Inattention

Today, on my way to work, I was thinking about how much we nevertheless fail to notice around us. I decided to conduct an experiment and for 15 minutes concentrate as fully as possible on everything happening around me and to me. I will say straight away that it is not so easy at all. Thoughts, people, noises, passing cars, signals - everything diverts attention.

Try at least to count how many steps you take from your car or public transport to the office door. For me, from the tram to the office door it comes to 1,255 steps. How many for you? The first thing you run into is that it is impossible to walk at a normal pace and mentally recite three-digit numbers at the same time. So, some system is needed to count all the steps without stopping. By tens, then hundreds, then thousands. Aha, so now I know for certain that even for very simple things a system is required.

One more observation. During working hours I casually asked all the company's employees during conversation one simple question: how many floors does the building our office is in have? You know, no one had noticed that for more than two years every morning we open the door of a five-storey building. I too would not have known the correct answer, had I not once raised my eyes and consciously registered what kind of building it is and how many floors it has.

In reality, this is not a story about the number of steps or floors, but about how little we are able to concentrate on the things we do, and about how little we pay attention to and remember details. Moreover, memory capacity decreases with each year of life, because we are away from the active learning process and no longer train our memory. In addition, everything nowadays is geared to pander to the laziness of the human mind. We do not need to know phone numbers by heart, because all of them can be stored in a SIM card. Websites can be bookmarked. Social networks whisper to us in advance the birth dates of relatives, friends, colleagues, and so on.

Hmm, it seems that mental independence depends on good memory and attention.