Innehållsförteckning för Issue 39 - March/April 2023 från New Philosopher

“It is essential for you to remember that the attention you give to any action should be in due proportion to its worth.”— Marcus Aurelius If I blew a trumpet in your ear while you were reading this, I’d be distracting you. You wouldn’t get a sentence straight in your mind. Your brain would be engaged in a juggling act – to read while simultaneously being subjected to the deep brassy notes of the trumpet. In today’s technological world of infinite distractions, how much of your life is experienced with the equivalent of trumpets sounding? A recent study on office workers found that workers average 47 seconds on any screen before switching to another screen. Workers check their inbox on average 77 times a day, and, over the course of…

“All the misfortunes of men arise from one thing only, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own room,” wrote Blaise Pascal. The French philosopher could well have added to the end of his quote the words: “without consuming information”. Pascal was referring to our aversion to being alone with our thoughts. He writes: “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.” Already, by the 17th century, intellectuals were wary of the volume of information circulating in society, most notably due to the proliferation of books. French philosopher René Descartes was one such critic, writing: “Even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things…

Is the possibility of becoming your ‘ideal self ’ just wishful thinking? One woman decided to find out, and takes us on a spellbinding journey into the world of becoming yourself. What is a meaningful life? What does it mean to flourish? Antonia Case, prior to co-founding New Philosopher and Womankind magazines, quit her corporate job in the city and travelled across the world in search of meaning. In a quest to find answers, she turned off the soundtrack of the media, rid herself of technology, and with little more than books as carry-on luggage, she journeyed from Buenos Aires to Paris, from Barcelona to Byron Bay, seeking guidance from ancient philosophers and modern-day psychologists on what makes a good life, and what makes a life worth living. Along the…

Stefan van der Stigchel is a professor in Cognitive Psychology at the department of Experimental Psychology at Utrecht University and principal investigator of the research group AttentionLab. For his research on visual attention, he received a VENI and VIDI NWO grant, and recently an ERC Consolidator Grant and VICI NWO grant. Stefan is author of the popular science book How Attention Works in January 2019. His second book Concentration: Staying Focused in Times of Distraction was released in the Netherlands in November 2018 and published by MIT Press in 2020. A third book, Grip op je aandacht [Grab Your Attention], was published in 2020. His books have further been translated into Russian, Korean, and Chinese. Zan Boag: In your book, Concentration: Staying Focused in Times of Distraction, it’s interesting that…

Last year, I attended a conference at a country house hotel that boasted a slightly battered baby grand in its lounge. From the moment I saw it, I was desperate to play – and I found my moment during an afternoon pause between sessions. I should have been networking, mingling, sharing ideas. Instead I sneaked to the lounge and started to improvise (very) loosely in the style of Oscar Peterson. I kept doing so until, eventually, it became clear that the lounge was about to be used for an event, at which point I crept away. I’m a decent pianist, but nothing special by the standards of those who make music for a living. So why are pianos important to me? One reason is that I find making music much…

Here is a place of disaffectionTime before and time afterIn a dim light: neither daylightInvesting form with lucid stillnessTurning shadow into transient beautyWith slow rotation suggesting permanenceNor darkness to purify the soulEmptying the sensual with deprivationCleansing affection from the temporal. Neither plenitude nor vacancy.Only a flickerOver the strained time-ridden facesDistracted from distraction by distractionFilled with fancies and empty of meaningTumid apathy with no concentrationMen and bits of paper, whirled by the cold windThat blows before and after time,Wind in and out of unwholesome lungsTime before and time after. Eructation of unhealthy soulsInto the faded air, the torpidDriven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate.Not hereNot here the darkness, in this twittering world. Descend lower, descend onlyInto the world of…

James M. Lang is the author of six books, including Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It and Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Jim writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education; his work has been appearing in the Chronicle since 1999. His book reviews and public scholarship on higher education have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Time. A former Professor of English and Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, Lang has delivered conference keynotes and workshops on teaching for faculty at more than two hundred colleges, universities, and high schools in the United States and abroad. He has…

A 56-year-old man was admitted to a teaching hospital for a routine medical procedure. Following the procedure, the doctors decided to put him on the blood-thinning medication, Warfarin. The next day, after a further assessment of the man’s condition, the attending physician determined that the patient should be taken off Warfarin. The case I am describing was reported by John Halamka in his article, ‘Order Interrupted by Text: Multitasking Mishap’. When the article was written, Halamka was Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel. Before rejoining the story, we need a piece of context that Halamka provides: “This academic medical centre had a robust computerised physician order entry (CPOE) system that allowed providers to enter orders using handheld devices and smartphones.” Returning to the case now: The attending…

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DBC Pierre DBC Pierre won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Vernon God Little, which was also awarded the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 – the first time the two awards had been granted to the same book. Pierre is also the author of Ludmilla’s Broken English, Lights out in Wonderland, a book of short stories, and a novella, Breakfast with the Borgias. He was awarded the James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. James M. Lang James M. Lang, a former Professor of English and Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, is the author of six books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small…

To progress, wrote Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, you first need to ‘know yourself ’, or understand what it is exactly that you want out of your life, and, furthermore, how you hope to achieve it. But of course, this scenario will play out within a world of near-bursting inboxes, traffic jams, twitter storms, and the end-of-season soccer finals. Our self-development will happen amid department store clearance sales, movie nights, and the pings of instant messages. In other words, our efforts at self-realisation will happen within the context of distraction. “It occurred to me,” wrote Santayana, “that a more honest criticism of progress might be based on tracing the distracted efforts of man to satisfy his natural impulses in the environment.” To know oneself, surmised Santayana, one must know how one…

At the tail end of breakfast at a hotel in Lourdes, France, a man enters the room accompanied by a cacophony of glass-shattering screams – dumping his manic toddler a metre from my table before heading over to the cereal bar. The toddler is in the throes of the biggest tantrum of his young life. His mouth is agape and his eyes are red wild. As his ribs contract for another round, I desperately grab two forks and march them like soldiers across my breakfast table. The toddler stops, stares, and is, almost magically, silenced. Fairly early on, most parents learn that distraction is their friend. When a child is in the throes of despair, much solace can be gained by shifting the child’s attention to whatever nonsensical or irrelevant…

It was a mild day in September 1899 when Dr David Orr Edson, son of former New York City mayor Franklin Edson, approached the corner of West 74th Street and Central Park West in an electric taxicab. As a southbound trolley car met the cab, sixty-nine-year-old real estate dealer Henry H. Bliss alighted, turning briefly to help a companion climb onto the street. In that moment, the taxicab hit the gentleman and ran him over, causing injuries from which he could not recover. Mr Bliss is remembered in a plaque on that corner as the first motor vehicle fatality in the history of the United States. On another mild evening 119 years later, in March 2018, a self-driving test vehicle travelled north in autonomous mode along Mill Avenue in Tempe,…

There has been an explosion of interest in mindfulness lately – that process of emptying the mind of its clutter and detritus and directing it to focus on something that repays your attention: the patterned surface of a leaf, the shape of a loved one’s smile, the textures of a painting, the particular quality of light falling across the table. Countless books on mindful techniques, their spiritual pedigree, and their meditative benefits, jostle the shelves of bookstores and libraries. More than just part of our vernacular, learning to be mindful has become an aspirational goal. Mindfulness makes me bridle. Not just because I am temperamentally ill-suited to its practice – my mind simply won’t be quiet! – but because frequently I struggle to tell the difference between the vaunted wonders…

Contemporary life in post-industrial societies is beset by a curious, insidious paradox. On the one hand, we live and work in the knowledge economy, where information is the world’s most valuable commodity: data, it is said, is the new oil. On the other hand, we have never been more swamped by information – by never-ending streams of messages, emails, advertisements, alerts, and notifications. This deluge of data gets more overwhelming as the scale of organisation increases: businesses are inundated with constant and fine-grained data about the behaviour of customers and potential customers; governments are confronted with everything from longitudinal studies of their citizens’ attitudes to instant data captured by physical sensors to track people’s movements through cities. The paradox is encapsulated by the idea of ‘information overload’: in an information…

In fourth century Greece, a young Athenian named Demosthenes built himself an underground study, and shaved one half of his head so he couldn’t go out in public. The young Demosthenes entered his subterranean world and there he would remain, oftentimes without intermission, for two or three months. As a boy, Demosthenes had a speech impairment, an “indistinct utterance and shortness of breath”, according to Greek philosopher Plutarch, that caused his sentences to be broken and disjointed, making it difficult for him to be understood. The first time Demosthenes made a speech in the public assembly, his stammering pronunciation caused him much distress, so much so that he sought the advice of an actor and set up a disciplined routine of practice. In his underground study, Demosthenes practiced diction, voice,…

newphilosopher.com newphilosopher.com/articles/rare-and-wonderful/ Rare and wonderful There is a remarkable photograph taken in Hamburg in 1936. It shows a crowd of shipyard workers gathered for the launch of a ship. newphilosopher.com/articles/the-courage-to-be-different/ Courage to be different If Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard were alive today, and had his own social media account, he probably wouldn’t get many likes. newphilosopher.com/shop/ Online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher and Womankind magazine, subscriptions, and gift ideas. newphilosopher.com/articles/new-philosopher-china-launches/ New Philosopher China The Chinese version joins the Arabic, Korean, and English language versions of New Philosopher magazine, the world’s most widely-distributed philosophy magazine New Philosopher & Womankind Missing any New Philosopher or Womankind back issues? Get your copy of one of the back issues still in stock, from ‘Health’ to ‘Space’. Back issues…

The Wandering Mind Jamie Kreiner Golden Age Our sense that distraction is getting worse carries ominous implications. Journalists and scientists tell us that distraction has serious consequences, among them unproductivity, chronic boredom, sleep deprivation, bad grades, weak relationships, car crashes, a lack of personal fulfilment, and a loss of civic solidarity. Even in small doses, at a safe distance from heavy machinery, it can still be maddening. At times like ours, when it feels like things are declining rapidly, the distant past can seem especially alluring. Historians know this impulse well: many societies in states of flux have looked to earlier eras in search of a lost and supposedly more stable Golden Age. The Shallows Nicholas Carr A meditative act Even the earliest silent readers recognised the striking change in…

Despite his short life, the nineteenth century American author Henry David Thoreau has become an enduring symbol of not one, but two popular tropes. Through his much-loved book Walden, an account of his two years living in a hut he built by the side of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Thoreau has become an emblem of a certain kind of rugged self-reliance. He’s a perennial hero to those wanting to stand apart from society and return to a simpler, less crowded and complicated life. Equally, by going to jail for refusing to pay a tax that would fund an unjust war, for reasons laid out with aphoristic flair in his essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, Thoreau has become a figure of moral courage, a staunch and principled resister of unjust state power…

A few years ago I was in Oxford city centre on a busy Saturday. As I queued for a cashpoint there was a commotion next to me. A young man of about 20 had started foaming at the mouth and seemed to be on the verge of an epileptic fit. He fell towards the pavement and people around cradled him as he went down, making sure he didn’t hit his head. They put him into the recovery position and tried to help him. Within a few minutes he came round, and, apparently unaware of what happened, got up looking embarrassed, brushed off his clothes, and disappeared into the crowd of shoppers. Turning back to the cashpoint the man in front of me realised what had just happened. While he’d turned…

For years, I played a game of virtual cat and mouse. I would post a photo, wait for ‘likes’, look to see what friends were doing, then, finding myself too distracted, my head spinning, delete the app. A few weeks later I would re-download it. I knew that social media took me away from the physical world and I knew that, with a few clicks, it could drag me into its orbit, where I would remain for countless minutes, sometimes hours, before coming up for air. But I couldn’t resist it. The colours, the lights, the social updates, the endless scrolling – it was all too tempting, even as it muddied my brain. We live in an age of distraction, spearheaded by the digital revolution. In 2022, over half the…

In her new book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way To Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, Dr Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, recounts a 2004 study in which she observed knowledge workers during a typical office day. She timed changes in tasks using a stopwatch and discovered that workers spent only two-and-a-half minutes on any given undertaking. Fast-forward to 2012 and another study utilising the same research protocols yielded a stunning result – the time spent on each task had halved to 75 seconds. Some ten years on, Mark wrote, “Our attention spans while on our computers and smartphones have become short – crazily short – as we now spend about 47 seconds on any screen.” Perhaps it’s hardly surprising that along with increases…

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