The Subtle Faculty
“How we deploy our attention determines what we see” (pg 4).
A great discussion piece for students and or staff:
What information consumes is “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (pg 9).
Basics:
“There are two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional. The sensory distractors are easy: as you read these words you’re tuning out the blank margins surrounding this text.” The emotional distractions are those that keep intruding into our thoughts, creating turmoil in our daily lives - (think recent breakups or arguments with a close relationship), (pg 14).
“All of us are smarter than any one of us” (pg 21).
“Good work” : “a potent mix of what people are excellent at, what engages them, and their ethics - what they believe matters” (pg 22).
Attention Top and Bottom:
“Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near-constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control” (pg. 31).
The Value of Mind Adrift:
“Every variety of attention has its uses. The very fact that about half of our thoughts are daydreams suggest there may well be some advantages to a mind that can entertain the fanciful” (pg 39).
“A mind adrift lets our creative juices flow. While our minds wander we become better at anything that depends on a flash of insight, from coming up with imaginative wordplay to inventions and original thinking” (pg 40) . . . other positive functions of mind wandering are generating scenarios for the future, self-refection, navigating a complex social world, incubation of creative ideas, flexibility in focus, pondering what we’re learning, organizing our memories, just mulling life - and giving our circuitry for more intensive focusing a refreshing break” (pg 41).
“In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential. Creative insights entail joining elements in a useful, fresh way” (pg 43).
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift” (pg. 45).
“Creative insights flowed best when people had clear goals but also freedom in how they reached them. And, most crucial, they had protected time - enough to really think freely. A creative cocoon.” (pg 46).
Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us
“I am what I think you think I am” (pg. 70).
“We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speak the story of our lives to someone we trust” (pg. 70).
“The journal Surgery reports a study where surgeons’ tone of voice was evaluated, based on ten-second snippets recorded during sessions with their patients. Half the surgeons whose voices were rated had been sued for malpractice; half had not. The voices of those who had been sued were far more often rated as domineering and uncaring . . . research has found that when people receive negative performance feedback in a warm, supportive tone of voice, they leave feeling positive - despite the negative feedback. When they get positive performance reviews in a cold and distant tone of voice, they end up feeling bad despite the good news” (pg 71) . . .
A Recipe for Self-Control:
“Attention regulates emotion” (pg 76).
“Attention . . . has a limited capacity: working memory creates a bottleneck that lets us hold just so much in mind at any given moment. As our worries intrude on the limited capacity of our attention, these irrevelent thoughts shrink the bandwidth left for, say, math” (pg 85).
The Empathy Triad:
“Cognitive empathy . . . lets us take other people’s perspective, comprehend their mental state, and at the same time manage our own emotions while we take stock of theirs. In contrast, with emotional empathy we join the other person in feeling along with him or her; our bodies resonate in whatever key of joy or sorrow that person may be going through . . . empathic concern lead us to care about them, mobilizing us to help if need be” (pg 98).
“When people listen to someone telling , the brain of the listeners become intimately coupled with that of the storyteller” (pg 103).
“Empathy depends on a muscle of attention: to tune in to others’ feelings requires we pick up the facial, vocal, and other signals of their emotion” (pg 104).
“If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me” VS “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him? . . . compassion build on empathy, which in turn requires a focus on others” (pg 106).
System Blindness:
“Wayfinding embodies systems awareness . . . detecting and mapping the patterns and order that lie hidden within the chaos of the natural world . . . how to read the signs of seasonal change” (pg 137).
“One of the worse results of system blindness occurs when leaders implement a strategy to solve a problem - but ignore the pertinent system dynamics” (pg 142).
“the ‘illusion of explanatory depth,’ is where we feel confidence in our understanding of a complex system, but in reality have just superficial knowledge” (pg. 143)
The Myth of 10,000 Hours:
“Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognize errors and correct them - which is why dancers use mirrors. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with and expert - and so every world-class sport champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don’t get to the top ranks” (pg 164).
“when you’re feeling good our awareness expands from our usual self-centered focus on ‘me’ to a more inclusive and warm focus on ‘we’ (pg. 170) . . . “cynicism, breeds pessimism: not just a focus on the cloud, but the conviction that there are even darker ones lurking behind. It all depends on where we focus: the mean fan, or the fifty thousand cheering ones” (pg. 171).
Grade: A
Any difficulty I had with this books was completely my own. I read it after during a time where my mind needed rest, not deep and impactful thinking. I would comfortably recommend this to any and everyone interested in being a better person.