Many a times, paying attention means we see the world less clearly

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Avatar for Palasagar
2 years ago

What we see in our world is perceived by our senses. Using our senses the brain interprets signals and keeps us focused. When you start your day, get ready and start for your office or school you might see Bus stop, people hurrying through the streets on vehicles or by walk.

In the distance you see huge office buildings & people. My visual sense represents a rich collection of objects, in all shapes and sizes. This all happens with ease: I just open my eyes and there it all is, apparently instantaneously. It seems like its all easy.

But our brain does numerous computations immensely. My eyes register information about light, and that information is processed in several different systems located throughout my brain, before showing up in my visual consciousness. The impression I get of the outside world (the vehicles, the building, the people) is a very distant descendent of the information that first entered my eyes.

Almost all of the work goes on entirely unconsciously, inaccessible to our own conscious minds. Like for example you sit in a room and keep your focus on a object, take for instance table fan. As you keep increasing your focus on that object, you can notice the other objects are out of focus. My attention is merely making it look as though they are.

Why does this happen?  Attention seems to be one factor influencing this interpretation, but unfortunately it’s still not clear why this would cause a change in the brightness of one object.

Similarly if you on a job to accomplish, you devote your entire focus on it. when your attention slips, you’ll make mistakes. On this common-sense idea, attention is a path to knowledge.

Of course, no one would deny that paying attention to something often helps us to gain knowledge. You’re more likely to solve a maths problem correctly if you pay a lot of attention to what you’re doing. Sometimes, attention can mislead us about the world.

This is not to say that attention always distorts our knowledge of the world, but it does suggest that it might not be the unproblematic guide to knowledge that we originally thought. In order to unravel the complex link between attention and knowledge, we might need to change the way we think about both of these faculties. Indeed attention can misguide us about the knowledge of things.

Suppose you are involved in a complicated project, And are completely focused. At certain point of time you might feel that the knowledge you gain now is much less than it is when you started.

There is far more information around ourselves, our brain can perceive only certain amount of data it can fully process. What our brain grasps only relevant information leaving behind the vague and unwanted information.

On this way of looking at attention, its job is not to get everything perfectly correct, but to select what’s deserving of our limited cognitive resources. What’s most important is that we’re concentrating on the most important things at that particular time. Once we start thinking about attention this way, it’s unsurprising that it doesn’t always get everything 100 per cent right.

What we really need is a way of deciding the point at which attention stops being beneficial for knowledge, and strays over into distorting things. I’m pretty sure that working all this out is going to prove very difficult. 

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