The document explores the significance of meaningful versus trivial experiences in the context of learning, character development, and distraction in modern life. It emphasizes that meaningful experiences are absorbing, promote growth, and yield positive outcomes such as friendship and skills, while trivial experiences feel like a waste of time and offer no learning. It discusses the role of character in discerning between the two types of experiences and warns against the harmful effects of multitasking and distractions on attention and memory.

1. Learning and Distraction
Learning to learn in an age of texting, smart phones,
Facebook, and a million other distractions

2. Experience: Meaningful vs.Trivial
Products of Experience
Character or the contribution of conduct
Philosophy and Meaningful Experience
Understanding Philosophy
Distraction: Sources and Dangers
Outline

3. Meaningful Experiences
What are meaningful experiences like?

4. Meaningful Experiences
are...
They are absorbing and intense:
• They pull us in, body and soul
• We invest all our attention into them.
• We may lose track of time, where we are, or
even who we're with in these experiences.

5. Meaning accumulates...
At the end of the experience...
• we look back on what just happened and are
amazed.
• We're proud of how we spent our time.
• Something accumulates from the experience.
• We learn something and grow from the
experience.

6. How can you tell?
• How can you tell if you've been having a
meaningful experience?
• Thoughts? Examples?

7. How to tell you’ve
been having a
meaningful experience
• When we're distracted during such
experiences, we're often stunned or even
angry at the interruption.
• Something important has been taken from
us!

8. Examples of meaningful
(absorbing/intense)
experiences?
• Great book, concert, movie, e.g.
• Conversation about something that really matters.
• The search and discovery of something which has
puzzled us. (The “Eureka” moment in science.)
• Playing a musical instrument--being “in the zone.”
• Teaching a friend how to snowboard.

9. What about “trivial
experiences”?
What are they like?

10. Trivial experiences
• They don't absorb us or are very faint.
• or, they do absorb us, but we cannot
remember them the next day.
• Looking back, we think we could have done
something better with our time.We feel
like we "wasted" our time.
• Nothing accumulates from the experience.
We don't learn anything or grow from the
experience.

11. Cumulative Products of
meaningful experience?
• What are some of the outcomes or
products of meaningful experiences?

12. Meaningful products...
• Friendship and love.
• Family bonds.
• Creative, athletic, or artistic talents.
• Critical and scientific sharpness of mind.
• Sense of aesthetic taste or appreciation--
heightened sensitivities.
• Richer, more complex values.

13. Reviewing:
Meaningful Experiences
• are absorbing and intense:
we invest all our attention
• accumulate—we learn and
grow from the experience.
• are marked by our desire
not to be interrupted; our
focus on their importance
• Product examples:
friendship, love, skills and
talents, intellect, sensitivity,
values
Trivial experiences
• don't absorb; are very faint.
• are not memorable; feel
like a "waste" of our time
• nothing accumulates—
don't learn or grow

14. Character
What kinds of character traits might a
person need to recognize the difference
between the meaningful and trivial?

15. Character, cont’d.
• Patience/Perseverance--the ability to delay or
deny pleasure and gratification; to “stick with it.”
• Reverence--for the values which matter the
most.
• Courage--to turn down or away from
experiences or people whose habits we judge
unworthy of us.
• Intellectual acumen--to create criteria to
discriminate between meaningful and trivial
experiences.

16. Philosophy and
Meaningful Experiences
Philosophy investigates topics which bear on the living of
a meaningful life:
• What is justice?
• Can God’s existence be proved—and why try?
• What causes human loneliness?
• How can we tell right from wrong?
• What’s the difference between knowledge & opinion?

17. Philosophical
Topics
• Topics can...
• be difficult--unusual, complex, or abstract.
• accumulate into systems or world-views
• To grasp another person's world view often
requires that we allow it to unfold and that
we set our own expectations aside.We must
allow it to inhabit.

18. Philosophical
Topics
• Topics can...
• seem impractical--
• but typically, these topics have been
important for many hundreds of years.
• Topics can challenge, emotionally--
• we can find ourselves cringing or squirming
about some topics, but it is important to
push past these initial reactions.

19. Principle of Charity
• #1 hint for learning philosophy:
• Read or listen to the person or text
and give it the maximum amount of
credit.
• Train yourself to suspend judgment
and be able to carefully re-state the
point being made.
• Unless you do these things first, you
have no good grounds for criticizing
the argument.

20. Additional hint:
• #2 hint for learning philosophy:
• Go to Dr. Hildebrand’s webpage for additional hints on paper
writing, text markup, and learning philosophy:
• http://www.davidhildebrand.org/teaching/tips-hints/

21. Reviewing:
Certain character traits are important for
learning philosophy
Patience/temperance; reverence
Courage; discrimination
Philosophy's topics:
complex, abstract, systemic
seem impractical but most are central to
human self understanding
can challenge, emotionally

22. Reviewing:
#1 hint for learning philosophy:
First Detach
• Suspend judgment,
• Give author maximum initial credit,
• Learn the argument
• #1 hint for learning philosophy:
• Go to Dr. Hildebrand’s webpage for additional
hints on paper writing, text markup, and

23. Listen to Nietzsche
In the midst of an age of 'work', that is to say, of
hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which
wants to 'get everything done' at once,
including every old or new book:
this art [philosophy] does not so easily get
anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to
say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously
before and aft, with reservations, with doors left
open, with delicate eyes and fingers.
(Dawn, Preface)

24. Warnings: Distraction

25. “Distraction” is...
In distraction there is a
• loss of attention or focus
• dividing of attention or focus
In either case the central focus
• is lost or diminished by something unrelated.

26. What about “multi-tasking”?

27. How do we “multi-task”?
What causes self-distraction?
• Examples?

28. Deeper question:
Where does our modern need to be so distracted
come from?
• Why are we bored?
• Why are we anxious?
• Why do we need constant contact?
• Are we worried about nuclear war or did we
not get enough love from our mothers?

29. How effective
is multi-tasking?
Not very.

30. Recent brain science shows:
• we are not wired to multitask
• people who appear good at multitasking
• actually have good working memories and
• use them to pay attention to one input at a time.
• studies show that a person interrupted
• takes 50% longer to accomplish a task and also
• makes up to 50% more errors.
Source: John Medina, *Brain Rules*, page 87.
Science on multitasking:

31. Multi-taskers are deluded
• Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at
Stanford University
• "Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident
in their abilities…but there's evidence that those
people are actually worse at multitasking than most
people."
• Evidence: 2009 study finding that self-described
multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive
and memory tasks that involved distraction than
those who prefer to focus on single tasks.
• Source: http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/

32. Sources of self-distraction:
• Some sources of self-
distraction:
• Cell phone
• Internet surfing
• TV or radio or
music player
• Anxiety, fear,
ambivalence

33. Multitasking harms attention which
diminishes working memory
• "Why is it that some people seem to reason well and
others don't?
• Part of the reason...is that higher-working-memory-
capacity people are simply better able to control their
attention."
Source: Michael J. Kane, Associate Professor of Psychology at the U. of North Carolina,
Greensboro

34. Multitasking also harms
long term memory:
• Distraction negatively effects
• the encoding of information into long-term
memory.
• Why? Even under optimal conditions, it takes
significant time for the brain to switch from one goal
to another, from one set of rules to another.
• "There is a switching time cost whenever the subject
shifts from the [one] task to [another].And those
extra time costs quickly add up."

35. Reviewing:
Multi-tasking harms:
• attention
• working or short term memory
• long term memory
• in other words: reasoning

36. Other costs to
distraction:
• Let’s forget about psychology and cognitive
achievement
• What else is lost when we’re constantly
self-distracted?

37. Other costs...
• missing chances to
• see something unique or
• meet a new person
• less in tune with environment or nature (less
"present" in the moment)
• increased number of trivial experiences instead of
memorable, deep experience
• over time, inability to build meaningful projects
• less critical mind = more vulnerable to harm
• more dangerous to others--distracted driving, e.g.

38. We can distinguish between kinds of experience
• (Meaningful vs.Trivial)
Meaningful experience leads to important products we value
• (Friendship, talents, etc.)
Character is key to having more meaningful experiences.
• (Especially detaching and suspending judgment)
Philosophy deals in meaningful experience and is, hopefully, an
example as well.To understand philosophy and increase
meaningful experience we need
• to guard against distraction
• by investigating distraction’s sources and harms
Summing Up:

39. Any questions?
Presentation copyright 2010, David Hildebrand