Even without the attention-consuming technology we’re immersed in today, humans have always been easily distractible. So what distracted the mindful monks of the past? And are there lessons from the monks’ practice that we can apply to today’s level of distraction?

Jamie Kreiner is a history professor at UCLA and the author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. In the book, she details the strategies monks used to improve concentration and connects the past to the present – examining why the human mind has persistently been prone to wandering.

Jamie and Greg discuss monks’ theories of distractibility and why concentration mattered for salvation, ethical obligation, and getting beyond self-fixation. The conversation also contrasts monastic aims with Stoicism and Buddhist mindfulness, and considers what modern people can learn from the monastic approach.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How monks managed distractions internally

23:02: This is a really basic but really profoundly smart way that monks tackled having thoughts they did not want to have. So rather than kind of ignoring them or hoping they are not real or just not paying attention at all and letting something fester and get bigger, you sort of act as a bouncer or a screener of anything that comes through, and you have to evaluate with each one, "Do I want this here? Is this a good thing?" And sometimes that can be really hard. Sometimes they thought that work of deciding whether something was good or bad was so difficult you actually needed to consult another person about it, like a mentor. We would think of it maybe as a therapist now, but they had a very different idea of what that kind of mentoring involved.

Books like technology can be distracting too

29:40: Books are really essential to that initial process of learning, meditating, and internalizing, and part of the memory training involves interacting with books in these ways. But it was also, like any piece of tech, distracting on its own.

How monks strengthened attention over time

26:59: Probably the most basic difference is that they just treated the memory like we would treat a muscle or something. It needed exercise, it needed training. You had to keep it in good shape if you wanted it to behave properly. So the memory for them was both a storage unit, but also a kind of construction site or toolkit that could work with the memories. It had to be a kind of exploratory place to build new ideas out of. So you would train the memory in two different ways. One was training it to store things that you actually wanted to retrieve. They knew it was really hard to get rid of memories, but if you kept stocking new ones that mattered or kept revisiting the ones that you thought were most important, that would more effectively, over time, edge out the things that you thought were intrusive.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Stoicism
Akrasia
Monasticism

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Faculty Profile at UCLA
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675. Even Medieval Monks Had Trouble Concentrating with Jamie Kreiner

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

675. Even Medieval Monks Had Trouble Concentrating with Jamie Kreiner