It has happened a few times already that just after I posted a blog post, I came across a better way of saying what I was trying to communicate. I forget where, but after posting about Imperceptible Change I came across a quote about change happening at the edge of your comfort zone. After I posted about Heuristics In Chess, I read Douglas Hofstadter’s explanation in terms of a limited number of recursive calls. (Imagine you have an evaluateChessPosition function. It can evaluate positions non-recursively, using heuristics, Piece Activity, Material, King Safety etc. or recursively by playing a move and calling itself on the resulting position.)

Neither of these was as frustrating as, the day after I posted my attention post, I realized that sleep, an analogy I edited out of the final draft was the perfect analogy for attention. The issue I ran into while writing about attention was the impossibility of quantifying a proper or good amount of attention to give to different things. As with other pathologies, the only metric we have to identify disordered attention is the burden it places on the person’s life. But even this metric is hard to pin down. Obviously someone who can’t hold down a job or maintain healthy relationships would be pathologized, but what about you. Would you really learn ASL if you could stop refreshing your email? If the Social Media Naysayers are to be believed, almost everyone has disordered attention. The counterposition to this would be that many people do get nonnegative value from Social Media and they spend time on it which allows them to receive this benefit without incurring outsized costs.

I could go on, but already there are too many exceptions and exceptions to exceptions to clearly explain how complicated it is. Sleep is a good analogy primarily because it is simpler than attention. People broadly agree about how much sleep people should get to function at their best and to avoid daytime drowsiness. (It’s been around quite a bit longer than smartphones). It’s clearer to everyone when someone has a sleep disorder. The simplification makes sleep a ripe analogy for attention.

Everyone knows what it looks like or feels like to attend to something. The part that I struggled to define last time was when it’s acceptable to become distracted from the current object of attention. Then, all I could do was shrug and say it was all up to subjective experience. It’s still largely up to internal experience, but the analogy of sleep leads us to ask the right questions at least.

Waking Up

If you think of waking up as the process of shifting attention from nothingness to something, you can ask when it would be acceptable to make that shift. Certainly you’d want alarms to wake you so you could make it to work on time or so you didn’t sleep through a housefire. If your fire alarm didn’t go off, you would want to be woken up by the extreme temperature change. If you sleep with the shades up, you might want to be woken by the morning Sun. You will probably also want to wake up when your body is well-rested and you’ve had enough. This list is not exhaustive, but it contains the most common reasons that healthy sleepers might be woken up.

If you’re too heavy of a sleeper, some of these things may not be enough to wake you. Hopefully you would still wake up during a natural disaster, but you may oversleep alarms. On the other hand, if you sleep too lightly, there will be many more things (passing trains, thunderstorms) that wake you that you wish didn’t. In the same way, there are sets of acceptable interruptions for waking tasks. They vary drastically depending on whether you’re sitting for an LSAT or watching Legally Blonde, but either way, as for sleep, you can ask: What distractions are acceptable?

You might also wake up naturally if your body is well-rested and it’s had enough. You wouldn’t want to naturally wake up before you had gotten enough sleep or sleep for many hours more than you needed. (Sure some people might want to, but other people would call that hypersomnia). Again, people generally agree about how much sleep they should get, so it’s easier to tell if something is way off. If you think of every task having a “proper duration” (a claim that I wouldn’t necessarily defend, but is sort of right), then, absent the aforementioned acceptable interruptions, you would want to continue attending to the task to its natural conclusion, and it would be disruptive to your life to either not be able to spend that long on it or for it to overstay its welcome and consume more time than was right. In general, when deciding whether we have a problem with attention, the questions we should be asking are whether we filter out extraneous distractions, allow acceptable distractions, and spend the intended time of things.

Falling Asleep

I don’t mean to gloat, but I usually far asleep shortly after I lie down. On those occasions when I do experience insomnia, I am exhausted and on some level I want to sleep, but I also want to think about frustrations, embarrassments, and anticipations. Of course there are biochemical factors, but insomnia always feels like a battle of attention. If I can just stop thinking about how Christmas is tomorrow or that I’ll get to talk to my crush tomorrow or what a stupid mistake I made earlier, then I’ll be able to fall asleep.

The most consistent method I’ve found for giving sleep the upper hand in the battle is to try to evacuate the voices in my head (including the one commenting on how quiet it is). I can only maintain that for about 5-10 seconds, but if I’m tired enough, that’s sufficient to shift my attention away from my ruminations and towards nonsense thoughts that become dreams. Other methods for sleep induction I can think of (counting sheep and lullabies, even reading or listening to soothing ASMR) share the same property of replacing thoughts of the day with monotonous, repetitive thoughts. A friend of mine observed that if he’s paying attention, just before falling asleep, his mind starts speaking nonsense sentences that he thinks of as a precursor to dreams. I also experience this, and I wonder how common it is.