Animal Machine

Like it or not, we are animals. Like it or not, we are fancy self-repairing machines. On the animal front the notion that we are some higher order super species prevails in many quarters. We give birth to live young, eat, defecate, and have a whole host of features in common with other species. So, what separates us? We are not the only ones with self-awareness. As for the ability to plan, other animals can plan too. We might be judged to have the most intelligence potential, but in other areas we are not as capable. We can’t run as quick as a cheetah or swim as well as a dolphin and obviously flapping our arms produces no flight. The combination of deftness, excellent language skills and useful extra intelligence give us a crucial edge. How you view this relatively small margin of superiority is not that important but taking a look at humans from a machine point of view is quite revealing.

You may have tried meditation. You may have looked at ideas in relation to self-improvement. You might have wished for spiritual enlightenment. These things are wonderful. However, maybe it is time to look at something vastly different. Attention monitoring - the pinnacle of all curiosities relating to our inner workings. You can do it by yourself on your self. It takes a little grit yet is nothing more than paying attention to your attention.

We can only pay attention to one thing at a time. When multi-tasking we focus on one thing whilst using autonomy on the rest. We may switch our attention quickly between many things, but we can never pay attention to two things simultaneously. We switch attention to make adjustments. Our attention my receive an interrupt if something is going awry, maybe an item is slipping from our grip, or we hear a sound etc. Our attention flicks from one thing to another.

One can see the effects of attention switching when observing a group of people out hiking. When they encounter a gate or have steps to climb the talking will stop. It will stop whilst they negotiate the obstacle. Our attention switches from focusing on the conversation to dealing with the obstacle. Encountering the obstacle invokes an interrupt signal which is sent to grab hold of the attention. The hikers will deal with the obstacle then carry on talking afterwards. We can drive and chat, but we pause speaking when something in the road diverts us. Our sub-conscious acts for us at times. We perform tasks without focusing on them, that is once our attention system sets them in motion. The attention activates a process then our autonomy takes over. Areas of our minds spot potential problems and send interrupt signals.

When we are learning to drive a vehicle, we focus on this new learning activity. We pay attention to the handling of the vehicle. As we gain experience we can drive with little thought or consideration of how we do so. Sometimes we take the wrong turn as we follow a regular route, one that has been firmly imprinted. We can go from one place to another and not really know how we got there. We paid very little attention as we are so familiar with the journey. Autonomy in action.

Our attention moves from one thing to another, constantly throughout the day. The attention can dwell for twenty seconds or longer. However, the dwell time is often fleeting, very brief. The piece of time the attention stays fixed on something is what we call a moment. The attention system will get drawn away from the present item by something, an interrupt, maybe a loud noise, a knock on the door, the phone ringing or something moving that catches our eye.

Attention monitoring is one of the most insightful experiments you can do by yourself. It will give you a deep understand of the human machine. All one need do is pay close attention to your attention. Your inner mechanical workings will be revealed through the process of perpetually observing each change of attention. You need to be alert to your every action to become aware of what each event really consists of. Observe the mechanical aspects of eating, drinking and sexual moments. Nothing will be quite the same again. It is revealing and insightful, but not life enhancing. Most definitely not life enhancing.

All through the day you can probe the countless moments. Probe the physicality of your actions. You need to be fully aware of your attention whatever you are doing. Aware too when you are relaxing. It is hard to describe and even harder to get under the skin of it straightway. This is not remotely akin to mediation. This is far removed from deep trances. What is your attention focusing on right now? That needs to be the question you keep asking yourself. Perpetually. Open a window into the soul. Get into the habit of noticing what the attention is dealing with. Over time, you become positively aware of each thing that you are focused on. You will note everything that distracts you. I found it a little disturbing. It took a few months to ‘get in’ and unfortunately it took the best part of a year to relinquish the habit and return to a form of normality.

The aim of the self-experiment is to scrutinise all the interruptions that you encounter. All day, every day. You will notice the messages from your bladder informing you of the need to go to the toilet. Think about your thought paths as you are about to climb some stairs. You may make a brief judgement before you climb them. Pay close attention to what your attention switches to if you bump into someone coming the other way. Study yourself recalculating a new path. Life maybe a series of problems but it is also a sequence of interrupts.

When you blink, the vision system in your mind shuts off. It shuts off in sync with the blink making it disappear from your consciousness. You don’t see black flashes every few seconds in day-to-day life. The mind fills in the blanks and creates an illusion of continuity. You will notice the blackouts when you pay attention to your blinking though. Your eyes are constantly scanning. They scan left, right, up, down, across. The scan is rapid. The same scan viewed through a video camera creates a horrid fast paced jumping about. We do not witness this jumping about with our eyes. This is not how we experience life. Our visual scan and each change of attention is merged and smoothed over.

The attention is the core of the being. It is the gateway to all areas of the mind. The attention manufactures the sensation of being conscious. The process by which the attention flits between each function without jarring creates the illusion of consciousness. It is the amalgamation of all the sensory inputs and thought centres, each having their turn acting on the core attention that brings about the feeling of being alive. As there is a seamless transition from one to another and never locking onto one for any great length of time, we get this sense of cognition that we all take as experiencing normal life. To understand consciousness, complete the self-experiment in attention watching. The smooth flow, the gentle transition between each attention switch and the way the mind blends each moment hiding what would be a horrid reality. The experiment enables you to grasp the essence of consciousness.

Interrupts attempt to grab our attention. We can ignore them if we choose and continue with what we are focusing on. You can ignore many an interrupt like a rumbling stomach more easily if it is below a certain threshold. As the pertinence of the bodily event rises, the messaging system increases the level and frequency of the reminders alerting you to it. An alarm of some sort, be it a loud noise or strange smell can jolt the attention into a mode for reaction. All of which can be monitored precisely by studying oneself.

Many parts of the human machine begin to decline as we age. The machine begins to struggle tuning into one person amongst all the background noise. When in peak condition it can decipher fragmented speech quite well. It can calculate the most probable bits that it missed and string it all together into something coherent. Various mind modules can buffer information. Buffering sound enables us to replay what we heard. Useful but error prone. We can replay the sounds stored in the buffer a few times to try work out what we heard or what we think we heard. It is here that we may invent a piece and put it into the stream. We invent something that fits. An assumption, a presumption, a guess.

These buffers have storage limits. For audio it typically equates to about two seconds worth of audio. When making a mental note of a long number, it is not the number of digits spoken to you that counts as much as the number of digits spoken in that storage time frame. You can capture more when things are said quickly.

There is a lot going on inside us, night and day. Our minds have a lot to contend with - just to maintain the health of the body. Regulating, controlling, monitoring. Signals are sent back and forth endlessly. We think of ourselves as a single entity, a person, an individual but we are in fact a bundle of co-operating, symbiotic units. The heart operates independently from the head using its own neurons set within it. It is a subtle but significant detail; the heart gets a request to beat harder and faster rather than being controlled directly from above. I suppose saying someone has a good heart is appropriate as it is a separate entity to the spirit in the mind with its own thinking capability. The mind talks to each participant in this conglomeration of parts. It will talk and respond to phantom limbs too as much of the messaging system is still in situ despite the arm/leg being absent.

When something does indeed drop on your foot, stop, and examine what is happening. You may notice that the pain is in the foot not your mind. The throbbing is very much there with the cells telling you about it. Your collection of parts hosts a few kilograms of bacteria with their own cooperative agenda. It is not only you that gets hungry. Your gut, your skin have unpaid workers helping your stay in good shape. Wash them off, wash them out at your peril. Wash gently and sporadically. Eat with care and attention.

There is a lot we can do without being able to describe how we do it. We learn how to do it with our conscious mind and then file it away in our sub-conscious. We can then do it automatically without having to pay any regard to it. The reason we struggle to describe how we do things is often because we forgot that we pre-programed our actions. We planned, we programmed and then executed the plan. We made a few adjustments to improve then repeated until we are happier with our performance. Then we stop thinking about how we got to where we are with our skill set.

An area of the mind can be set a task to do. When it is complete it will let us know by sending an interrupt to our attention. We may be working on a problem. We cast it to the back of our mind for it then to reappear solved sometime later. Each area can only do one task at a time competently giving rise to conflicts. Doing something with your hands won’t detract from working on a solution to a mental problem. However, trying to write and speak at the same time is not feasible as the same language area is being utilised. Trying to look at two things at the same time is equally challenging. Whilst the eye will notice movements using a different schema to the visual processing area, all it can do it bring it to your attention. A puncture in your tyre sets you off on a mission to spot a repair shop. Beforehand these repair shops were barely noticed. Now and for a good while after they seem to stand out wherever you go. The task is not erased.

Place a treat in someone’s bedroom. Put it somewhere where it can be seen but not too obvious. It can be days rather than hours before they notice it. Your vision system may have the optics of a camera but works in an entirely different manner. The system builds a picture, partly by inventing things to speed up the processing. It assumes using prior experience. It takes something from memory and places it in the scene. When one walks into a room, we do not process each and every object. That would take a very long time. Instead, we identify the important things. Our memory of what we think we saw is often far removed from the information that went through our eyes.

Picture the scene, you walk into a busy restaurant and what do you see. What grabs your attention? You spot those that you know and some of the ones that you do not. Familiar faces stand out. Unfamiliar attractive ones stand out too, ones that you find attractive. Which ones do you remember being there? Old people grey out, hide in plain sight as the visual scan skips them completely. Camouflage works so well because to survey an entire scene in front of an animal takes too many mental resources. When you know what to look for and have an idea of the shape it becomes much easier.

Your mind ignores a lot, it cuts corners, approximates things and allow much to pass it by. The errors we make stem from us storing things in a fuzzy emotive way, rather than as concrete digital data. Having an impression of something is a quick method of absorption. People believe they are right, convinced at times beyond any uncertainty, but in truth they are liable to make significant and frequent mistakes because our capacity to process information at speed is somewhat limited.

One of the highlights of your self-experiment with attention watching will be pain and sensory alarms that quickly grab your attention. Pay attention to how your attention is deviated from the present task by any unusual touch, itch or bite. Sounds above ambient levels and unexpected tastes will come to the fore along with reminder signals. We set up inbuilt reminder calls for something we had planned to do. You need to explore each interrupt. There are lots of them throughout the day.

Pain thresholds vary from person to person with some being able to tolerate a lot more than others. Some aspects of pain can be enjoyable. Pain is change after all. Change feeds the reward system. What some people take great pleasure in, others find uncomfortable. Many are just indifferent towards pain.

Some of you may wish for more details regarding attention watching, but no further explanation is needed. Keep focusing on your attention during every action, pumping, inhaling, swallowing. It is all mechanical. It is distinctly different from relaxing, meditating or trying to blank the mind. It is following every single switch of action, being alert to all changes and consciously observing all the things that divert you from the moment in hand. Nothing will seem the same if you persist with it. It is a different process from any mind aware quiet time, beyond thinking about thinking. It is intercepting every aspect of the human machine. The fantasy element during sex is curtailed and replaced by a bodily awareness. The input to the senses replaces the sensuality.

To give you an idea of the process, start by watching your blinking. You will notice the black flash on every blink. Within a minute or two you will forget that you forgot to watch the blinking. That is ok in regards the blinking but not ok in regards overviewing your attention. You need to maintain the awareness of what the attention is dealing with. A habit will form. You are set to get a first-hand insight into the mechanics of the animal machine. When you are finished, when weeks of this is kept up you will grasp how human consciousness works.

There are many mind challenges available for you to try. Perhaps swap the knife and fork from left to right hand, or vice versa, for a meal or two. When watching a film or sporting event, keep your focus on one person, the referee, a player or actor. Ignore the rest. Just watch that one person where possible for a while.

Lie on your back. Close your eyes. Plug your ears. Get someone to touch you at random. Be titillated or sensually soothed. Enter the world of the animal machine.