Contraction, expansion, and the view from your sensory house

Screens and minds #1

This is the first in a loose series exploring the relationship between screens and our thoughts, behaviours and emotions. You can read the rationale behind the series in the second half of this post.

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After a long period of looking at my phone, I often feel what I think is most accurately described as contracted. The contracting is physical: my visual field shrinks, my jaw and forehead tighten, and my muscles tense towards and around the screen as if I’m on my way to being frozen in my phone-clutching state. (I think the old people of the future will have permanently curled-in thumbs.)

It’s a mental contraction, too. I close myself off, stop noticing what’s going on around me, forget I have a body. I consider doing something non-screen-based but find myself sucked in to the screen world and lacking the willpower to haul myself out. I get stuck in an unpleasant but compelling state of mental freneticism that prevents me giving my full attention to the physical world, and lasts even after I’ve finally put the device down.

In my dabblings in meditation and Buddhism, I’ve more than once encountered the idea that meditation can help you move from ‘contracted’ to ‘expansive’ states, which implies that we naturally incline towards states of contraction, whether with or without the help of our devices. I think this might be why phone-induced contraction can be so hard to avoid — because it exacerbates a tendency we have already. Here, for what it’s worth, is my theory:

We were already stuck in our thoughts

Anyone who’s attempted mindfulness or meditation will know that it is nigh-on impossible to ‘stop thinking’ or ‘clear your mind’. Our experience of the world is more often shaped by mental chatter and semi-conscious storytelling than by clear-sighted awareness of our surroundings as they are. We take our thoughts with us wherever we go (which is, of course, why it’s perfectly possible to be miserable in a lovely place). So in a sense it’s part of the human condition to be ‘contracted’ — because we are trapped inside our own skulls. It’s like having a big garden but rarely stepping outside the shed.

…and then the internet came along and started mimicking our mental chatter

One thing I’ve noticed, from my spates of meditation over the years, is that the way my brain hops mindlessly from thought to thought is really quite similar to the way I hop mindlessly from post to post when I’m scrolling the internet. Whether I end up deep in the toxic comments section of a news article or rehashing a conversation I had with an ex-colleague five years ago, I’m liable to be miles from where I started and uncertain about how I got there. The internet, and particularly social media, feels like an externalised, outsourced version of my private mental chatter. As we’ve established, it’s extremely difficult to extricate yourself from your thoughts, so when you take something akin to this mental proliferation and add bright colours, interfaces designed to keep you addicted, and algorithms feeding you the things guaranteed to capture your attention, it’s no wonder the act of scrolling is fatally seductive.

We already accorded more importance to vision than our other senses

Humans are extremely vision-centric and tend to value the information we receive via our eyes over and above that which we receive via our other senses. As Ed Yong writes in An Immense World, ‘Our species and our culture are so driven by sight that even people who are blind from birth will still describe the world using visual metaphors.’

Lots of those metaphors assume an indelible association between vision and understanding. How often do you say ‘I see’ when what you mean is ‘I understand’? Or you might ‘see the light’ when you reach a realisation, ‘enlighten’ someone by explaining something to them, or describe a person with great ideas as a ‘visionary’. Eyes and minds are inextricably entwined in our thinking, which might be why — or because — we have a tendency to contract ourselves down to a sort of ‘eye-mind nexus’ and treat it as our central information hub and the site of all our worthwhile experience, with the rest of the body relegated to a means of transporting this information hub from one location to another.

…and then screens started giving us visual ‘junk food’

You only have to watch a toddler with an iPad to see that we’re programmed to be mesmerised by bright colours and moving images. They make all the other sensory experiences we could be having instead seem dull and uninteresting. Once upon a time we used to just eat potatoes, but then someone invented crisps. Screens are like crisps for the eyes, and other, less immediately gratifying sensory experiences — looking at the world in its drabber colours, listening to a clock ticking, feeling the sensation of your feet on the ground — are more like plain old boiled potatoes. If you only eat boiled potatoes you start to appreciate their subtleties, but it takes a level of willpower I don’t have to avoid being seduced by the crisps.

All of the above is my best guess as to why I so often feel like I’ve been shrunk down to a phone, a pair of eyes and a brain with no say over the situation.

The antidotes to this state of being are, of course, no secret: movement, exercise and the aforementioned meditation. (Perhaps also leaving social media, but that’s a topic for another post.)

The zoologist Jacob von Uexküll, whom Yong quotes in the introduction to An Immense World, used the metaphor of a house with windows to describe an animal’s sensory relationship to the world. ‘Each house,’ he writes, ‘has a number of windows … a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows.’¹

The human sensory ‘house’ is dominated by the ‘light window’. But things like movement and meditation encourage you to expand into some of your other rooms, and to look through some of your lesser-used windows: the sound window when you swim, plunging your head in and out of the water; a few of the many tactile windows when you stretch and balance in yoga or cycle up a hill or run through a park. Most meditation practices involve closing your eyes, pulling the blinds down over the big light window so that you can better focus on the others — by doing a body scan, say, or lighting incense.

All of these things help us to decentre ourselves, to draw the attention outwards from the magnetic locus of the eyes and the thoughts behind them, like smoothing out a ball of foil.

Now I’ve backed myself into a corner where the only thing I can say is that I need to do more exercise and meditation in 2024, which is such a tediously January-ish thing to conclude that I can only apologise.

Off I go to do a body scan, I suppose. (Here’s one I like.)

‘Til soon,

K

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1. The fact that this is intended to describe sensory experience generally but still uses the extremely visual metaphor of a window in order to do so just goes to show how vision-centric our culture is.