Clarity for Teachers: Day 40
‘Following distractions is a waste of your life. Improve your concentration.’
I’m trying to concentrate on the serious subject of distraction, when my mind wanders to an image of a toy. I don’t know what they are called, but maybe you’ve seen one — an inflatable ball which has a smaller ball inside, so that it doesn’t just bounce, but will dodge suddenly and unpredictably off course. A small child or a dog can exhaust themselves with delight chasing one of these around. Following distractions can be brilliant fun. I should know, I’ve followed a few.
When I was a kid, the teachers would say to my parents that it often looked as though I wasn’t concentrating — I’d be staring out the window, or whatever — but when they asked me a question, they would realise that I had been. My guess is I just had them fooled: I could rewind in my head and half remember that thing they just said that I’d half paid attention to, and mostly that was enough to satisfy them. It’s a trick that works less well in adult life.
Concentration is ‘the action of bringing to a centre’. To concentrate is to gather the attention and centre it, rather than having it dragged all over the place by distractions. But now I’m thinking about toys again.
The SOMA cube is made up of nine pieces that look like they escaped from a game of Tetris. The cube was invented by the Danish poet and scientist Piet Hein while he was sitting in a lecture on quantum mechanics — I don’t know if that counts as getting distracted? — but it made its own entry in the scientific literature through its use in psychology experiments. Most famously, an experiment first carried out in 1969 by Edward Deci, looking at the relationship between money and motivation.
Two groups of students were asked to solve puzzles involving the cube; one group was paid for each solution they came up with, the other wasn’t. When the time was up, they were left apparently alone in the room, while the researchers observed them through a one-way mirror. Those who had been paid during the session were less likely to go on playing with the puzzle than those who hadn’t.
The conclusion of the Deci study was that external rewards tend to undermine intrinsic motivation: when you get paid to do a task, it starts to feel like a chore, even when it might otherwise have been fun. In later work, Deci and colleagues describe this in terms of a shift in the ‘perceived locus of motivation’. The reason why you are engaged in this activity no longer seems to come from within you, but from elsewhere, and there is a falling away of pleasure and meaning in the activity itself.
The wastefulness of life in modern societies, it seems to me, has to do with a scarcity of intrinsic pleasure and meaning, and this has to do with how much of the activity going on within these societies is being done because someone is being paid to do it.
Today’s advice begins with a warning to be careful what you follow, if you don’t want to end up wasting your life. Following, like motivation, has to do with movement and direction. To have your attention centred is to know why you are doing what you are doing, to follow a direction that comes from within you. To be distracted is to be chasing around, instead, led by whatever catches your drifting attention, like a dog chasing after a madly bouncing ball. As a game, it can be fun, but it’s no way to shape a life.
Västerås, 28 April, 2020
This is the fortieth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
