Originally started on May 4, 2025
Today, there are several things that I need to address. For one, let me start with the fact that I am sitting down at a cafe, with various items strewn upon the long table at which I sit. I am accompanied by my three brothers, mother, and father. Though, one of these brothers, whom I shall call D, is sitting down at a round table next to the long table, and my father is sitting down at a low round coffee table at the other side of the path of this second floor at a Starbucks Reserve.
This is my current state, and the reason for its mention is that unlike in almost all of my journal entries, I am writing in a completely different location, so I am naturally going to be affected and influenced. On the other hand, my room at home, my primary location, is so commonplace that it barely skews or contorts my behavior, at least in ways that feel causally out of place and viscerally immediate.
The objective of this current writing session is to interrogate my cognition under active focus (as opposed to the default state) in an environment characterized by more sudden exposure to sensory challenges that would otherwise be decreased in a personal room. To qualify this statement, while this may be more increased than if I was in a room at home, the intensity of the effects of this exposure are largely attenuated by my cumulated tolerance over the course of my lifetime through varied sensorial environments, not only as a mere sensory tolerance or balance, but as a psychological relationship between how the mind interprets the complex range of sensations accompanying abrupt shift, switch, or alteration of exposure augmenting the otherwise exclusively physiological response. In such cases can we see the difficulty in identifying the mechanisms that bottom the most visible changes, such as body language, facial expressions, and similar non-mechanistic somatic expressions as they occur alongside changes in motivation, creativity levels, and how one interprets relatively neutral "banalities," such as one's regularized coffee intake through each habit-formed visit, and their relationship to their past, recent, and current circumstances and stimuli.
The impossibility of essaying a complete treatment of the cognitive mechanisms involved in such conditions lead us to the necessity of establishing a scope, which shall include mostly my personal reflections on my body responses and how I interpret such effects upon my mind and their relationship with the extended reflections that I will be writing (the activity of which shall be chief in facilitating sustained attention).
I was wondering what is the specific standard term for a focused cognitive state as opposed to the default state.
"Is "attentive" or "focused" sufficiently standard?"
I meant that if I wanted to describe a focused state in domain-specific cognitive terms, is "focused" or "attentive" sufficiently standard? My concern with these terms is that they're not discriminated or differentiated from a specific action taken during such a state. Attentive and focused as terms can also lose their power because of their use in commonplace vocabulary, insomuch that what is being referenced is no longer that particular "focused-state" in the dichotomy with "default mode network," which is also controversial as a term due to how much it holistically describes what could be instead pointed to specific regions of activity within the brain.
So "sustained attention" could be a better term in place of "focused state," because "focused state" assumes and carries too much responsibility without actually having the standardized history and qualification. It could be compared to a dog posing as a lion.
There are other terms like "habitual" and "habit-formed" that feel sufficiently standard, but I fear that they have also become conventionalized to the extent of becoming just another instance of a person doing something, when it could be better delineated as relating to a specific set of actions taken under certain physiological, cognitive, or psychological conditions.
The suggestion to use "internalized" instead of "habitual" and "habit-formed" is an error, because of the niche qualification that "internalized" delivers.
"Procedural" and "automatized" imply a connection to deterministic frameworks as well, so there is undoubtedly debate embedded within such terms, as they imply almost immediately that the physiology carries into the psyche. However, that is not to say that hormonal imbalances do not have an effect, but the jump from "habitual" to "procedural" changes the meaning from humanistic to biologically deterministic terms, even if some "healthy" determinism is necessary in any reference to neurology. Ultimately, oftentimes, avoiding terms such as "procedural" and "automatized" can be more helpful, and focusing more on adopting such terms as "habitual" only within their ruder contexts is pragmatic, especially for conducting randomized trials where conveying too much specificity can cause potential bias and compound the limitations of the methodology of the study.
The issue and strength with science and terminological care is that there is no one canon direction available in every single fork that science takes, which also means that embedded within almost every significant term is an allegiance to a particular way of thought or a set of presuppositions that can influence students and new thinkers in the most insiduous ways, like a trojan virus left as a file hidden in some nothing-burger forgotten nested place that no one will find. In such circumstances are qualifications, caveats, and disclosure and discussion of methodological limitations essential to the improvement of any single definition moving forward. This will determine how people form the very bases by which we conduct any study and science.
I feel that such sentences are sinful:
"Identity" itself (in forms of self-reference), through the regulatory processes of meta-cognition, is shaped by this interplay.
I mean "sinful" in the sense that they're intellectually unproductive, because it is too holistic and damages the potency of each concept by relying too much on the idea that they all are connected without significant qualification that points to something compatible with standard methodology.
I really don't like "identity" as a term. Perhaps, I am one of many thinkers who feels that the discussion of "identity" is merely useful, at least outside of methodology, but while "identity formation" is much more standard and evidence-based than Freud, I problematize its holism, even if it is useful as a way to refer tangentially to more grounded phenomena including "self-referential processes," "autobiographical memory, "self-reflection," "meta-cognitive mechanisms like monitoring and control," "neuroimaging," and "behavioral experiments."
It feels like a magic word or wand in science communication, but not necessarily a useful shorthand if we're talking about anything empirical. Correlation to evidence-based processes != falsifiable, especially when holism, lack of mechanism, philosophical overtones, and vagueness are the culprit.
"Identity" might indeed be fast becoming an archaic grouping (term to refer to a set of empirical processes), as a consequence of its traditional connection to philosophical presuppositions and and ongoing evolution alongside contemporary views on gender. Like some terms throughout the history of psychology like "sociopath," "identity" could fall down the "rabbit hole" of remaining relevant in conventional use, but not in methodology.
The approach to continue refining and qualifying existing terms while being explicit about their limitations could be called "revisory," and the approach to developing entirely new terminology could be proposed as "eliminative," given the necessity not only to replace, but to "void" the importance and relevance of the concept itself in methodology also. Examples of the former could include "memory," and examples of the latter could include "sociopath," "ether," "vital force," and, for an easier one, "animal spirits." The distinction is in most respects arbitrary and dependent on what ends up becoming the new paradigm as introduced both by ongoing revision and elimination by influential thinkers or successful frameworks.
The trajectory of terms like "consciousness" or "executive function" are relevant to this discussion, but I do not have an answer to them. Ultimately, I encourage examination and innovation around them.