Information, attention and TaKeTiNa

Check this quote:

Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971

IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

via Green sandbox: Since 1971.

It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us.

Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what happens when we induce groove and confusion using rhythm, stepping and voice, and I was really struck with an exploration of the polarity between planning and doing.

One of the questions we were playing with was “What do you do with space?”  The rhythmic pattern we were working with had moments of lots of space, and moments where several movements happened all at once.  It was a kind of sprung rhthym, all carried over a steady beat.  What I noticed was that in the spacious moments, I took time to get myself ready for the next burst of activity instead of resting in that spaciousness.  The result was that, to the extent that my mind was living in the future, my body went there as well and I ended up often doing things AHEAD of the beat.

In other words there was so much information I was taking in, including information about what to do next, what to sing, how the polyrhythms worked, what else was going on in the room, that my attention to the present moment was erased and I had a hard time just DOING.

This polarity between planning and doing is familiar to me.  When I meditate, and when my thoughts drift, they almost always drift to the future, to things I need to do or should be doing.  I notice that this keeps me away from being in the present and actually paying attention to what is happening all around me.

In group settings, this imbalance can lead to me missing a whole bunch of information about where a group is at, if my mind is fixed on where we are going, or where we need to go.

By contrast, when I focus on the present, and on doing rather than planning, I am in balance.  Balance in this case means that every part of my mind and body is HERE.  Imbalance is when some part of your mind or body shifts elsewhere, and you very often topple in that case – physically or otherwise.  Being present opens up the spaciousness of the present moment (what Harrison Owen calls “Expanding our Now“) and ironically opens many more possibilities and pathways for action.

So my learning from all of this is that information overload obscures attention, fills space and limits possibilities.

Think about that the next time you need to do a comprehensive environmental scan!