I want to start this by saying I have never been more aware of my goldfish-level attention span than during the process of collecting data for this assignment. I also learned a lot about where my train of thought goes and why it goes the way it does. I think due to my psychology classes I’ve taken, I should’ve been way more aware of my brain activity in general, but nonetheless I will discuss my findings.

Parallel Distributive Processing

From what I can remember from class, Parallel Distributive Processing is the mental map your memory uses to determine the meaning of different stimuli that your senses are intaking. This means when you see, for example, Snoopy in a Charlie Brown cartoon, your brain is sorting through everything it already knows to figure out what you’re looking at. The ‘parallel’ part means its making these connections all at the same time until it finds what it’s looking for. The train of thought might be dog -> beagle -> cartoon -> peanuts art style -> snoopy. Or, some people might notice that it’s a Peanuts art style first, and then identify Snoopy based on that starting point. Most people make a web of all their prior knowledge thats relevant to the stimuli almost immediately and all at the same time. This makes it very hard to track a single flow of attention, but I have tried my best.

To What Extent Was I Able to Live Comfortably?

My personal approach to collecting data was to set aside the hour of 8pm-9pm everyday for a week to record my attention that way it was more consistent and I wasn’t torturing myself being 100% mindful of distractions all week, although I can say that it did make me crazy even not during that hour of the day because I did end up being CONSTANTLY aware of it. So that was a fail. Honestly it made that hour of the day really unproductive because I kept either stopping what I was doing to record something in my journal or I was following a rabbit hole on purpose because something interesting had caught my attention that I normally wouldn’t have pursued. For example, I spent ~15 minutes googling the effects of plants on productivity because I had noticed I was zoning out a lot looking at the plants around me in Bailey. From my journal:

"zoned out lookign at the fake plants in bailey a lot. why are they even here if theyre fake?? would just get back to work but i might as well look it up. ok looked it up- apparently plants increase workplace productivity by 15%, but thats coming from a website that specializes in designing plants for workspaces soooo reliable prob not but maybe. did not doubl check. went back to my work."

I honestly don’t think distractions like these took away from my autonomy or comfortability at all because if anything I was engaging with my train of thought instead of shutting it down for the sake of mindfullness.

Navigating Digital Enviornments Going Forward

This assignment has made an immediate and lasting impact on how I navigate both real life and digital spaces, as you’ve already read. I walk through life with a much more mindful approach now, I even set a time limit for my social media apps because that kept coming up in my data as a distraction. Specifically, Instagram was mentioned the most times, with Pinterest as a close second, and Tiktok as the third. I am very grateful for this opportunity and this class as a whole.