## Metadata - Author: [[Matthew B. Crawford]] - Full Title: The World Beyond Your Head - Category: #books ## Highlights - Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that for all our talk of an information economy, what we really have is an attentional economy, if the term “economy” applies to what is scarce and therefore valuable. ([Location 57](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=57)) - Our mental fragmentation can’t simply be attributed to advertising, the Internet, or any other identifiable villain, for it has become something more comprehensive than that, something like a style of existence. ([Location 96](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=96)) - The fact has not been widely noticed, but attention is the organizing concern of the tradition of thought called phenomenology, and this tradition offers a bridge between the mutually uncomprehending fields of cognitive psychology and moral philosophy. ([Location 118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=118)) - Through this inquiry I hope to arrive at something like an ethics of attention for our time, grounded in a realistic account of the mind and a critical gaze at modern culture. I should note here that I am using the term “ethics” in its original sense—not primarily as an account of what we are obliged or forbidden to do, but as a more capacious reflection on the sort of ethos we want to inhabit. ([Location 121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=121)) - It has been said (by Iris Murdoch) that man is the animal that makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the pictures. ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=131)) - The introduction of novelty into one’s field of view commands what the cognitive psychologists call an orienting response (an important evolutionary adaptation in a world of predators): an animal turns its face and eyes toward the new thing. A new thing typically appears every second on television. ([Location 139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=139)) - In this battle of attentional technologies, what is lost is the kind of public space that is required for a certain kind of sociability. ([Location 146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=146)) - The benefits of silence are off the books. They are not measured directly by any econometric instrument such as gross domestic product, yet the availability of silence surely contributes to creativity and innovation. They do not show up explicitly in social statistics such as level of educational achievement, yet one consumes a great deal of silence in the course of becoming educated. ([Location 188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=188)) - Apart from the usual concerns about online security and identity theft, I have to confess that I am not terribly worried about keeping particular facts about myself hidden from the data-mongers—until they use that data to make a claim on my attention. I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face-to-face as individuals, but to those who never show their face, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested by mechanized means. ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=217)) - To attend to anything in a sustained way requires actively excluding all the other things that grab at our attention. It requires, if not ruthlessness toward oneself, a capacity for self-regulation. ([Location 259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=259)) - Self-regulation, like attention, is a resource of which we have a finite amount. Further, the two resources are intimately related. Thus, if someone is tasked with controlling her impulses for some extended period of time, her performance shortly thereafter on a task requiring attention is degraded. ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=270)) - The media have become masters at packaging stimuli in ways that our brains find irresistible, just as food engineers have become expert in creating “hyperpalatable” foods by manipulating levels of sugar, fat, and salt.11 Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=278)) - If the attentive self is in a relation of fit to a world it has apprehended, the autonomous self is in a relation of creative mastery to a world it has projected. ([Location 430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=430)) - Discovering your true preferences requires maximizing the number of choices you face: precisely the condition that makes for maximum dissipation of one’s energies. ([Location 435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=435)) - For several hundred years now, the ideal self of the West has been striving to secure its freedom by rendering the external world fully pliable to its will. For the originators of modern thought, this was to be accomplished by treating objects as projections of the mind; we make contact with them only through our representations of them. Early in the twenty-first century, our daily lives are saturated with representations; we have come to resemble the human person as posited in Enlightenment thought. Such is the power and ubiquity of these representations that we find ourselves living a highly mediated existence. The thing is, in this style of existence we ourselves have been rendered pliable—to whoever has the power to craft the most bewitching representations or to control the portals of public space through which we must pass to conduct the business of life. ([Location 451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=451)) - The Latin root of our English word “attention” is tenere, which means to stretch or make tense. External objects provide an attachment point for the mind; they pull us out of ourselves. It is in the encounter between the self and the brute alien otherness of the real that beautiful things become possible: the puck-handling finesse of the hockey player, for example. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=462)) - A humming kitchen of the sort I have described may be regarded as an ecology of attention in which the external demand of feeding people in a timely manner provides a loose structure within which the kitchen staff themselves establish an internal order of smooth, adaptive action. ([Location 531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=531)) - Andy Clark, one of the leading figures in the extended-mind literature, writes that “advanced cognition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning: to diffuse achieved knowledge and practical wisdom through complex structures, and to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political and institutional constraints.” ([Location 535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=535)) - The creeping substitution of virtual reality for reality is a prominent feature of contemporary life, but it also has deep antecedents in Western thought. It is a cultural project that is unfolding along lines that Immanuel Kant sketched for us: trying to establish the autonomy of the will by filtering material reality through abstractions. ([Location 1184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=1184)) - Whether you regard it as infantile or as the highest achievement of the European mind, what we find in Kant are the philosophical roots of our modern identification of freedom with choice, where choice is understood as a pure flashing forth of the unconditioned will. ([Location 1238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=1238)) - A harder-edged car, without electronics mediating between action and perception, and in which mechanical noises are not fully damped out, preserves “cross-modal binding,” thought by some to be the key to our grasp of reality. Information that we pick up through different senses gets bound together, and coheres in our apprehension of some state of affairs in the world, because these various information streams are locked into a common experience of time. ([Location 1338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=1338)) - When viewing two-dimensional representations, whether photographs, paintings, or screens, we are not able to move around and gain different perspectives on the scene depicted. Recall that it is by moving around that we “extract invariants from the stimulus flux,” as Gibson says. When we can’t do that, our basic equipment for reality testing is inoperative. ([Location 1384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=1384)) - Is the mouse-click a kind of agency? This gesture, emblematic of contemporary life, might be seen as a fulfillment of the thinned-out notion of human agency we have signed on to when we conceive action as the autonomous movements of an isolated person who is essentially disengaged from the world. ([Location 1406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=1406)) - Your action of pressing a button produces an effect that aligns perfectly with your will, because your will has been channeled into the spare, binary affordances provided by the buttons: press or don’t press. You give yourself over to the logic of the machine and are rewarded by a feeling of efficacy. That is, you lose yourself, and thereby gain control. ([Location 1446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00O0G1A6S&location=1446))