#concentrate!

[anthonytudor2]

[headedoutleft]

If we can all just pool our vibes together, maybe we can have at least one really good vibe between us

[nanisorezura]

Visit Original Link

[luxe-pauvre]

Concentration is not always so rewarding. It comes and goes, forms and collapses, builds and then crumbles, because there is an upper limit to what players can hold in their heads at any one time. I find that I move towards my upper limit and away from it repeatedly. Peering into the unfolding position, it is as if I am driving more or less automatically, until new possibilities flash before me like bikes emerging from side-streets, and bring me back to the challenge of steering consciousness. At such moments, the edifice of thought I have built is likely to collapse. If I’m not careful, I can spend far too many minutes in this state of perpetual irresolution, seeking but not finding an answer to what is happening, because there is just too much meaning in the position for my mind to process. This challenge of learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions is pertinent not just to chess but to life more generally. […] Concentration is not like a bulb that we can turn on and off with a switch, because we are not just the bulb; we are also the switcher and the switch. Humans are more like thermostats receiving and sending out signals, seeking the optimal ‘mental temperature’ as ambient conditions around and within us change, and we’re often abruptly adjusted against our will. We succeed in concentrating when we manage to convene the dispositions that matter for a task at hand – for instance, our awareness, attention, discernment and willpower – and that is possible only if the right emotions co-arise and come along for the ride. Concentration is therefore best understood as a kind of coalescence. The ultimate aim might be single-pointed attention, but the process of concentrating is more like a method of corralling and coordinating fissiparous parts of our psyche.

Jonathan Rowson, Concentrate!

[royal-loki]

Headcanon: When Tom and Chris fuck they call each other Thor and Loki for fun

[luxe-pauvre]

Attention is fundamentally grounded in perception (how we attend), flow is fundamentally grounded in experience (how we feel), and concentration is grounded in praxis (how we purposively coalesce). We ask too much of attention and not enough of concentration. The recent cultural emphasis on attention risks subsuming too many variables of human experience, as if they could ever be held constant. We have to pay attention with the body, the will, the place, the mood, the memory, the moment, the relationships, the affordances, not the least the smartphone. All these variables are implicated in our capacity to attend, but they have their own kinds of agency, too, and they play with each other in unpredictable ways. The emergent properties arising from the psyche at play with itself in the world include amusement, enchantment, dissonance and distraction: these are not mere hindrances but more like a kind of data to be understood and integrated before we can exercise agency that is truly our own. We need to coalesce in order to concentrate, and concentrate to coalesce.

Jonathan Rowson, Concentrate!

[luxe-pauvre]

In the early 21st century, the position we face includes a cascading ecological crisis (when material-intensive economic growth remains the world’s prevailing priority); the challenge of preventing mass unemployment in an age of rising AI; protecting the truth when lies are easier; more exciting and faster travel; and strengthening collaborative governance in a time of vested interests and spiritual and political alienation. In his Utopian novel Island (1962), Aldous Huxley depicts ‘reminder birds’ called Mynahs who fly around periodically saying: ‘Attention!’ and ‘Here and now!’ to help bring the inhabitants back to themselves and the present moment. However, if Mynahs were to be released into London, New York, Delhi or Beijing today, it’s not clear what we would be asked to pay attention to or for. Today’s Mynahs are smartphone notifications, which seduce us through our weakness for novelty and coerce us through our fear of missing out, as ubiquitous advertisers, in league with psychographic profilers, harvest our attention as a commodity. Our problem today is not that we don’t or can’t pay attention, but that the systems and structures of society oblige us to pay attention so frequently and fleetingly that we cannot in fact concentrate. Lacking an ability to concentrate, it’s a struggle to construct and maintain a coherent and autonomous sense of self, which leaves us at the mercy of digital, commercial and political puppeteers. Without concentration, we are not free. I am glad that attention is growing in importance as a political concept to enrich our understanding of freedom, and to describe the interface between self and world. However, as a chess grandmaster, I feel that the issue has been misconceived. Our challenge today is not that we all have to pay attention, but that we need to know attention from the inside, which means that we have to learn to concentrate.

Jonathan Rowson, Concentrate!