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Learning to Live Without a Self with Jay Garfield

Tricycle Talks

CHAPTER

The Importance of Self-Directed Attention in Learning Skills

When we're first learning a skill, it's really important to have self directed attention. If you inhibit that self attention by using a distractor, novice performance degrades very rapidly. On the other hand, if you ask experts to engage in that same kind of attention, where are my hands? How am I breathing and what am I doing? Their expert performance degrades dramatically. And the way to recover it is to distract them from that. Listen to some music or something like that. We find ourselves at our best when we drop that feminization of ourselves and that subject to object duality.

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