Analysis paralysis

Can you imagine how slowly your mind would function if it had to stop to identify and label every single thing you experience?

Stop reading this for for a moment and look up at the space or setting around you. Now, imagine your phone rings. It’s a good friend of yours, so you pick up. They ask you to describe your surroundings - not because they’re coming to meet you - because they’re blind. Naturally, you’d try to give your friend an accurate mental picture of where you are.

Perhaps you’d say something like “there are eucalyptus trees, the sun is setting and there’s the smell of cut grass”. You wouldn’t go into infinite detail though, would you? It would be most important to communicate the essence of the scene. If you had to identify every last pixel of the reality before you, then something as simple as looking at a fallen leaf could become an overwhelmingly tedious process.

Now, imagine your friend responds with a barrage of questions. The general description wasn’t enough. They ask “Are there any fallen leaves? What colour is the closest one? Can you describe the shape of the leaf? What pattern do the veins make? What is the edge like? How is the light hitting it? How many leaves are there? Are the others just like this one? What about the grass?”

Because you love your friend, you’re feeling compassionate, so you spend a good 5 minutes describing things in detail. Then they ask “Can you tell me about each blade of grass, individually? Also, was that a roller-skater I heard? Are they still there…? What about now?” … Wait, are they taking the piss? That would be the final straw. “Seriously?” You say to yourself, “and when I’m done with that, would you like me to count the atoms?”

This example shows us just how ridiculous it is to translating your reality into a thousand bite-sized pieces to consciously note every change in real-time. If your brain was a laptop, this would be enough to induce the spinning beach ball of doom. It’s pretty clear that in order to actually relax, take it all in and enjoy the view, you have to stop analysing and identifying. And you absolutely can take it all in if you stop trying so hard to understand it all. Because doing so is actually the only way to experiencing reality directly, rather than through concepts.

And yet, for some of us, this dialogue happens all day long. When ‘living in the head’, our minds grasp onto every little thing and chatter non-stop, compulsively describing our entire human experience and analysing it, to the point where our minds become overwhelmed with junk and we can no longer connect with the refreshing richness of immediate, direct experience. When ‘living in the head’, we aren’t explaining things to a blind friend… we are the blind friend.

To explain things, we have to use language and memory… and it’s the process of manually committing particular details to memory which takes effort. When there is no need to remember or explain, there is no need to identify what we see or grasp onto the details. Compare the experience of cramming for an exam to the experience of reading for pleasure. There’s one clear difference; cramming is stressful and exhausting, whereas reading for pleasure is relaxing and peaceful.

The content on the page we’re reading could be exactly the same, but the quality (the kind) of attention we bring to the task is what makes all the difference. If cramming is like cooling yourself down with a fire-hose, then reading for pleasure is like cooling yourself with a hand-held mist sprayer. The fire-hose represents a highly focused, narrow beam of intense concentration, whereas the mist sprayer represents a soft, expansive, general focus.

Narrow beams of concentration can allow us to zoom in on certain ‘pixels’ of reality at great detail, but aren’t very helpful when we’re trying to notice patterns or ‘connect the dots’. For that, we need to be able to ‘zoom out’ and see the bigger picture. If we concentrate on analysing one element of this picture, we might actually miss an important detail which lies just outside of our rigidly, defined scope of view. By definition, if we concentrate on one thing, we make distractions of anything else.

So, why is it important to un-concentrate - in other words, to practice soft, general focus? For the same reason it’s better to ask unbiased questions when really trying to understand a topic. By focusing too intently on one angle, we default to finding only the information we are looking for, without understanding the greater context which makes that piece of information meaningful. When we narrow our focus without a conscious intention, we unconsciously decide what is relevant and what isn’t.

If this seems too abstract to grasp, just imagine that you are watching a stage play through a pinhole. You could zoom in and further analyse what you see through this pinhole, but how on earth could anyone expect you to understand the story of the play? If someone asked you what it was about, you’d say “It was about colours and shapes, and that’s about it”. What you would see through the pinhole as ‘random’ flashes of colour and light would just be a tiny fragment of a story which could only be understood with a less specific and more general perspective.

The message is this: our interpretation of reality is limited to our perspective, and that widening our perspective is essential if we want the details to mean anything. Analysis paralysis is the process of digging ever deeper into the details to the point where we lose sight of what the details mean. Unfortunately, it’s a common phenomenon for modern humans, because we spend so much of our life practicing the narrow, specific focus (the fire-hose mind). We waste so much energy trying to understand the grand play of life while looking at it through a pin-hole.

This is why I get uneasy when people say ‘trust the experts’. My problem with experts is certainly not their expertise - it’s the fact that they are often too highly specialised to be decision makers. Decision makers must be those who are advised by experts but able to collate the meaning of information with a broad view. A decision maker needs to be a dot-connectors and therefore something of a generalist. A specialist is, by definition, someone who understands relatively little of the world outside of their focus area.

Funnily enough, this is why the wisest man in the university (in terms of ‘life knowledge’) could just as easily be the groundskeeper as any professor. While the professors and tutors are deep in the world of research and academia, the groundskeeper sees something they aren’t looking for - the way they walk, talk and act while they are not in character. He does not call himself a teacher or a student, but he spends his days observing the mark they leave on their immediate world. What kind of people are these people? What do they know of life outside of the classroom?

In case it sounds like it, I am not here to bash specialists. I appreciate specialists and generalists equally. It would be foolish to say that zooming out is always more important than zooming in. My main point here is to say that if a culture becomes predominantly analytical and over-prioritises specialisation, it will become incoherent and nonsensical to anyone with common sense. If technology can safe us from this, it will only be because we have learned to ask better questions and identify our values.

To do this, a balance of synergistic (dot-connecting) thinking and analytical (dot identification) thinking is surely essential. Of course, balance is inevitable, in the long term. Such is the nature of all things. But if we, as a collective, wish to course-correct and align with balance before we are dragged towards it, we’ll need to practice soft, general attention a little more. We’ll need to share our perspectives more often and more openly and encourage dialogue between specialists and generalists, as well as experts and common folk.

The only reason we are not yet speaking of the wonders of soft, general attention and non-identification (not rushing to conclusions) on the grand scale is because the media sources and technological platforms which we have built our lives around reward precisely the opposite. Humanity faces a grand shift and all must participate, whether conscious or unconscious of the changes occurring. The services we once used as tools are already using us, and it’s something even the creators of many social platforms have admitted.

Will we be the generation of blunted minds and frazzled nervous systems, unaware of the power of our own attention? Will we forget that awareness is currency because attention is energy? Will we throw stones from glass houses and criticise the ‘other’ who represents a misunderstood aspect of self? Will we outsource our entire beings in the name of convenience and entertainment? I have no idea. Some of us definitely will and some will do their best to run the other way.

What I do know is that those of us who can see something isn’t quite right, should lean into the feeling and into themselves. The solution is not complex - we must be utterly committed to maintaining a clear mind and giving our heart, gut and the rest of the unconscious genius within, a voice. Each of us must find a compelling way to express our truth, because one’s truth is the hard-earned fruit of direct experience and no experience is any more valid or real than another. 

And when going outward and allowing your attention to play in the world of things, avoid analysis paralysis, by sensing into the quality of your attention. See if you can relax again and again into soft, general focus when you feel yourself being ‘fire-hosed’. Once your basic needs are met, make every attempt to become skilled in expressing yourself through whichever medium feels most accurate and resonant for you. Most importantly, trust in what you know but can’t yet articulate, because tomorrow’s wisdom sprouts within you and will only develop if you allow it.