+- kanji koohii FORUM (http://forum.koohii.com)
+-- Forum: Learning Japanese (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-4.html)
+--- Forum: Off topic (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-13.html)
+--- Thread: Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! (/thread-5603.html)
Pages:
1
2
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - ahibba - 2010-05-11
By Win Wenger
At this moment, as you start to read this, you are holding your breath.
Gotcha!? ?
As you breathed, you moved your attention to this next sentence. OR, you moved attention to other things and then breathed again before moving it to this next sentence.
Gotcha yet?
Not because this brief is so breath-taking (well, maybe), but because your breath paces and punctuates your attention and awareness. Whenever you start to give attention to any awareness of stimulus, you hold your breath! When you breathe again, that is part of a pattern where you are releasing your attention from the one focus of awareness and moving it on to wherever it will alight next.
You can override this pattern and hold your attention (and not just merely fixate your eyes! ?did you? Gotcha again!) on one thing through several breaths, but it takes an effort. Normally, you don't go around making that effort, and neither do others.
Your breath is pace-maker for your attention, just as your child's breath is pace-maker for his or her attention. Not all instances of hyperactivity and short attention-span are caused by being short of breath, nor all reading problems. Being short of breath, an easily corrected condition, is virtually guaranteed to cause these, however.
This breath pace-making effect is not an absolute. You can override this pace-making effect with some effort. For example, hold in mind (not just your eyes at one point! ?gotcha!) the thought, " ?Holding in mind this one thought while breathing several times."
As you can see, you can override the interrupter effect, and keep one focus of attention in mind through several normal breaths (though some readers may have needed several tries before being able to do so). Also when driving a car there
may have been occasions ?but watch closely what your mind is actually doing virtually the whole time you are driving with your attention ostensibly on the road!
But it does take an effort to override the interrupter effect and even with the effort you just made, with the beginning of one of your next breaths you did find that your attention had moved on. ?And normally, neither you nor your child nor anyone else goes around making that effort. Normally, there is nothing to prevent your breath from playing its absolute role as the pacemaker for your awareness span.
You can easily test the effects of your breathing on your awareness another way, by going out for a run (or any fairly aerobic activity) which leaves you panting, short of breath. Until your breathing settles down, how hard or easy is it for you to give your sustained attention to anything, or to do any detailed work?
Even at the start of a sustained physical effort such as lifting a heavy load, you hold your breath! Doing anything, even physical, which requires concentrated attention, you repeatedly hold your breath, while trying to fix your toaster or car engine. Some people, whose concentrated effort outruns their breathing span, even become dizzy from this effect.
Check this phenomenon out by watching your own responses, then check it out on innocents around you. Fun . . . . but there is also a very serious side to this.
Normally, there is nothing to prevent your breath from playing its absolute role as the pacemaker for your attention and awareness span. So the normal span of your breath is critical to how well your mental faculties can function. This effect is so strong, in fact, it can change the course of national or world affairs!
A Breathtaking Impact On American Foreign Policy
For example: Former Secretary of State George Schultz, despite his high intelligence was remarkably ineffective in office under President Reagan his first few years. Why? ?Look at recordings of his TV interviews from those early years. He was always very short of breath, and often had to pant before he could even finish a sentence. Schultz could not muster and defend his position during Cabinet meetings. ?Nor did Schultz have the awareness span needed, despite his unquestioned intelligence, to formulate any sort of coherent foreign policy.
You have noticed that even some of your brightest friends and colleagues seem unable to make full use of their intelligence. You know from other things that they are
bright, yet they commit gaffes and oversights, or simply fail too often to see the obvious. Why? Why are some impatient with the very detail work which would enable them to succeed in their efforts? Why are so many of even the brightest, uncomfortable at reading? Well, try this one on for size:?
The Impact Of Your Breathing On Your Language Skills
If your breathing breaks your attention sooner than you can finish reading a sentence, it is hard for you to extract sense and meaning from that sentence, even if it is an easy in content as this sentence is, because before the thought it expresses to you is complete, your attention has veered away with your next breath and broken off the communication from page to you and it takes you considerable extra effort to veer back and pick back up the old focus of attention and hold that attention on this very simple sentence for long enough for the entire thought expressed in this sentence to take form in your mind!
If your breath-span is shorter than many of the sentences you read, you can see why your reading is in trouble. This may be handicapping your reading in the technical journals which you need to keep abreast of your field and career.
Smoking may be hazardous to your intellect, not just to your life and physical health!
And when you look at some of our pitifully thin-chested younger generation who have even far less reading comprehension . . . . .
An Easy Cure For The Problem:
http://www.winwenger.com/ebooks/guaran3.htm
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - bizarrojosh - 2010-05-11
edit; must not post while drunk!!!!
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Surreal - 2010-05-11
"Not all instances of hyperactivity and short attention-span are caused by being short of breath, nor all reading problems. Being short of breath, an easily corrected condition, is virtually guaranteed to cause these, however."
What.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - bodhisamaya - 2010-05-11
I have a short attention span, so I only read the title of this thread and nothing of the actual post. ごめんなさい！
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Mcjon01 - 2010-05-11
bodhisamaya Wrote:I have a short attention span, so I only read the title of this thread and nothing of the actual post. ごめんなさい！tl;dr
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - wccrawford - 2010-05-11
I guess I'm abnormal then because I breath regularly and it doesn't affect my ability to do other things.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Smackle - 2010-05-11
I can't even breathe while I'm breathing.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - ahibba - 2010-05-11
Results on 21-Day Underwater Swimming Protocol
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Jarvik7 - 2010-05-11
Stage 2: walk while chewing bubblegum
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - ahibba - 2010-05-11
Jarvik7 Wrote:Stage 2: walk while chewing bubblegumBBC NEWS - Chew your way to a better brain
NewScientist - Chewing Gum Improves Memory
Chewing Gum Expands The Mind
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Asriel - 2010-05-11
Quote:If your breathing breaks your attention sooner than you can finish reading a sentence, it is hard for you to extract sense and meaning from that sentence, even if it is an easy in content as this sentence is, because before the thought it expresses to you is complete, your attention has veered away with your next breath and broken off the communication from page to you and it takes you considerable extra effort to veer back and pick back up the old focus of attention and hold that attention on this very simple sentence for long enough for the entire thought expressed in this sentence to take form in your mind!I'm pretty sure that first one is longer than most sentences I read.
If your breath-span is shorter than many of the sentences you read, you can see why your reading is in trouble.
Although I'm not sure if the trouble is in me not holding my breath while reading, or if it's in the author's inability to write regularly-sized, comprehensible sentences.
I'm not going to go in and check if it's a run-on, grammar, blah blah, but Christ, that's a long sentence.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Mcjon01 - 2010-05-11
Asriel Wrote:I imagine that the author of this article noticed that everyone he talks to ends up with the same glazed, uncomprehending stare on their faces, but rather than coming to the conclusion that he's just boring and long-winded, he came up with this lame sentence-breathing theory. He probably thinks he's a genius for it, too.Quote:If your breathing breaks your attention sooner than you can finish reading a sentence, it is hard for you to extract sense and meaning from that sentence, even if it is an easy in content as this sentence is, because before the thought it expresses to you is complete, your attention has veered away with your next breath and broken off the communication from page to you and it takes you considerable extra effort to veer back and pick back up the old focus of attention and hold that attention on this very simple sentence for long enough for the entire thought expressed in this sentence to take form in your mind!I'm pretty sure that first one is longer than most sentences I read.
If your breath-span is shorter than many of the sentences you read, you can see why your reading is in trouble.
Although I'm not sure if the trouble is in me not holding my breath while reading, or if it's in the author's inability to write regularly-sized, comprehensible sentences.
I'm not going to go in and check if it's a run-on, grammar, blah blah, but Christ, that's a long sentence.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - jettyke - 2010-05-11
The way the article was written makes me think the author was way too confident in his theory.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Jarvik7 - 2010-05-11
I will soon be bringing to market a USB accessory for anki that continually forces air into your lungs at high pressure.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - jettyke - 2010-05-11
Jarvik7 Wrote:I will soon be bringing to market a USB accessory for anki that continually forces air into your lungs at high pressure.Haha, I want one!!!
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Raschaverak - 2010-05-11
ahibba Wrote:Yeah, then wouldn't it be better to chew a gum while trying to hold your breath under water?Jarvik7 Wrote:Stage 2: walk while chewing bubblegumBBC NEWS - Chew your way to a better brain
NewScientist - Chewing Gum Improves Memory
Chewing Gum Expands The Mind
Synergy or something
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - ファブリス - 2010-05-14
There's definitely something to breathing and attention.
Didn't someone post a YouTube vid of a great Japanese inventor? He invented floppy disks, the first walkman and so on. He touched the subject a little bit in the interview. He said he had underwater sessions..
In huge part of physical yoga is dedicated to expanding the lungs and breathing capacity, and countless breathing techniques..
According to B.K.S Iyengar (who is considered one of the foremost yoga teachers in the world) "the mind is the king of the senses, and the breath is the kind of the mind". Watch him pulling in the longest breath you may ever see (and he didn't train underwater AFAIK)
PS: so this "discovery" is at least several thousand years old ...
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Offshore - 2010-05-14
Interesting thread. Although I must admit when I saw the title and scrolled up to read the OP, I was shocked that nest0r didn't start this. O_o
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - auxetoiles - 2010-05-14
I didn't even finish the article, because it was making me breathe irregularly
All I managed to get from it was that the fact that I hold my breath when I'm concentrating (sometimes to the point where I actually become dizzy before I notice I'm doing it) is slightly lower on the weirdo scale than I've always thought. Huh.Now I just need something to distract me from concentrating on my breathing patterns...
jettyke Wrote:Same here... uh, so long as it doesn't involve intubation.Jarvik7 Wrote:I will soon be bringing to market a USB accessory for anki that continually forces air into your lungs at high pressure.Haha, I want one!!!
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - nest0r - 2010-05-14
Offshore Wrote:Interesting thread. Although I must admit when I saw the title and scrolled up to read the OP, I was shocked that nest0r didn't start this. O_oThe article seemed like pseudoscientific BS to me, as if I would post something like that. ^_^
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - ahibba - 2010-05-14
ファブリス Wrote:Didn't someone post a YouTube vid of a great Japanese inventor? He invented floppy disks, the first walkman and so on. He touched the subject a little bit in the interview. He said he had underwater sessions..Yes, one of Dr. Yoshiro NakaMats' best secrets for generating awesome creative ideas he describes humorously as: "swim till almost die!"
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Jarvik7 - 2010-05-14
He is also borderline insane
possible side effect?
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - ahibba - 2010-05-14
BPD is not a sign of insanity, even Hitler had a BPD.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Jarvik7 - 2010-05-14
Nakamats is worse than Hitler? I didn't see the thread going in that direction.
Awareness and attention-span: A Breathtaking Discovery! - Evil_Dragon - 2010-05-14
NakaMats invented Love Jet. He's an okay-guy.