0.9 Life occurs in sharp spikes  (Page 13/7)

People need to pay attention to things in order to keep their minds alive and active. They need to pay attention to little things all the time. That is why spikes occur, when people refocus their attention on little things over and over it occurs as a spike, because the new object needs to be processed as a whole and this processing takes energy in the form of a “spike”.

Humans cannot pay attention to everything, and the things they do pay attention to they need to “spike” their attention initially to get that object into their attention and focus. It is possible to not use spikes of attention, but if you did that then life would be boring. In order for life to be interesting people naturally spike their attention on certain things every so often (once a minute or so) to make life more exciting. Life would be boring if you never paid sharp attention to anything. Spikes of attention keep life “crisp”.

If life occurs in sharp spikes, why then doesn’t it feel like life occurs in sharp spikes? It seems pretty smooth to me. If it seems this way, then you aren’t realizing or paying attention to the complicated emotional and cognitive processes that are going on in your mind, life is not “all smooth” but there are changes in attention going on all the time. Each little thing you pay attention to (actually pay attention to that is, not just “absorb”) actually occurs as a spike in attention. This is because most of the time your attention isn’t extremely directed, but you need to make it extremely directed sometimes (once a minute or so) in order to properly stay awake. It is also because you don’t absorb every little thing, you only absorb a few things once in a while, and these things that you do absorb are the spikes. They are spikes because they are relative to most of your activity which isn’t absorbing things intently or deeply. Every minute or so you need to absorb something. That thing is the spike.

When you pay attention to your attention (or what you are paying attention to) how does life feel to you? Does it feel smooth or rough? Life seems rough if you pay attention to it like that, with occasional spikes of interest in things. It is rough because there are many little fluctuations of interest in various things, but intensity is needed somewhere. This intensity comes from the spikes, otherwise life would just be rough and there wouldn’t be anything smooth. The top of the spike is smooth, however because it is clear and it lasts a little while (a few seconds or a few dozen seconds). Paying sharp attention to things allows you to have a clear mind for the time you are giving that sharper attention. It separates out all the other things and you focus more on what it is you processed. This clears your mind because you just received a lot of stimulation. In this way spikes can make life be smooth. Without spikes life would always be rough because of all the little things. But if you use a spike then life is smooth afterwards because you are satisfied.