Complex Numbers

Attention Payment

I've been wanting to share this arti- SQUIRREL!

    We’ve always been distracted  
Worried that technology is ‘breaking your brain’? Fears about attention spans and focus are as old as writing itself

If you suspect that 21st-century technology has broken your brain, it will be reassuring to know that attention spans have never been what they used to be.

No, technology hasn't broken our brains. Endgame capitalism has.

Even the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger was worried about new technologies degrading his ability to focus. Sometime during the 1st century CE, he complained that ‘The multitude of books is a distraction’.

For the record, this was after the fall of the Library of Alexandria.

By the 12th century, the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi saw himself living in a new age of distraction thanks to the technology of print: ‘The reason people today read sloppily is that there are a great many printed texts.’

"But Waltz, I thought Gutenberg invented printing in like 1450" No, he mostly just put together movable type and lots of actual moving parts.

And in 14th-century Italy, the scholar and poet Petrarch made even stronger claims about the effects of accumulating books

Depends how big your storage space is.

A torrent of printed texts inspired the Renaissance scholar Erasmus to complain of feeling mobbed by ‘swarms of new books’, while the French theologian Jean Calvin wrote of readers wandering into a ‘confused forest’ of print.

Calvin was easily confused.

We can now worry that the cognitive circuitry of the brain has been ‘rewired’ through interactions with Google Search, smartphones and social media. The rewired mind now delegates tasks previously handled by its in-built memory to external devices.

Yes. This is a good thing. Unless you want to win bar trivia games without cheating.

Writing during the 13th century, the grammarian Geoffrey of Vinsauf had plenty of advice for writers overwhelmed with information. A good writer must not hurry; they must use the ‘measuring line of the mind’ to compose a mental model before rushing into the work of writing: ‘Let not your hand be too swift to grasp the pen … Let the inner compasses of the mind lay out the entire range of the material.’

That's great, Jeff, but we have a deadline to meet.

The article is fairly long, but has lots of interesting historical bits. Unfortunately, my attention span petered out about halfway down the page.