Posted by aselimov3 1 day ago
When I was working more vision was always a bottleneck ... Staring at yet more close things would be less useful than staring at far away things
It's nice because your eyes don't need to be open for it, so they don't get all dried out and itchy.
Consider:
We all know about "paying attention". Pay attention in class. Pay attention to the movie you're watching. Pay attention to where you're walking. Etc. It's important and we do it all the time.
Take that to the next level. Pay attention to a thing for a while. AKA Concentration. That's important too. Deep thinking, careful doing, science, engineering, art. It's necessary for all that.
And then there's meditation. It's more stuff to do with your attention.
Samatha (AKA concentration meditation) is concentration taken to the next level. All that deeper thinking etc that you got from concentration, this takes it further. Possibly much further. There are weird depths. And also, you become very familiar with the ways of attention. How it moves and how it affects the rest of your world and what you can do with it.
And then there is Shikantaza (AKA formless meditation, meditation without a seed...). it's a hard left turn. Serious sci-fi. I'll leave it at that.
It helps me focus to have just one active “feed”. And I put my phone away when I work to eliminate that screen as potential distraction.
Where I still kinda “fail” is during natural downtime. Like if I’m waiting somewhere, e.g the Dr office, I’ll pull out my phone and browse mindlessly.
The paper linked to justify this just talks about media that people consume which is growing. But that has nothing to do with the point this post is trying to make?
Your eyes "stream 4k video" anytime your eyelids are open regardless if you're watching a movie or looking at a wall? Why would me watching more videos say anything about how much information my brain processes?
Staring at wall produces little information in and of itself, perhaps through reflection, but staring at a TV produces a load of information, most of which is useless like names of characters, their favorite dresses, what food is being eaten where, etc. You can learn a lot by just passively observing even "dumb" TV especially if it contains foreign content or skills like cooking or sports. Again, not saying all of it is relevant to your life, but that's a different issue.
TikTok I have no knowledge of, but for sure seeing something like "Arab dude wearing suspicious looking outfit playing unknown instrument that I now have a name for playing a tune I did not know the name of but I do now says weird cultural thing that is highly specific to his or her locale but it kind of makes sense because of clues inside the video" is still very high-load compared to "I see a bird there that I do not care about in any way shape or form but I do remember it is blue".
I'm aware of an association between perception of time to number of photons received in the eyes.
These relate to both how much time the events appear to take subjectively as well as how well remembered they are or how long they feel retrospectively. As in there is an actual physiological explanation for "time flies when you're having fun".
There probably is something to also be said for attention too. Increased awareness and attention will undoubtedly use up more 'bandwidth' or 'storage' too.
But a wall would probably do just fine as well.
Show HN: Improve cognitive focus in 1 minute (oneminutefocus.com) 741 points by junetic on Feb 7, 2024 | 287 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288039