The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction.

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