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IHR Podcast #26: Rise of the Attentionauts

In this episode of the Integral Health Resources Podcast, I say “Hey” for the first time in eleven months, then ramble about reevaluating and revamping the podcast/website in the direction of my current foci: attentionology, meditation, and critical psychology.

Media and resources referenced:

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IHR Podcast #24: Delivering your cargo

In this episode of the Integral Health Resources Podcast, I take a journey from New Mexico to North Carolina and back again, then continue rambling through Kornfields and dark webs before rallying to restore my sanity.

Media referenced in this episode:

The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, Episode 290: Jack Kornfield
The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode 1129: Tom Papa

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Tristan Harris and Time Well Spent

The recent conversation between Tristan Harris and Sam Harris on the Waking Up Podcast (“What is technology doing to us?”) was one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to in a long time. Not content to be merely fascinated, down the rabbit hole I went, tracking Tristan’s numerous other digital footprints, including a TED Talk, interviews on 60 minutes and PBS, and the several essays on his own website. And no, the irony was not lost on me that I was compulsively consuming digital media that was explicitly about the ways in which we are persuaded to compulsively consume digital media. The pull of the puppet master is strong, and I’m trying to save my own soul here.

Tristan Harris worked for Google and knows a lot about tech design, the psychology of persuasion, and the attention economy. If anything is central to everything that is important in life, it is our attention. The quality of my attention, the clarity of it, is what distinguishes malaise from presence and vitality, and becoming aware of how my attention is affected by the myriad forces that seek to control its flow and its habitual patterns is perhaps the central project of my life. And while technological forces have undoubtedly been acting on my attention since my time in the womb, I am becoming acutely aware, as many of us are, of the effects that screens and social media are having on my overall state of mind.

As I’m typing this sentence it’s about 5:30pm on a Sunday, and I’ve felt compelled to consume distractotainment via one screen or another at least four or five times an hour since I crawled out of bed this morning. I’ve succumbed to the compulsion at least ten or fifteen times throughout the day, each time resulting in total derailment from the creative projects (including this blog post) I’ve been working on. While distraction is an age-old bugaboo, the problem seems to have gotten worse – a lot worse – in just the past couple of years. Social media has certainly changed a lot since I started using it about ten or so years ago. Remember when we used to be able to control what we could see in our Facebook feeds? Back in the day, one could simply see the posts made by one’s friends, and see them in chronological order. Now, most of what I’m seeing are things my friends have “liked,” which of course are often the posts propped up by Facebook’s paying customers. It is now impossible, even through a deep dive into one’s account settings, to transform one’s feed into the simple configuration of “my friends’ posts in chronological order.” Social media is all business now, and who came blame these tech companies for getting a return on their investment. It always seemed “too good to be true,” in the early days of the internet, when sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were simply providing everyone with free access to their services. They were playing the long game, and we are all now becoming increasing acquainted with the losing side. We’ve been willingly attaching a string here and a string there, and now those strings are being pulled by insidious “algorithms” that lead us in directions we don’t necessarily want to go.

Here’s how Tristan Harris describes some of the symptoms of the digital disease many of us find ourselves fighting off [From Tech Companies Design Your Life, Here’s Why You Should Care]:

We grow less and less patient for reality as it is, especially when it’s boring or uncomfortable. We come to expect more from the world, more rapidly. And because reality can’t live up to our expectations, it reinforces how often we want to turn to our screens. A self-reinforcing feedback loop. […] And because of the attention economy, every product will only get more persuasive over time.

The attention economy tears our minds apart. With its onslaught of never-ending choices, never-ending supply of relationships and obligations, the attention economy bulldozes the natural shape of our physical and psychological limits and turns impulses into bad habits.

With design as it is today, screens threaten our fundamental agency. Maybe we are “choosing,” but we are choosing from persuasive menus driven by companies who have different goals than ours.

One of Harris’s most impactful points is that we now find ourselves in a situation where the design choices of a handful of tech nerds can profoundly influence the thoughts, feelings, and actions of literally billions of human beings. Of course, we are free to choose not to, say, own a smartphone, but how many people make that choice? (I am one of those people who chooses not to have a smart phone, but I feel as though I may be seduced into buying one sometime soon). But can’t we freely choose how to use our smartphones, if we do own them? Of course we can, but when the “choice architecture” is specifically designed to exploit our perceptual frailties, when the full arsenal of persuasion techniques is brought to bear on human minds already easily duped by con artists and theocrats and a million other would-be puppet masters, how much freedom is there, really?

Of course, this game is hardly new. Alan Watts, prescient as he was on so many issues, recognized the attention economy – this system of creating and controlling the mental and behavioral puppet strings of an entire society – back in 1951, in his brilliant and still-relevant classic The Wisdom of Insecurity. Check this out:

Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse – providing constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release […]. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.

This stream of stimulants is designed [emphasis mine] to produce cravings for more and more of the same, […] to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner…

The trendiness of mindfulness is interesting in this regard, because the process of cultivating a deep and sustained level of presence entails a certain exposure of illusion and delusion, which can go a long way to helping us gain greater control over our tech, instead of allowing ourselves to be controlled by it. While Watts might have prescribed meditation as a way to inoculate ourselves against the digital disease process, Harris recommends that we ask ourselves, “what are our goals?” and “how do we want to spend our time?” and then pay close attention to the ways that our technology and the broader attention economy actively work against our best intentions.

Just like the food industry manipulates our innate biases for salt, sugar and fat with perfectly engineered combinations, the tech industry bulldozes our innate biases for Social Reciprocity (we’re built to get back to others), Social Approval (we’re built to care what others think of us), Social Comparison (how we’re doing with respect to our peers) and Novelty-seeking (we’re built to seek surprises over the predictable).

[We must] recognize our holistic mental and emotional limits (vulnerabilities, fatigue and ways our minds form habits) and align them with the holistic goals we have for our lives (not just the single tasks), [thus] giving us back agency in an increasingly persuasive attention economy.

Harris has also created a “non-profit movement” called Time Well Spent, the mission of which goes something like this:

We live in an arms race for attention. Because we only have so much attention in our lives, everything has to fight harder to get it.

The internet isn’t evolving randomly.
We know exactly where this is going, and it will only get worse.

Our mind is our one instrument to live our lives, to be informed, to be present with each other and to solve our most important problems – and it’s been hijacked.

We can solve this problem together, but we’ll need your help.

Harris goes on to give practical advice to change our tech habits, implores companies to change their design philosophy so that it maximizes benefits to their customers’ lives, and he suggests ways that anyone interested can get involved in inventing a more human future that supports our deepest values and best intentions instead of undermines them.

I am totally on board, and I encourage everyone to give Tristan Harris a few moments of your attention (while you still can!) :o)

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IHR Podcast #7: Knowing most about what matters least

In this episode of the Integral Health Resources Podcast, I discuss the limits of psychological science and the role creativity can play in living the good life. Topics include:

  • An interesting discussion between Sam Harris and Paul Bloom on the drawbacks of empathy
  • The appropriate weight of scientific research in guiding personal behavior and professional practice
  • The role of creativity in the pursuit of happiness

Summary:

    Most of us give little (if any) weight to scientific research findings when it comes to how we relate to our loved ones (e.g., in the realm of parenting and/or intimate relationships), instead relying on intuitions derived from general life experience. Yet, mental health professionals (e.g., counselors) are implored to rely primarily on scientific research findings when it comes to how we relate to our clients. Perhaps counseling is not fundamentally different from any other type of relating, and thus intuitions from general life experience contribute far more to effective practice than do data derived from scientific studies.

Here are some other media resources that may be helpful/relevant to this discussion:

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Sam Harris leads 4000 atheists in a guided meditation

This might be my favorite of all the Sam Harris talks I’ve seen to this point. It takes some moxie to ask a group of 4000 atheists to close their eyes and practice mindfulness meditation for ten minutes. Harris was speaking at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia. The title of this talk is “Death and the Present Moment,” and in it Harris attempts to answer the following question (among others): “What does atheism have to offer in the face of death?” Below is a mishmash of quotes and paraphrasing:

Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations. The challenge is to get people to engage in these conversations, given the seemingly irreconcilable differences between believers and non-believers.

What people are really worried about is death. When we’re arguing about teaching evolution in schools, we’re really arguing about death. The only reason for a religious person to care about evolution is because they know that if their holy books are wrong about our origins, then they’re very likely wrong about our destiny after death. So when you say to someone that “you are a fool for not believing in evolution” or “you are a fool to think the universe is 6000 years old,” I think that gets translated as “You are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with God” — and that is a very different communication.

[Note from Bob: A Gallop Poll just released on June 1st found that: “Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”]

How can people make sense of tragedy? Religion provides an answer — not a good one, but an answer that most people think they need. Belief in God is very consoling in the face of tragedy and death. Atheism doesn’t offer real consolation on this point.

Holidays, architecture, music, humility, awe, profundity — this is not what we necessarily lose when we jettison religion. All of that can be had within the purview of reason, and it can be had without lying to ourselves–or to our children, or other people and their children–about the nature of reality. The thing that gets lost, for which there is no real substitute, is total consolation in the face of death. If we want to build a bridge to a rational world that the better part of humanity can cross, then we have to deal with this fact.

People who face death are often struck with the realization or regret that when life was normal, their attention was too often bound up in petty concerns. There will come a day, for all of us, when we will look back at the kinds of things that captured our attention and think, “What was I doing?” We tend to live tacitly as if we will live forever, wasting time on things we don’t really care about. People who don’t believe in an afterlife have a particularly compelling reason to make the most of the present moment.

So what is the point of life? Is anything sacred? Do such questions even make sense? These questions do make sense and there are answers to them, but the answers are not about getting more information. The answer is a change in attitude. There are ways of experiencing life as sacred without believing anything, and certainly without believing anything on insufficient evidence. There are ways to really live in the present moment.

As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind, in fact I think there is probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that, if you want to be happy in this world.

You must know that I don’t want to stand in front of 4000 atheists and do my best impression of Lao Tzu :0)

This is not a matter of new information or more information. It requires a change in attitude, in the attentiveness you pay to your experience in the present moment.

How can we be truly fulfilled in life, given that our lives come to an end?

There are techniques available to deeply explore the present moment: I want to try a little experiment with you. Please close your eyes… [Sam then leads the group through a mindfulness meditation exercise, at about the 29:32 mark.]

We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment and a good enough reason to just be happy here. The practice of meditation I just showed you (mindfulness meditation) is just a trick for doing that, a trick for setting aside your to-do list (if only for a few moments) and actually locating a feeling of fulfillment in the present.

The conversation we have with ourselves every minute of the day comes with a cost. Discursive thought can be useful, but it is also the mechanism by which most of our suffering is inflicted — the sorrow, the self-doubt, the anxiety, the fear. And yes, the fear of death. Thinking is useful, but being perpetually lost in thought isn’t. Being the mere hostage of the next thought that comes careening into consciousness, isn’t useful. If there’s an antidote to the fear of death and the experience of loss, that’s compatible with reason, I think it’s to be found here.

The purpose of life is pretty obvious, beyond mere survival. We invest so much in culture and relationships because we are constantly trying to create and repair a world that our minds want to be in. Religion is not a good way to do this, and so we have to start a new conversation.

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Q & A with Sam Harris

As I continue to explore questions of human potential with an eye toward balancing open-minded inquiry and rigorous, evidence-based critical thinking, no one has been more inspiring to me in recent years than Sam Harris. Especially considering his recent focus on well-being in general and the value of transpersonal (i.e. “spiritual”) experience in particular, Harris has much to contribute to any discussion about Integral Health. While many deride Sam and his fellow “New Atheists” (like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) for being basically arrogant dicks, few haters seem to appreciate the degree to which Harris has engaged both his critics and fans in thoughtful dialogue. I am continually amazed at how articulate and nuanced this guy can be when responding extemporaneously to questions and criticism. Case in point, check out this new video of Harris answering questions submitted by users on Reddit.com:

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Sam Harris: We are lost in thought

The Edge Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.” This year the foundation posed the following question to 164 of the world’s leading intellectuals:

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY’S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

Sam Harris–author, neuroscientist, and CEO of Project Reason–responded with a reminder that “We are lost in thought.” Harris has studied and practiced meditation for many years, and I especially appreciate how he demystifies spiritual experience by talking about in terms of attention and well-being (as I’ve discussed before). An integral study of attention (Attentionology?) is something I’m very interested in exploring and developing, and Harris is a great resource in this respect. Here’s his full response to The Edge Question 2011:

We are Lost in Thought

“I invite you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought. This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made.

I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. Linguistic thought is indispensable to us. It is the basis for planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the substance of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with the flow of thought — that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as transient appearances in consciousness — is a primary source of human suffering and confusion.

Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox, in fact. When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill. But we all talk to ourselves continuously — we just have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. Our lives in the present can scarcely be glimpsed through the veil of our discursivity: We tell ourselves what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, and what might yet happen. We ceaselessly reiterate our hopes and fears about the future. Rather than simply exist as ourselves, we seem to presume a relationship with ourselves. It’s as though we are having a conversation with an imaginary friend possessed of infinite patience. Who are we talking to?

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.

Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.

The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc.

Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.

But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.”

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The Spiritual Atheist: Sam Harris’s “Experiments in Consciousness”

There are so many terms in the English language that fall flat from the weight of excessive baggage and unfortunate associations, but we’re especially hampered when discussing what theologian Paul Tillich called our “ultimate concern”—namely religion/spirituality. You see I’ve already blown it, putting the words together like that with a slash. Of the two, I prefer the word “religion”, because of its etymological elegance [re (again) + ligare (bind, connect) = “to reconnect”]. “Spirituality” evokes images of ghosts and New Age bookstores, and to me sounds a bit wishy-washy and disembodied. But then again, in terms of common usage (and practice), “religion” hardly seems connected at all to the cultivation of rarefied states of being.

For my money, the best adjective we have available when talking about experiences of the farthest reaches of human consciousness is not religious, spiritual, or mystical, but rather transpersonal—a term probably first used by William James, but nonetheless later associated with the likes of Abraham Maslow and Carl Jung. Unfortunately, Maslow’s bold vision of establishing a fully rational yet visionary branch of psychology to explore what he called peak experiences has, in my opinion, failed to live up to its promise. As in the human potential movement in general, once the originators and visionaries of humanistic and transpersonal psychology (Maslow, Rogers, Jung, et al) passed away, those who took the baton lost their grip and fumbled it. Perhaps they’ve gone too far in their commitment to define themselves as “outside the mainstream”, but whatever the case, the field has come to embrace too many fuzzy-minded New Age theories and practices, making it hard for a hyper-rational guy like me to stand behind it. But that’s another blog post.

Ironically, one of the people who I think is doing the best job of articulating a rational approach to transpersonal experience is the “New Atheist” Sam Harris. Harris has appeared so often in the media since his book The End of Faith came out in 2005, it’s easy to form an opinion about him without having actually read this signature work of his. But those who have read it will have noticed his strong affirmation of transpersonal experience in the book’s final chapter (Experiments in Consciousness). What I appreciate most about Harris’s approach is the way he demystifies spiritual experience by talking about in terms of attention and well-being:

“At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition; it is possible to have one’s experience of the world radically transformed. Although we generally live within the limits imposed by our ordinary uses of attention—we wake, we work, we eat, we watch television, we converse with others, we sleep, we dream—most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible.”

So the distinction between our everyday personal experiences and the more extraordinary, deep, trans-personal experiences (experiences most of us have at least glimpsed and that give us the feeling of being connected to something greater than or beyond or transcendent to the confines of our personal egos) is simply a matter of how we use our attention. As Jon Kabat-Zinn has done in his work with mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), Harris articulates the essence of spiritual practice (namely Buddhist-style meditation, which Harris has studied and practiced for many years) in universal, common-sense terms, stripped of religious and traditional associations:

“[Meditation] merely requires that a person pay extraordinarily close attention to his moment-by-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed claims about the nature of our subjectivity. Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his experience with remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a variety of insights that people tend to find both intellectually credible and personally transformative.”

While Harris makes it clear that experimenting with different methods of modifying our habitual uses of attention is very much a worthwhile endeavor, he takes pains to stress that such a project does not, in principle, need to have anything to do with either religious or New Age belief systems:

“The history of human spirituality is the history of our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic plants. There is no question that experiments of this sort can be conducted in a rational manner. Indeed, they are some of our only means of determining to what extent the human condition can be deliberately transformed. Such an enterprise becomes irrational only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical evidence.”

So there you have it. One of the “Four Horsemen” (along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett) of the so-called New Atheist movement spent the final chapter of his religion-trashing opus validating spiritual—er I mean transpersonal—experience! In fact, the book’s concluding paragraph, from which the title was extracted, could have been written by Maslow himself. Well, except for maybe the final sentence:

“While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.”

I’m looking forward to reading Harris’s latest work, The Moral Landscape, as it promises to flesh out his vision of an appropriately 21st century pursuit of global well-being. Now that’s a project I have no trouble standing behind.