A Mind Wandering episode

Project Prototype

Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over

In order to make a very personal project I spend time self-reflecting on how my mind and thinking process operates.

Common scenario - after the first 5 or 6 pages of a new book I have to go back to the beginning and read everything again simply because my mind was wandering about something else. Same goes for movies and when I have a conversation with someone - after some time talking about a topic X, I lose focus on that topic and experience task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Then I introduce a new topic not necessarily related to the previous one.

This happens multiple times per day, and even though I tried to discipline myself to follow external tasks, on the long run it’s hard to control mind-wandering episodes, either because I totally forget to control myself or simply I have no interest in the conversation.

Mind-wandering is called in neuroscience “the Default mode network” - the default mode of brain function. Boredom can trigger these episodes as well as performing simple tasks like washing the dishes, tooth brushing , driving on a highway for a long period. It is like when reading an article and then open new tabs and shifting all attention to the new tab, leaving the other task unfinished.

This disconnection from the external world is an interesting topic for my work in this class, but what it has to do with Pleasure?

PLEASURE OF THE BRAIN

Like me it is estimated that people spend almost 50% of their time awake mind-wandering or daydreaming (e.g., Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Risko, Anderson, Sarwal, Engelhardt, & Kingstone, 2011).
The difference between Daydreaming and Mind Wandering is that the first happens when we are not performing in any other task, for example just sitting on a chair whereas mind wandering happens while we are performing a task such as reading a book or watching a movie etc. and have completely unrelated thoughts to the task we are performing.

In Buddhism daydreaming is considered to be an addiction because we lose command of our thoughts, the surrendering to a crave. In fact, for a brief moment when our mind wanders about fantasies and possible future accomplishments we feel a rewarding effect coming from the release of dopamine in the brain.

MENTAL TIME TRAVEL

Mind wandering and daydreaming allow us not only to revisit past experiences but also to project what can happen in the future.

There are a some famous episodes of how mind-wandering changed the course of history. Albert Einstein famously linked his Theory of Relativity to an episode of mind-wandering. Isaac Newton was under a tree when an apple fell which led him to think about the law of gravity. And Darwin used to take walks to roam around and think about things, Darwin's "thinking path".
I started to wonder if Isaac Newton had a smartphone back then would he think about the episode the same way he did, or would rather just take a picture to upload on Instagram or write 140 characters about that episode on Twitter.  This thought comes to me every time I take a bus and see how everyone is using smartphones to do trivial things when bus rides and train rides actually have the great capacity of making one's mind wander about inumerous things. I did an exercise to test my previous statement - on purpose I would turn of the phone or just listening to music to see how many things come to my mind in one hour trip to the university. First going through some melancholic moments when I pass the Han river and think about Lisbon. Then I think about people that I know, revisit some past experiences and wander about the next time I will see them. Finally as the bus gets closer to the university, I think about school projects and review some of my ideas. This is actually a fundamental time for me because some ideas I thought were great one day before became blend and boring all of the sudden. So my point here is that through Daydreaming or Mind wandering we can reflect upon ourselves, our social relations, our strives, our accomplishments and so on.
Technology sucks us in. Will it continue to do so in the future? Absolutely.

In modern societies we value people that are "goal-oriented", "focused", "straight to the point" or "straight to business". Daydreaming and Mind wandering have therefore a bad reputation because it's considered to be contra productive or in other words a waste of time. In design schools we talk about design thinking, brainstorm ideas etc. but there is not so much talk about how important is to walk around, think about what is going on around us, and most importantly, to be curious.

What if we could organize our thoughts?
Lately, researches on Mind wandering tend to focus on Meta-awareness and how to "make use" of this episodes, to stay productive. But it seems to me that this is part of a campaign to make people wander less by telling them that people what mind wander a lot are less happy.
It's a pessimistic approach to talk about how people wander less but I wander about the effect that this will take on our future society.
Also another concern I have is about how people are deprived of their opinion simply because the way information is available to people in mass quantities results in a feeling of "overwhelmingness".
It happens because we barely have time to digest all the information so in the end it  becomes hard for an individual to have a personal reflection, instead it's easier to classify that information as "good" or "bad", "agreeable" or "disagreeable" and this judgement is influenced by our groups.


“And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living”

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

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Project

I - visualize our thoughts through Augmented Reality.
I gave the example about how I mind-wander and daydream inside the bus on my way to the university. What if I could actually see what I think, for example instead of seeing Han river, because I'm thinking about Lisbon i see Tagus river instead.

References

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932.full

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/acp.1814/full

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2153599X.2013.826717?journalCode=rrbb20

themes

Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?

Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?        

I firmly believed that in the future robots couldn't replace artists, photographers, architects or designers. But then I came across the work of Simon Colton - a computer scientist that created a software called "The Painting Fool". And remember this?

 

Note to Will Smith: There is a computer called IAMUS capable of creating any musical composition within 8 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzrcoqpnZqA

The theme I would like to talk about is the Future of Design and how people will create in the future - total automation vs designers±machines.

Nowadays most designers work using software, but how will it be like when the software is capable of editing a book, making a poster, a branding image or even draw the interiors of our house based on our taste.

Amongst the most famous classic dystopias, I’ve read Fahrenheit 451 published in 1953 and 1984 published in 1949.

In 1984 we are introduced to a world that is divided in 3 states - Oceania, Eurasia and Lestasia. The Big Brother controls everything inside Oceania - the history, the information, and ultimately peoples lives. The party manipulates the past to serve in their favor an creates a common enemy to whom people can canalize their hatred towards to - Goldstein. Is forbidden to love it’s forbidden to even think something that might be considered against the party and even the language is manipulated - less words so people have less power when expressing their feelings. Children become spies shaped by the government as the government’s most fiercest allies. Inside every home there is a device called “telescreen” that basically monitors and records everything, any manifestation of disagreement or discontent are enough to make someone disappear in this world.

1984 gives us a very uncanny description of the espionage system that our capitalistic democracies rely on. Orwell died before the Internet came to our lives but now for the first time in human history it is possible to apply the same type of control that he describes in the book on people. After Edwards Snowden revealed the NSA was spying on people by collecting data of phone calls and so on, this novel’s sales jumped, the same happened right after Donald Trump won the U.S. election, 1984 became the 1 best-selling on Amazon, 70 years after it’s first publication. 

So what are the similarities?  What first comes to my mind is what it’s called Newspeak in the book - a language created to satisfy the regime’s ideologic needs. Controlling a language is the same as controlling people’s thoughts. If we can’t find words to express what we feel and think therefore we don’t express our feelings and our thoughts, that was the primary goal of the party. That brings me to what is being called the “New Language” in today’s world - the Emoji language. In 2015, Oxford's word of the year was the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji. As of June 2017 there are 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard. And while there is no definite answer to how many words exist in the English Language, the second edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 obsolete words. Some years ago when I had my first Nokia I remember we had a limited amount of characters so we had to cut the words, condense them in a understandable way to fit in one message. The same happens on Twitter where we can only fit text in 140 characters. The main question is if in fact this new way of communication improved our capacity of understanding each other. In 2015 a 17 year old Black Lives Matter supporter was arrested because of a post on twitter. It was considered a terrorist threat to use emojis of a policemen and revolvers.

While we can argue that Emoji overcomes language barriers and that is a global language, it seems to me that Emojis are also changing the meaning of our words and most certainly will replace our languages in the future. With augmented reality we will be able to use Emojis on our face to face interactions and we won't need so many words anymore.

References:

“Is emoji a type of language?”

 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/emoji-language

"Word of the year 2015”

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2015

"Emoji language dragging us back to the dark ages - and all we can do is smile”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/may/27/emoji-language-dragging-us-back-to-the-dark-ages-yellow-smiley-face

In nature nothing exists alone