Reclaim The Brain

My attention is shot. I’d like to have another go. Things about focus, the ruination of focus, ADHD, and paying attention.

David Pennington

Attention is first philosophy—

Philosophy is not only a system of thought but a mode of attentiveness, an exercised openness to what exceeds us yet calls us to deeper participation. Its systematic aspects are downstream of this attentiveness, and can certainly become a scaffolding by which others can train their own attention, but it is at its root... See more

Adam Robbert • Attention is First Philosophy

It is tempting, in moments of ambition, to think that we must change everything all at once, that the path to mastery or peace requires a sudden, dramatic shift. But this is rarely the case. In truth, most lasting changes come from small, deliberate actions. It is in the repetition of these small actions, over time, that we build strength, that we... See more

Bill Wear • The Quiet Art of Attention

It blows me away that I work for myself and yet I somehow I have to keep up with 3 calendars.

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans... See more

archive.ph

I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same... See more

Rayne Fisher-Quann • Choosing to Walk

humans talking like machines

Big Think • Mechanized Minds: AI’s Hidden Impact on Human Thought

With LLMs all but conversing with their userbase, the variations between human and “talking like machines” is thinner by the day. I think we also see this across movies and modern books and social media. Maybe it started with the listicle format of content being all the rage, or content experts saying there is a specific way to set up content on the page for maximum human engagement.

This phrase suggests a blurring of boundaries between human communication and machine-like processing, highlighting how AI influences us to adopt more mechanical, perhaps less spontaneous ways of thinking and talking.

One of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

Why Buddhism is True | https://highlights.melanie-richards.com

Persistently for the last twenty years the ideals of order or liberty have dwindled in our books; the ambitions of wit and eloquence have dwindled in our parliaments. Literature has purposely become less political; politics have purposely become less literary. General theories of the relation of things have thus been extruded from both; and we are

G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Heretics

only when we have shifted into the rest-and-digest response of the nervous system will our brains allow us to reclaim our attention, access the power of our imagination, and unlock our subconscious.