The Biden Presidency

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Is it the case that the Media in the US is so obsessed with Trump, that it is failing to report on the evident successes of the Biden Presidency?

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Even though they give Trump a lot of attention, there's an argument that they still gloss over what he is saying. Apart from his supporters, not many people are being exposed to the full extent of his bizarre, incoherent, vindictive rants. Hopefully this will change over the next 7 months.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...peech-analysis

I had to laugh at this definition of intelligence from Trump.
“The fake news will say, ‘Oh, he goes from subject to subject.’ No, you have to be very smart to do that. You got to be very smart. You know what it is? It’s called spot-checking. You’re thinking about something when you’re talking about something else, and then you get back to the original. And they go, ‘Holy shit. Did you see what he did?’ It’s called intelligence.”

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Originally Posted by filghy2

“The fake news will say, ‘Oh, he goes from subject to subject.’ No, you have to be very smart to do that. You got to be very smart. You know what it is? It’s called spot-checking. You’re thinking about something when you’re talking about something else, and then you get back to the original. And they go, ‘Holy shit. Did you see what he did?’ It’s called intelligence.”

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I practice a secular form of meditation that has been described as a means of training attention in order to avoid the kind of mind-wandering he is describing. There's a belief among some in the neuroscience community that the brain is every bit as active when a person is awake but not actively focusing their attention on a particular subject as when their brain is highly focused on something in particular. When one is not focusing, particular structures in the brain that are part of what is called the default mode network (or task negative network) are active and one's thoughts will oscillate from thoughts about the past, fruitless speculation about the future, and daydreams intended to fulfill wishes but which often lead to dissatisfaction. Some people who have difficulty focusing are not able to quiet this network and will find negative associations cropping up, for instance, when they attempt to train their attention on something.

Anyhow, what he describes is the disordered mind of someone who cannot maintain their attention on a single subject, and who constantly shifts to whatever self-centered thought that interests him most in a given moment. Finally, he never returns to the original idea as he claims, because he's usually lost track of what his purpose was when he began his series of non-sequiturs. Anyway, it's early here and although this isn't super relevant politically I thought if some people hadn't heard of the default mode network, it provides a useful way to think about what the mind will do on its own when we don't apply it to something outside ourselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network

That certainly rings true. True intelligence is the ability to focus on what matters most and identify the most pertinent pieces of information. As they say, If everything is important then nothing is. A mental map in which everything is connected to everything else, without any sense of which connections matter most, is just a confused mess in which people blindly follow their impulses.

Like any other skill, mental focussing is something that needs to be practised otherwise it will atrophy. I don't meditate, but I do make a conscious effort to spend time on focussed mental activities like reading on some issue or doing puzzles. I have a history of dementia in my family, which is something I've become more conscious of as I get older, and I know this is something that can help.

The default mode sounds like it's related to the tendency that social media platforms capitalise on to generate clicks and, in turn, exacerbate. I wonder if the amount of time spent online is contributing to a loss of these skills in the general population.