Last weekend at Aladin I met a weapon called sensitivity.
[##_Image|kage@bQNksh/btquCuc1niV/EDrkDVg9xR7oqEwMYoVUPK/img.jpg|alignLeft|data-filename="KakaoTalk_Photo_2019-04-16-15-48-28.jpeg" width="254" height="338"|The Weapon Called Sensitivity — Rolf Sellin (trans. Yoo Young-mi) | Namu Saenggak_##]
It's a book classified under psychology. As always, my purpose in starting to perceive was understanding the other. But as I turned page after page, I couldn't put the book down for a long time — not because of others, but because I was coming to understand myself.
This is the passage where my gaze first stopped.
Paying attention means, in effect, directing one's energy toward that place. So when someone lovingly notices us, we feel good. Children need this kind of energy and naturally absorb this fact. They call out "Mommy, look at this!" and demand attention. Children tirelessly demand attention. They would rather receive attention even by misbehaving than receive none at all and get no energy. (p.118)
When the time comes for me to raise children, I came to think that, besides paying attention in the moment, there will need to be processes that confirm — or can confirm — that I am always watching and thinking of them, whether I'm nearby or far.
But as I turned the pages, I noticed that the content wasn't primarily about understanding others or parenting — what was stirring first was understanding of myself. If children demand attention, aren't adults chasing salary raises and promotions through performance and recognition, in a similar way?
Adults are similar. But once you become an adult, you generally receive less attention. Attention or resonance for the effort you put in is often lacking. When needless conflict arises or work creaks along and energy drains away, it's often because you aren't receiving attention and your energy is depleted.
Without attention, a person who keeps directing their attention outward continuously loses energy and experiences a great energy hemorrhage. Through perception, they weaken themselves over the long term. Perception and attention are the key to regulating one's life energy. By consciously handling perception, one can regulate one's own energy state. (p.118)
Major social revolutions like the Industrial Revolution are dated not by when a technology was invented or advanced, but by when it became widely available to the masses. Because of that, I don't think the times when personal computers and laptops became popular, or when the internet was being rolled out, were "revolutionary eras." Abroad from 2008 and in Korea from 2010, the mobile market and the popularization of IT technology began. It's this moment that is the era of the information revolution. Of course, this is just my personal claim. From the start of this information revolution, the range of perception and cognition for the ordinary individual began to be recalibrated. The roles and capacities of the brain also began to be re-tuned.
The habit of reducing attention toward a particular event or object is — perhaps — a basic function of the brain. But thanks to the mobile terminals handed to us, which are the source of the information revolution, the time humans have to do so is shrinking. The brain's role is being threatened. This may not be exactly accurate without being educated knowledge, but — if I must put it — it feels like the brain, once the manager of the human body, is being split off and turned into a separate object. Borrowing dev terms, it feels almost like an inner CLASS. By the way, time to stop paying attention is running short. The book talks about this too, in a later part.
The brain receives abstract stimuli and produces sensory impressions about reality. No matter how sensitive you are, you can't take in every stimulus that comes. There are simply too many. The brain filters and only lets through the ones that seem important. If perceptual filters, intentions, assumptions, and values differ, even the same situation and the same conditions can let people see the world differently.
Perception is never objective. (You don't hear the lawnmower of a likable neighbor, but the lawnmower of a disliked neighbor grates on your ears.) Perception cannot but be influenced by our concerns, expectations, hopes, desires, knowledge, experience, past, theories, programs, values, and meanings. (p.121)
Human beings' desperate efforts to overcome discomfort have borne results. And those results have turned human activity from "improving the uncomfortable" into "pursuing further convenience." Thanks to faster transportation and faster internet, the baseline level of general knowledge has become vast, and news is no longer news — it is shifting into an entertainment-type medium. This sort of situation keeps human perception from ever stopping, and individuals, left in that situation, end up racing to draw attention to themselves via social channels — isn't that it? That's what I think. Similar content was written about later in the book too.
We perceive dynamic stimuli more strongly than static ones. The faster something moves, the more strongly we perceive it.
The brain also reacts more strongly to new stimuli than to already-known ones. Our ancestors, with the help of this brain mechanism, could perceive change and new dangers in time, and quickly find unexpected food — enabling survival. The brain also actively seeks out new stimuli. But in today's age of information flood and fast change, this mode of brain operation can become a trap for us.
People tell me things like this: "I meant to just rest after getting home from work, but as soon as I finished dinner I automatically turned on the TV and was taking in noisy stimuli without realizing it."
We have to learn how to direct perception to ourselves to find our center, while also not completely ignoring the outside world. Regulating perception creates energy, lets you unfold yourself more, and lets you live more joyfully. (p.123)
There was an Excel template I made for sharing internal work and processes. It was a template where individuals share their personal to-do lists, and from that the overall workflow gets aggregated and shared. The result was satisfying. I think the reason we achieved that kind of result is similar in spirit to this. Without having to explain everything one by one to someone, as long as everyone knows that the others are watching and participating in the Excel schedule, the attention-seeking actions and perception can naturally concentrate into this one channel.
Isn't one person managing other people a violation of dignity? Regardless of what the target of that management is. I've been thinking that for several years. In the so-called age of AI, I expect we'll think this even more strongly. Human dignity will only be reinforced — because the survival of each individual is that much more threatened.
Survival is shifting layers — from the physical aspects of disease, war, and violence to the mental aspects of emotions and values. In the wild, the big grouping of "animals vs humans" fought for survival. In the more recent past, fates of survival could be shared within groupings of class or nation. Recent survival is "each person for themselves." The boundaries of the groupings of ethnicity, region, school ties, and hometown ties are blurring. It probably began in pursuit of fairness. But in an age when even human emotions and private life are transparently public, and only a few with power can actually use that transparently? public information, each individual's survival capacity keeps shriveling. The age of transparency — shall we call it "only personal information fully laid bare"?
For the first time in my life, I heard tinnitus. Spring 2019 for someone born in '83 is cruel. The kitchen vent hums. My thoughts won't stop. Ideas keep expanding without stop. Imagination? Idle thoughts? Those kinds of thoughts don't stop. Maybe all of this is the result of concentrating on perception without realizing it?
We have all learned perception. By now it's settled into an unconscious, automatic process. So we experience most perception passively. But perception is an active act. To change perception, conscious decision is needed.
We must not stop at being swept up by external stimuli and just reacting; we have to learn how to properly regulate perception. In fact, when you are concentrating on a particular activity, you are always regulating perception.
…but only when my thought turns to it do I realize that sound is happening again. The laptop fan, the birds in the garden, the construction site. But I now decide to listen to the thrush singing in the garden. As soon as I do, the construction hammering is no longer heard. I feel a quiet breath, I stretch to contract my muscles, release them, breathe deeply, and concentrate on work again.
The stimuli that disturb us get amplified through our nervous system and are hard to ignore. Then we take some measures to shake off the irritating perceptions, but may struggle to escape from these stimuli. Because the more perception that hasn't had its cause removed grates on us, the more strongly we perceive it.
Sensitive people often unconsciously amplify stimuli. They suffer because of it, so they try harder to block them. Then the stimuli exert a stronger effect, and they reject them even more tenaciously. Recognizing this relationship with stimuli makes life change possible. Once we recognize this mechanism, we can live without being at the mercy of disruptive stimuli. The most important thing for change is simply accepting the things you dislike but can't change.
To handle one's own sensitive nature, the mental maturity to accept and acknowledge people and life situations as they are is necessary.
Ah, so that's it —
