On the Ability To Maintain A Sharp Focus of Attention In Cognitive Psychology Bernard Pyron

 

On the Ability To Maintain A Sharp Focus of Attention In Cognitive Psychology Bernard Pyron

The ability to focus attention sharply on one thing and to maintain that focus for a period of time is very important for cognitive skills or intelligence.

There is a list of cognitive skills that are impaired by a lack of ability to focus sharply for a period of time.  These cognitive skills are the ability to tell the difference between what is important and what is not important, the ability to create adequate gist  meaning  summaries of information,  the ability to think in cause and effect terms, clarity of perception of  space and time, the ability to isolate and   pay attention to an item embedded  in a visual field or context,  the ability to correctly remember information from memory at the right time, the ability to hold more than one item of information in consciousness at a time,  the ability to make use of information to think in new ways in order to solve a problem, and the ability to combine information into new possible combinations and  to see new connections - or creativity.

This emphasis upon the ability to pay close attention to something for a period of time and not get distracted from that focus comes out of cognitive psychology.  Cognitive psychology to some extent rebelled against the German influence upon psychology, especially from the Leipzig School - such as Wundt, B.F. Skinner and other Behaviorists, all of which is a reductionist approach.

One point of origin for Cognitive Psychology was Noam Chomsky's interest in Cartesian Linguistics, especially the Port-Royal Grammar.  Port-Royal Grammar goes back to about 1660 in France.  In Cartesian Linguistics there is a distinction between the

outward verbatim form of a sentence and the representation in the mind of the meaning of that sentence.  Chomsky called  the outward verbatim form of a sentence "surface structure" and the  representation of that verbatim form "Deep Structure."  Deep Structure refers to gist meaning.  The mind represents verbatim sentences  in a kind of short hand or cognitive map, which may leave out details but retains the gist meaning.

Behaviorism is not able to deal with this difference between surface structure and deep structure, because behaviorism is reductionist and not able to understand subtle meaning or nuances.  

I ran into this issue of the importance of a sharp focus  of attention upon an item for a period of time when I first received a Dell Optiplex 390 loaded by Walmart with Windows 10.

In some contrast to my experience with earlier Dell computers, such as the Dell 3000 which has an old IDE hard drive - and mine is still working - this Dell 3020 with Windows 10 loaded by Walmart with all kinds of Apps seemed to be designed to hinder any development of the cognitive skill of focusing sharply upon one item at a time. It floods you with all kinds of distractions - and seems to make the Internet and computer functioning ambiguous and overly complex.

I have been able to get rid of some of these distractions but not many of them because Microsoft does not allow them to be deleted.

Ambiguity is necessary to change the attitudes and behavior of masses of people.  So is anything that hinders the development of a sharp focus of attention.

For example, a few days ago when I was trying to get my old Dell 3000 working again, I found that its Bios can be clearly used to find out if a hard drive is recognized or not by the BIO.  While the recognition by the BIOS of a hard drive is not a hundred percent accurate in determining if a hard drive is working, it is a test that is available.

  For my Dell 960s which show the Blue Screen of Death when a Windows XP Setup CD is run, I have not been able to figure out how to use the BIOS in them to evaluate the hard drive with the Blue Screen error message.  Too much ambiguity in the way the BIOS is set up or represented on the Internet.