Cognitive implication and engagement through investing attention

Investing Attention Essential to Viable Growth (Part #8)

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]

---

The reference in this argument to investing attention endeavours to elicit the nature of the continuum between investing in the tangible (as more conventionally understood) and investing in the intangible through attention to it in some way.

Cognitive feel of the investing process: Of particular interest is the cognitive feel of "investing" -- perhaps most vividly experienced in gambling, and games involving risk and reward. The etymology is variously indicative of senses which may continue to be conflated in any use of the term:

• "act of putting on vestments", as continues to be found in investiture, namely "to clothe in the official robes of an office,"
• "act of being invested with an office, right, endowment, etc."
• "surrounding and besieging of a military target"
• and only more recently the sense of "conversion of money to property in hopes of profit," and the amount of "amount of money so invested; property viewed as a vehicle for profit." giving one's capital a new form.

Some of these senses are evident in jargon use of the expressions "getting into" or "buying into".

Understood metaphorically in terms of clothing and enrobing, the cognitive feel may include the sense of taking on a role, as in a drama -- with associations to enrolling. There is then investment in a dramatic role with the "in-vestment" understood as a form of vestment. This frames the question as to the number of stories in which one is effectively invested -- if only in the eyes of others? The clothing may constitute a facade, as in the famed investment in Potemkin villages -- but now evident in any process of cultivating an image and a look.

There is then also the sense of investing as embodying -- echoed by the strange implications of "incorporation", as used with respect to an investment initiative, and as a means of acquiring a form of identity. It may even be understood as the activation of subpersonalities. It can also be understood as incarnation -- a term used on occasion with respect to the re-emergence of a bankrupt initiative in a "new incarnation".

Although vestments may be adopted and "donned", they may also be "doffed" as in the process of divestment (or disinvestment). Again it is the psychology of disassociation from a previously adopted role -- its abandonment -- which is a key to the shift of focus of attention and of its reframing. This is usefully recognized in the comments of actors regarding detachment from the patterns required of a previous role.

Illusory nature of investment: The preoccupation here with how investing attention "works" therefore calls for recognition of how any "investor" of attention "gets into" or "gets out of" the investment.

A surprisingly relevant approach to the cognitive processes is through vulnerability to illusion -- as a mistaken form of attention, possibly enabled by skilled exploitation of visual metaphor. This then attributes patterns where none exist -- but which may well be usefully understood to exist for a period as providing a credible explanation. Reference to illusion is of course of significance in relation to financial investment and the anticipation of reward suggested by the presentation of an opportunity -- most notably in investment fraud.

Financial success has long been associated with "sleight of hand" and a capacity for "magic" in the market place -- with which some are readily held to be endowed (Neil Charnock, Investment Magic, 24hGold, 26 June 2007). Use is made of the expression magic formula investing. This may be associated with financial alchemy, especially framed as a quest for a "pot of gold" (George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance, 1987), or even the Holy Grail (Holy Blood, Holy Grail: cultivating a murky world of illusion, 2011).

With respect to investing attention more generally, the role of "confidence tricks" is well recognized, most particularly in personal relationships and commitments. Cultivation of an illusion is a major key to attracting investment -- possibly with the aid of "spin doctors" -- as is most obvious in cultivating an image and a "look" enabling fruitful relationships.

In endeavouring to understand the investment of attention there is therefore a case for understanding illusion as long practiced by illusionists. A report of a meeting by Drake Bennett (How magicians control your mind, Boston.com, 3 August 2008) notes:

For the moment, the cognitive scientists looking at magic are confining themselves to these sorts of simple effects, and the fundamental questions they raise. Eventually, though, [Ronald A.] Rensink envisions a sort of periodic table of attention effects: methods for getting someone's attention, methods for deflecting it, methods for causing someone to be blind to something they're looking directly at. Such a taxonomy, he argues, wouldn't just be helpful to magicians. The control and management of attention is vital in all sorts of realms. Airplane cockpits and street signs would be designed better, security guards would be trained to be more alert, computer graphics would feel more natural, teaching less coercive.

A typology of attention was proposed by Davenport and Beck (The Attention Economy, 2001), notably distinguishing attention that is "front of the mind" (for instance when someone is talking to another person) from an attention that is "back of the mind".

Typology of illusion: The possibility of a periodic table of illusions -- of fallacious perceptions -- is a theme developed by Richard L. Gregory (Seeing Through Illusions: making sense of the senses, 2009). Such a table naturally needs to be based on a systematic typology of illusions and a sense of the variety of illusions. This approach can then be related to Rensink's recognition of the possibility of a periodic table of attention. This is implied by the periodic table approach briefly explored above.

There are many references to types of illusion, about which the work of Peter Mark Roget is commonly cited (Linda Bierds, Roget's Illusion, 2014).

As noted with respect to the work of Jean Piaget by Klaus F. Riegel and John A. Meacham (The Developing Individual in a Changing World, 2007. p. 233):

In two early papers Piaget et al, 1942; Piaget and Lambercier, 1944), Piaget set out his basic typology of illusions, dividing them into primary -- those which declined with age and were based on field forces -- and secondary -- those which increased with age and were dependent on operations of comparison across time and space. He proposed a single set of mechanisms to account for the ontogenesis of both types (Piaget 1967, 1969) during the course of an extended research program that ... ended with the original French version of Mechanisms of Perception (1961).

Aspects of the paradox of a typology of illusion are highlighted by James Barlow (Jaynes contra Nietzsche: Affinities and Digressions Among Two Seminal Thinkers, The Jaynesian, Summer 2011):

For to 'know oneself' is not, properly speaking, to know the causes behind why the way you think and act as you do as you do. That is a misunderstanding. Nor is it to know oneself as a person who knows he ought and should do, or refrain from doing, such-and-such, and rather ought to do instead this-and-that. To know oneself is to believe wholeheartedly in who and what you are, and what you seek to do. Everything else is hypothesis. And an hypothesis already contains within itself the typology of illusion, does it not? To become a 'knower,' says Nietzsche, i.e. to seek objective knowledge for its own sake as an inevitable description of what it means to know oneself -- does that endeavor as the definition of self-knowledge render the impossibility of self-knowledge? Does it not destroy the veridical prospect of introspection?

More recently Rensink has framed the challenge in terms of taxonomy (Ronald A. Rensink, A Function-Centered Taxonomy of Visual Attention, 2014).

Illusory investment modalities: Of relevance to the argument with respect to investment of attention is the articulation of characteristic illusions associated with financial investment, as presented by Brian Bloch (Avoid These Common Investing Psychology Traps, Investopedia, 5 June 2013). Distinguished are:

• Anchoring: an over-reliance on what one originally thinks.
• Sunk costs: inappropriate protection of previous choices or decisions, avoiding acceptance of loss and recognition that a wrong choices was made
• Confirmation trap: dependence on the advice of others who have made, and are still making, the same investment mistake
• Situational blindness: excluding recognition of prevailing market realties in order to do nothing and postpone the time when losses must be confronted.
• Relativity: excessive dependence on what others are doing and saying, when their situation and views may not not necessarily be relevant outside their particular context.
• Superiority: assumption by an investor of knowledge superior to experts in the market or to the market itself.

Varieties of attention fixation: It is of course the case that (as noted above) various disciplines of meditation have long been attentive to the varieties of illusion as being complementary to the varieties of attention. With respect to their presentation, those of mandala-like form offer a variety of ways of positioning and relating modes of what may be understood as attention/illusion.

The enneagram may be considered as one form of mandala. The illusory nature of the investment of attention in any form of fixity -- effectively perceived to be a class of asset -- is succinctly clarified in the remarks of Stuart Sovatsky (The Living Enneagram, The Enneagram Monthy, January, 1996):

As a map of typical ways people fail in the Heideggerian challenge to know being and time together, the enneagram charts nine thematic reductions from which to see fixity -- permanence, determinacy, absolutism and false-idealization -- where it is not. And in such generalizing and reductive seeing, so the seer himself becomes, to himself and to others varyingly predisposed, more reductively fixed as "himself", with his "own" modes of self expression, tastes and values -- or so it seems.

Thus, the enneagram is a typology of more or less illusory "personality fixations", or typical patterns in which people live "as if" lives -- as if these "patterns" of their lives were bindingly "real" As if the preoccupying themes of avenging the past, becoming more righteous, securing love-feelings and the six other themes, were each adequate to all of being and timebody stuff

From some philosophical perspectives, there is a problematically intimate relationship between attention, illusion and any more insightful form of knowing. As a periodic ordering of ways of knowing, it is in this sense that it is appropriate to note that formulated in the Brahmajala Sutta. and presented separately (Comprehensive set of ways of knowing: the All-Embracing Net of Buddhist culture, 2009). It is considered to be one of the Buddha's most important and profound discourses, weaving a net of sixty-two cases capturing all the philosophical, speculative views on the self and the world (Bhikku Bodhi (Tr). The Discourse on the All-Embracing Net of Views; the Brahmajala Sutta and its commentarial exegesis. Kandy, Buddhist Publications, 1978). It can be seen in terms of attention or illusion, with the further possibility that any such ordering itself has an illusory dimension.

However attention is invested, any associated fixity -- understood as a "fixed investment" -- can be explored in terms of the traditional challenges of philosophy and meditation to forms of "attachment". It is somewhat ironic that the contrasting case for "detachment" and "impermanence" (or the Sanskrit Neti Neti) might be fruitfully compared with short-term speculative investment (Joan Stambaugh, Impermanence is Buddha-Nature, 1990).

Illusory fixation in a society in crisis: There are many forms of illusion and deceit (Helen K. Gediman and Janice S. Lieberman, The Many Faces of Deceit: omissions, lies, and disguise in psychotherapy, 1996). The extent of news management to that end has been made evident with respect both to marketing and cultivation of political agendas (Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, 2010; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky and Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 1988). The extent of "group think" has been acknowledged with respect to the intelligence failure rendering American society vulnerable to 9/11 (Groupthink: the Search for Archaeoraptor as a Metaphoric Tale, 2002).

As suggested above, global civilization be understood as heavily invested in attractive illusions -- seemingly cultivated with great care and skilled misdirection. They only become apparent through being "spoiled" by revelation of systematic complicities associated with the financial crisis, diplomatic cable disclosures, use of torture by the intelligence agencies, and sexual abuse by clergy, as separately noted (Abuse of Faith in Governance, 2009). The difficulty with regard to collective illusions of this kind is that there is no concrete proof as to whether they exist or not, as separately explored (10 Demands for Concrete Proof by We the Peoples of the World, 2012). Expressed otherwise, it is not whether proof of any kind exists, or not, but rather how much it would cost to fake it, who would need to be paid, and what concrete proof can be offered that they have not.

The non-trivial implications of illusion have been made especially evident during the course and emergence of the financial crisis, perhaps exemplified by the Madoff investment scandal of 2008. The extent of cultivation of illusion has been highlighted by articulated protests of economic students in 19 countries regarding the relevance of their courses to the 21st century, as reported by Phillip Inman (Economics students call for shakeup of the way their subject is taught, The Guardian, 4 May 2014). Their manifesto indicates that they want courses to include analysis of the financial crash that so many economists failed to see coming, indicating that the discipline has become divorced from the real world (The manifesto of 42 networks of economics students from 19 countries, Real-World Economics Review Blog, May 2014).

The purported failure to recognize the vulnerability to crisis can of course be understood as a high order of collective complicity amongst authorities in sustaining the illusion -- reminiscent of Potemkin villages and the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes (Entangled Tales of Memetic Disaster, 2009).

It is of course the very nature of illusion that it attracts belief in the coherence it appears to offer -- as was true of the so-called big lie employed in Nazi propaganda. Acceptance of the illusion is indicative of resistance to any "inconvenient truth", as separately discussed (An Inconvenient Truth -- about any inconvenient truth, 2008). With respect to the current challenges of global civilization, there is cognitive resistance to problematic information (Karen A. Cerulo, Never Saw It Coming: cultural challenges to envisioning the worst, 2006; Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable, 2007). Irrespective of any typology or periodic ordering, this frames the questionable value of any:

• Encyclopedia of World Problems -- variously reflecting the beliefs in their reality by some constituencies, but potentially contested or denied by others, as separately discussed (Encycling Problematic Wickedness for Potential Humanity, 2014)
• Encyclopedia of Ignorance -- variously reflecting what some believe others are not aware, or what is known to be unknown -- but necessarily without any inability to take account of the unknown of which none are aware. Of relevance are the responses to the 2005 Question of the Edge.org ("What do you believe is true even though you cannt prove it?")
• Encyclopedia of Illusions -- variously reflecting the capacity for misdirection, notably as practiced by illusionists (List of optical illusions) -- but with little capacity or motivation to consider the illusory nature of problems, misdirection by authority, or assumptions regarding absence of ignorance

As separately suggested (Memetic and Information Diseases in a Knowledge Society: speculations towards the development of cures and preventive measures, 2008), is society vulnerable to a collective form of Alzheimer syndrome (through erosion of collective memory) or of diabetes (through systematic preference for sugar-coated information)?

The implication of inappropriate fixation can be explored as problematically "frozen categories" and the potential benefits of "unfreezing" them (Framing the Global Future by Ignoring Alternatives: unfreezing categories as a vital necessity, 2009). Any questionable "repackaging" of categories to elicit investment of attention can also be explored as somewhat analogous to the past repackaging of toxic financial assets (Vigorous Application of Derivative Thinking to Derivative Problems, 2013).

Cognitive constraints in the face of complexity: Investing attention, framed by a pattern of possibilities (whether periodic or not) is usefully to be seen as constrained by the cognitive limitations of the human mind. Any such favoured pattern is effectively a reflection of such constraints, as variously argued (George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being, 2001). This patterning limitation, constraining the investment of attention, is evident in a wide variety of domains (Patterns of Conceptual Integration, 1984).

Some sense of the complexity of any situation, calling for investment of attention, recalls the assessments of the Situational Complexity Index (SCI). In enacting any deployment of attention, key constraints to be recognized include:

• "Miller number" (7 ?± 2): the much cited constraint reported by George Miller (The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: some limits on our capacity for processing information, Psychological Review. 1956). Included in the SCI.
• "Spreadthink number": as identified by John N. Warfield (Spreadthink: Explaining ineffective groups, 1995). He states that this collective condition (with implications for investment by any collective) is generally neither recognized nor usually compensated for. Spreadthink reflects the fact that any time a group meets to work together on a complex issue using ordinary and familiar group processes, the individuals in the group will not agree on what are the most important sub-issues, and in general will not have a majority view on the merits of any of the many sub-issues.
• "Dunbar's number": as formulated by Robin Dunbar, This is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships (Christopher Allen, The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes). These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. In this case "people" might be understood as investments of attention. The limit has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150 -- curiously of a similar order to the number of chemical elements distinguished
• Span of control (aka span of management): The number of subordinates a leader can efficiently control or manage (between 4 and 10). Here "subordinates" could also be understood as forms of investment of attention.

Such constraints may be variously implicit in bodily functions (Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: aesthetics of human understanding, 2008; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy In The Flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought, 1999).

The experiential complexity may be partially circumvented through metaphor, as noted above and strikingly argued by Mark Forsyth (The Poetic Pageantry of the Financial Mind: in the picturesque patois of bankers, money can seem a mere afterthought. International New York Times, 14 April 2014; The Poetry of the Trading Floor: going beyond bears and bulls, The New York Times, 13 April 2014):

My point here is the eternal poetic inventiveness of the financial mind. Popular opinion has it that bankers think of nothing but profit. But their brains are fixated on poetic invention. Money seems to be a side issue.

Irrespective of any caricature, such language highlights the extent to which the processes of investing attention require forms with which the investor can identify -- to which the investor can be paradoxically "attached". Illusion, as mal-investment of attention, is nevertheless rewarded in the short-term through the certainty offered by explanation -- credible in the moment.

---

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx | Refs ]