I kind of feel like
my attention spam is dying
knocks on the door
it's just like
whenever I try and do anything,
I start craving some sort of distraction
I can't just focus on one thing at a time
even if that thing is sleeping.
But I have things I wanna do, things I focus on
I just don't
because refreshing Instagram is
always going to be easier
... and it's a problem!
And I'm tired of it.
I am tired of feeling like my life is so far out of my own control.
So today,
we are figuring out how to stop scrolling,
and how to start paying attention.
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[slam]
So, what's in the box?
[box opening]
This is an electroencephalogram, or an EEG.
It measures electrical activity in the brain
which are associated with certain performance metrics
like attention, excitement and stress.
Does that look good? How's that - How do I look?
Now these things usually look a little bit more
threatening and wire-y, however
I reached out to this brand called Emotiv
that creates more simplified consumer options.
They gave me a little discount
so I could actually afford this for the video.
And I look like a cyborg.
I think it looks cute.
Okay, so these are my brainwaves
and if I focus on it
really hard
it should be able to translate these
into more understandable metrics...
like attention! Look at that!
You see the building of tension and spike in excitement;
that's my brain!
I kind of feel like a videogame character and these are my stats.
It's cool.
Now I should note that EEG data can be pretty noisy
and things like movement can really impact the results.
However, I think that having any level of recording is an improvement
because I basically never pay attention to my attention.
It only every really comes up when I'm feeling guilty about my screentime,
or I realise that I've done nothing all day.
And only having these really infrequent and negative interactions with my problem
makes it really hard to be objective about the whole thing,
to understand how bad it actually is
and see if it's getting better or worse.
But now, with the help of this brainscanner,
I finally got to measure a baseline for my attention span
without getting bogged down by guilt,
or forgetting to focus on my focus.
[typing]
I wore the EEG while I worked, ate, exercised and relaxed.
I did take it off a few times because it gets pretty uncomfortable
after really long stretches.
Woah!
But, overall, it was pretty easy to ignore
while I just lived my life for the rest of the week.
Alongside the EEG, I installed a program to automatically track
how often I switched tasks on my computer,
and I recorded how many times I picked up my phone.
Did you know that you can't actually export you screentime data!
Then I wrote a quick script to compile all this data and visualise it.
Here is my life for the past three days.
Ooh.
The x-axis is the number of hours in a day.
These blue bars represent the number of times I picked up my phone.
This grey line tracks how productive I was at my computer,
and these coloured lines are the median performance metrics from my EEG.
Now, some highlights include this moment
where I picked up my phone to start debugging the app that I was using to scan my brain,
and then I ended up [uh] opening Instagram and spending the next two hours on it.
[laughs]
However, during my meeting the next day
I was like super interested and attentive,
right? Great? No.
It's because I kept picking up my phone!
I was supposed to be on call!
I kept opening up Instagram!
But it's not all bad news.