DRMacIver's Notebook
Stable attention as a prerequisite for skill
Stable attention as a prerequisite for skill
As is traditional when trying to recover from a drought of writing, I’m going to write about not writing.
Specifically, my current difficulty with writing seems to be primarily… what to write about.
Some context: Part of why I’ve been having “difficulty writing” is that over the last couple of months I’ve been very into mathematics. The difficult thing hasn’t actually been writing. I’ve had very little difficulty writing about mathematics, or figuring out new and interesting bits of mathematics. Much of this hasn’t happened in particularly public places, but it has happened.
I think there are at least two reasons for this, but they happened at the same time. One of them is that I’ve started a new job which very much needs me to be good at maths, so I’ve been dusting off a lot of old mathematical skills and applying them. This has been great, honestly.
The other reason is that at more or less the same time I started on Wellbutrin. My initial experience of it was also pretty great, my ongoing experience is… more mixed, but I think still positive.
Whatever the reason, the last couple of months have seen me with a very strong preference for crunchy work over squishy work.
Something I noticed almost immediately on starting it is that I lost a skill, which is the ability to tell myself stories in my head. I tend(ed) to do this a lot, especially when trying to fall asleep, and within a few days of starting Wellbutrin it seemed nearly impossible to do. I could start just fine - coming up with a premise for a story and starting to tell it isn’t any more difficult, but the problem is that I would lose the train of thought. I’d tell myself a story for a minute or two, and then I’d start thinking about something else.
Unfortunately being able to do something for only short snatches at a time before losing the thread is pretty indistinguishable from not being able to do the thingEspecially when holding attention is the main point of the activity, as it is when trying to use this to fall asleep.
Ironically I got distracted from writing this right after writing that sentence. I’m trying to use a secondary anchor to keep focus, and it is helping, but not perhaps as much as I’d like.
I originally titled this post “Holding interest as a prerequisite for skill”, but actually that’s not right. What’s needed is attention. Holding interest is one way to maintain attention, but it’s not the only way. You should, ideally, be able to hold attention on something regardless of whether you find it interesting.
And when you can’t, the skill usually falls apart. I think this is the mechanism behind the “I can only do things I find interesting” problem a lot of us with or vaguely in the direction of ADHD have, but I think it’s a general phenomenon: If you want to be good at something, you first need to be able to hold your attention on doing the thing.
Some skills eventually you grow out of needing attention on them and can do by rote, but most things will go better if you can pay attention to them.
This is true even for things that you can do without paying attention to. I’ve noticed, for example, that Pilates goes much better for me if I’m paying attention to the actual physical act I’m performing and how it feels than it does if I’m designing algorithms in my head. I’m often designing algorithms in my head anyway, so I’m not all that good at Pilates. I can still do the exercises, but not necessarily well. I do it anyway because doing Pilates badly is better than not doing Pilates, but the difference is noticeable.
I think part of the problem with the storytelling, and the writing, is that as my brain went maths brained, there was no longer a thread of interest holding my attention on the task, and as a result my mind wanders off the idea whenever I try.
I think there’s a motivation component to it too. Certainly part of the problem is that I’m choosing not to write rather than just not writing. But, at least in theory, I can solve that problem.
I don’t have to want to write in order to write, but also it’s more complicated than that. I do want to write, I just don’t find any particular thing I want to write appealling, but that doesn’t mean I won’t appreciate the result in the end. I could choose to write, I just need to be able to maintain the thread while doing so.
I don’t quite know how one cultivates this skill of holding attention without interest. Maybe it’s something meditation should help with (it certainly sounds like it should be), but I suspect also it’s just a case of doing the thing until it feels natural, so let’s see if some more daily writing fixes it.