Deep thinking in life, academics, and the arts

The stay-at-home orders to stem the Covid-19 pandemic have enabled a significant shift in how I live my day-to-day life. My life is typically dictated by an ongoing schedule - what time do I need to be in the office? What do I want to get done before then? Where do I need to be after work, and by what time? By the time the weekend comes around, it’s split between “catching up” on things I need to do, and actively avoiding things I need to do, just in a miniature rebellion against the clock (never mind that the clock on the weekend is running out).

Certain efforts and projects on my to-do list lag for months, largely because they require focused time, and often, life makes that phrase feel like an oxymoron. When I have the time, I’m unable to focus. But usually, the time I do have available is fragmented moments between a seemingly unyielding calendar. In the mean time, the twin deities of efficiency and productivity that we worship above all else seem to both bless my to-do lists and calendars and admonish my inability to complete larger projects.

Given the recent stay-at-home orders, I had a list of projects I wanted to tackle, a growing stack of books I wanted to read, and a desire to develop skills such as (rudimentary) audio and video editing. However, I haven’t been making quite the degree of progress that I’d hoped for.

Certain days have felt immensely fulfilling in the past few months - such as the days I worked with my mom on a couple of new choreographies, the days I’ve completed some long-delayed projects around the house, my excitement over this past weekend over mastering some new video editing skills, and the days I have been able to focus long enough to complete and post on this blog.

On a related note, an ongoing conversation I’ve had with others who are educators over the years has been the struggle to get students to retain and process information, to make connections and correlations when engaging with new material, whether it’s dance, music, school subjects, or other extracurriculars. One educator who I deeply respect talked about revisiting his entire pedagogy and curriculum because kids today simply aren’t learning the way they did when he first started his martial arts studio.

A lot of this came together for me today, as I was listening to the most recent podcast episode of The Ezra Klein Show, which was an interview with Nicholas Carr on “deep reading and digital thinking”. Now, when I usually consume podcasts (and I use the word “consume” very intentionally), I have a playlist droning in the background, and I catch interesting snippets as I go about my day or fade into sleep. I’ve caught myself having conversations with Bertel about things I’ve heard, without being able to state from where, and it takes me a silly amount of time to retrace my steps. Every now and then, I’ll find myself replaying a podcast 5, 6, 7 times, just to make sure I hear the whole thing. Rarely, I drop everything else I’m doing. This particular interview was one such episode. This was a wide-ranging conversation, but I’ll hit the major points that resonated with me, and then elaborate on them.

Whenever there is a new form of medium, there is a fundamental shift in society as it is reshaped by that medium.

Carr specifically points out that the assumption for the root cause is the change in access to information. It is, however, the change in the way the information is consumed.

He used the shift brought on by the written word and the printing press as an example, talking about how time spent on reading meant time spent away from other people, which led to the development of a much more individualistic (Western) society. He also noted an amazed observation from the time when the written word began growing in prominence upon a person encountering someone reading internally, not out loud.

Other implications of the shift to the book-based society was that people were focusing more time on deep reading and deep thinking, and trading mental resources previously spent on reading nature and understanding through the other senses into focusing on a sight-based individual makeup.

We, of course, coming from the Indian diaspora, talk about how our traditions have been oral traditions, and while manuscripts of ancient texts exist, we’ve passed knowledge on from generation to generation through memorization and recitation. Now, we’ve always grown up hearing (and, in many cases, experiencing) how much more community-based our culture is, which, by extrapolation of Carr’s point, makes sense. If you need someone to vocally pass down information to you, you cannot separate information from people.

Then, there’s the subject of memorization. As someone who has always prized analysis and understanding over simple memory, I have learned over time the value memorization and recitation bring to the ability to analyze and understand.

For instance, my love affair with math began in elementary school, out of a most hated assignment. My mother would have me write my times tables through 12, twelve times each, daily. I dreaded doing this, and since I couldn’t bothered writing things in order (1x1=1, 1x2=2, etc.), I would approach each day writing the same hated tables in different order and different approaches. What I found was patterns, elegant beautiful patterns in numbers that then enabled to me to discover arithmetic “tricks” that arose from a deeper understanding of the connections between numbers.

I think back to the dance pieces that I’ve spent the most time with. During my earlier training, my dance teachers often just said “do it”. (And this included how I saw senior students learn new pieces). Some times, I would be taught the piece section by section. More often, I would be put behind a senior student and I’d follow along. Of course, far before I got to learning the dance for any piece, I would learn the song just by virtue of being in class and singing every song for which I didn’t know the dance (which, when I was first starting out, was all of them). Working on something else instead of watching class and singing was not an option. This meant before I ever learned a piece on my own body, I learned the songs, gleaned the meaning from watching the hand gestures to the lyrics day in and out, saw as many interpretations of the piece as there were students in the class, and subconsciously parsed and interpolated all of the information. So, when I got around to learning the piece years later, I was already a significant way there.

I’ve learned I cannot teach that way and get results today. In direct contrast to how I learned, I structure my own classes today to explain context, teach every single lyric and the associated meaning, and then parse how that is translated into the choreography and what patterns exist. I fell into that habit to try and help students remember their lessons. I’ve got a strong dislike and distrust (and shameful dependence at times) of remembering via recorded video, preferring instead to make connections and draw parallels with other pieces. However, I found out at some point many of the students I was encountering didn’t function that way - which was a shift from my contemporaries and seniors. So, I tried to lead them down the path of making these connections, and then encouraging them to find their correlations.

(My favorite - one of our senior students was teaching a newbie the final first half step this way: “Pretend you’re going to someone’s birthday party, and just when you see them, you realize you forgot their present. So you turn around and go back.” The girl, who’d been struggling with the step for ages, immediately got it!)

Frankly, it was a skill they needed to be taught, and as crucial as it’s been for my own development in all areas of academics, I was going to spend that time helping them.

Carr’s interview helped crystallize that with another point:

There was a flawed belief at the onset of the internet age that with all this availability of information, people would be freed up to do deep thinking and contemplation. The opposite seems to have happened.

My grandfather taught me when I was very young, that if I wanted to really learn something well, I needed to repeat it over and over and over again, and at some point, I would find new depths in it. Duh, Ameya, that’s practice, you can say. But I would push back that he was talking about something deeper than simple practice. In another podcast that I religious follow, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, they use different sacred reading practices that rely on deep contemplation and the active seeking of connections between the text, a chosen theme, and personal lives to find greater meaning. This very sacred reading practice is what we often do without realizing it when we deeply immerse ourselves in arts. And when I say arts, I mean books, movies, TV shows, music, dance, the visual arts, the whole gamut, and this includes whether we engage as artists or as art-lovers.

I’ve read certain books countless times. I’ve practiced certain dance pieces countless times. And some songs and poems will follow me to the ends of the earth. And yet, every time I re-engage with them, in addition to encountering younger versions of myself, I bring to the experience my newest set of experiences and the growth I’ve had since the previous time. I think that is the case because a lot of mental time and effort is spent visiting and revisiting that piece, and the level of engagement finds new connections. Some part of all of this is called deep thinking.

Carr made a point of how young kids learn to read - they must first learn to identify the letters, sound them out, string the sounds together to make them into recognizable words, and then recollect the meaning of the words. (And of course, the next step is to make sense of all the words in the sentence and determine what the sentence is saying).

I know learning dance and music can feel like similar efforts. First, we are learning simply how to use our muscles. Then, it becomes the task of learning the choreography or composition - the specified sequence of events and actions that make up the piece. (Unfortunately, I think this is where we often stop engaging with the piece because we’re on to the next thing). The next layer on is to know and absorb that choreography or composition to the point where we no longer have to stop and think about where we are and what’s next. That’s the point where we find the rasa, bhava, and joy in the piece, when we are able to engage in it from the soul.

Now, I think that was much easier to do when I first started learning music and dance than it is, today. My only responsibilities were school and my music and dance classes. (To be fair, I was a very unburdened elementary school kid with an immense amount of freedom). When I learned something new, it would just sit in my mind, replaying for hours on end. We did have a personal computer (Windows 3.1, followed by Windows 95), but the internet came slowly to our house (dial-up days…), and I recall mainly using the computer for email, (educational - thanks, Amma) computer games, and for projects (anyone remember WordArt?). So, I wasn’t using the computer to necessarily amass and look up large volumes of information. It was a different form of reassessing and reengaging with the same information I’d been processing from my classes and learning experiences.

That’s a very different experience with technology than I see my son having with technology. For a while, when we talked about anything new, his first question would be “can you show me a picture on the phone?” and then he wanted to scroll through as many images in the search results as I’ll allow him  (okay, he still wants to do that). I had a frustrating few months where he would rather look at something on my phone than see the real thing right in front of us in the world (think lightning, animals, plants). This had started innocently enough - he discovered YouTube when my dad showed him a few videos of autos in India after his fascination at encountering one in a book. But the seemingly mindless swiping through images or videos of an item bothered me to a degree that I stopped acquiescing to his request to process information by seeing new things on my phone. I decided, we can draw them, we can talk about them, we can find books that talk about them, but we cannot look them up on the phone.

There’s a different but fundamental shift in the students I’m seeing in class as well - they are likely plagued with notifications and multiple demands on their over scheduled days just as much as I am, and their instinct (likely honed in by education) has been to largely collect information, not to collate it, and to constantly chase productivity and efficiency. If there’s a recording of the new lesson, they can use it as a reference for whenever they need it. If they need to know the solution to some arithmetic problem, they can pull up a calculator. Any “downtime”, even the silences in class, are spent “productively.” I had to (hopefully gently) redirect some students in class this week because they were spending time I was focusing on another student’s new lesson by rigorously practicing their own steps. I know from my own experience that the few moments “wasted” watching someone else learn a new step will teach them much more than a dedicated hour of me teaching them that very step, because they are absorbing the information and thinking on it before ever having to figure out how to replicate it on their own bodies.

However, I think the availability of fast information has reduced the necessity for focused attention, which has, in turn, reduced the capacity for focused attention. I don’t need to remember phone numbers. I am no longer as capable of remembering as many phone numbers as I used to be. I no longer need to make my way through a several hundred page tome to understand its key points - search engines helpfully allow me to find the key points on any subject, so I can take away the “most important information” without needing to focus on the book. And damn, it has been hard focusing on that book. Any book.

One Christmas, I was gifted with a collection of the original Sherlock Holmes novels. I literally made my way through the entirety of that collection over break, often forgetting meal times and forgoing sleep. More recently, working on my thesis, I was struggling so hard to get into the zone on reading and writing, that I ended up employing the Pomodoro timer, trying to focus for 25 minute chunks and take short breaks when I gave into urges to check my phone. The most productive period of my thesis writing, however, didn’t require that Pomodoro timer. I was in some kind of a dream state when the pieces fell into place correlating hours of conversation I had with practitioners of Kuchipudi, thousands of words I’d read, my own experiences, and the framework of Natya, Nrithya, and Nritta into a simple table. The evening before, I had the same information, but nothing to show for it, but by the early hours of the morning, I had a theory put together that formed the crux of my thesis. (It didn’t escape my notice that this happened between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am, when my phone doesn't emit any notifications).

The experience underscored several things to me - that it takes focused time without a predetermined direction to get the best insights, growth, and development. That notifications are the bane of my and everyone else’s existence. That productivity and efficiency are false gods.

That last point might not seem as congruent yet. Keep reading.

We spend our time either giving into our devices or actively resisting our devices, and either way, it is taking up mental power that is keeping us from deep thinking

This point by Carr hit me hard because it epitomizes the struggle in my life. I have two monitors for my office work and a compulsion to clear my inbox and chat windows of any notification. Sometimes, I hear from coworkers over text as well, so my phone is always within reach, but I’m constantly trying to ignore notifications from non-work things. (Thank goodness, they’re sunsetting our work instance of Facebook, because that used to be a fourth avenue of communication to monitor). Meetings and to-do lists dictate my day, but it’s much easier to get the quick answer out than to focus heads down and work on a larger document. So the document I’ve had to work on hasn’t been progressing well. In contrast, last Friday afternoon, when most people were offline, I had the most fantastic working session with someone where we made more progress by revisiting existing information than I’ve been able to in a while.

This same thing bleeds into my dance life and my personal life. I’m usually hyperaware of my phone and its proximity to me. I rarely forget where it is, and when I do, a wave of panic washes over me. I have to-do lists on my phone and my laptop, and a constant nagging urge that there’s something I’m forgetting.

I want to forget it, as well as that feeling that I’ve forgotten something. I feel most satisfied when I’ve had a few hours without my phone when I’ve been able to get to work done, but there’s a fear. We don’t have a house phone - what if someone is trying to get ahold of me with an emergency?

The pressures of the larger world today, between the pandemic and unrest against systemic oppression, haven’t helped. Even as much as I pat myself on the back for eschewing Twitter, cable news (really, any TV), and the radio, fears of these larger events are getting to me. I can swipe away newspaper notifications, but not before getting a glimpse of the headlines. And, as studies have shown, even when we are physically removed from some of these events, we are still impacted by them mentally as if we’ve personally witnessed them.

So, it’s hard to focus on what I need to get done, both because I’m always interrupted by some notification, and because as placid as my personal life is right now, I’m constantly reminded by the uncertainty that has gripped my greater community, and worrying about what I’m missing.

With that comes guilt, because things aren’t getting crossed off my to-do list at the rate I should be able to get things done. Because time not spent crossing things off my to-do list is time when I’m not being efficient or productive. Note that I keep referring to “things being crossed off,” not to accomplishing work. Because frankly, it’s become much easier to just get a task complete and move on than it is to focus on a task and ensure I’m doing it. There’s a subtle difference, and in it, the world. To be efficient and productive, I need to get as much done as possible in as little a time as possible. That does not allow for deep thinking. And when I’m not honed in on what I’m doing, my brain isn’t immersed in the action and making the connections and correlations that feel like progress has been made. This applies to literally everything in life. My mom would tell me, even if you’re throwing a piece of trash into the garbage can, watch what you’re doing and focus on it. The simple act of doing dishes, sweeping the floor, brushing my teeth, sitting outside with a cup of coffee - they feel completely different when I’m doing them “to get it done” with my eye on the next thing, versus when I fully engage in them. I’m having to retrain myself on something I knew well as a child, unlearning over a decade of go-go-go.

It’s taken me far too much time of this “stay at home” period to get to this realization, but I want to carry it with me going forward, at work, with my dance, and in my personal life. And I offer it to you as well. Take things slow, do things well, do them for the act of doing them, not for the feeling of getting them done.

I usually hyperlink throughout my piece, but one last thing from Carr - an article chockfull of hyperlinks apparently prevents deeper engagement with the texts, because the mind keeps being pulled out to process the link even if you don’t click on it.

So, I’m proceeding differently - the link is at the end.

Where you can find that podcast

Photo credit goes to my delightful 4-year-old, who has taken to photographing away whenever he gets ahold of my phone, since it doesn’t require unlocking the device. The clutter and general grumpiness exuding from me seemed apt to the topic.