The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

And if so, on what basis can one prefer Calvin to Cass Sunstein?

“character” comes from a Greek word that means “stamp.”

Habit seems to work from the outside in; from behavior to personality.

Rather, they are drawing attention to the fact that we are already administered in various ways, inescapably, but are generally not aware of it. And this has everything to do with the managing of our attention by others.

The point is that staying out of jail is much easier with money. The daunting complexity of the demands we have to comply with, and the opportunities for diversion that abound, add up to a pretty compelling case for just staying on the couch in a state of overstimulated avoidance.

We all know how easy it is for a life to go off track when we are left to our own devices, and that is why those of us with means do what we can to jig the way for our children. I worked for one of the test-prep companies for about six months, coaching students for the SAT and GRE tests. The intellectual content of what I was offering was pretty close to zero—a few tips that could be put on one side of an index card. But the classes and tutoring sessions provided an institutional setting that forced students to show up and do practice tests.

Motorcyclists call this counter-steering, and it is indeed counterintuitive. Turning the handlebars briefly to the right makes the bike lean to the left because of gyroscopic precession, and it is the leaning that accomplishes the turning.

This brings up another uncanny fact about motorcycle steering: the bike goes wherever your gaze is focused. Most important, if your eyes lock on some hazard in the road, you will surely hit it. This is not a superstitious motorcyclist’s version of Murphy’s Law; it is a reliable fact, and it reveals something deep about the “intentionality” of our prereflective sensorimotor negotiation of the world. Inhabiting the kind of bodies that we do, our gaze and our locomotion are connected in ways that work for us, and we don’t have to think about it.

This visual demand is absolutely counterintuitive. When walking, we move away from a hazard (for example a snarling dog) while keeping it in view. Our action programs, visual system, and “affect” (immediate, visceral judgments of good or bad such as happens when we see a spider) are integrated in a way that is adaptive for us, and have achieved a certain automaticity.

But when the relation of your body to the world is mediated by a machine, one that requires a very different set of muscle responses to achieve the desired avoidance, then you aren’t well adapted until you have reintegrated muscle response, visual system, and affect into a very different collection of automated responses. At the heart of this learning process for the motorcyclist is a phenomenon utterly unknown to the natural human body, namely gyroscopic precession.

Gibson’s work sheds light on all this. He suggested that the concept of an “ecological niche” is necessary to properly understand perception. A niche is not quite the same as a habitat. A niche “refers more to how an animal lives than to where it lives.”12 It is not simply the physical surroundings, but the aspects of those surroundings that are meaningful for an animal given its way of life.13 When yo...

Gibson’s most interesting and controversial point is that what we perceive, in everyday life, is not pure objects of the sort a disinterested observer would perceive, but rather “affordances.” The affordances of the environment are “what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.” ...

Affordances lie in the fit between an actor and his or her environment. When that relationship is mediated by a prosthetic, such as a motorcycle, it changes the field of objects that we perceive and how we perceive them.

But his idea of affordances provides a useful foundation for thinking about culture and technology—that is, for thinking about the distinctly human ecological niches that we create for ourselves. This becomes important for my concept of the situated self,

A flatter cross section or “profile” will produce a larger contact patch while the motorcyclist is riding upright in a straight line (thus increasing braking power at the end of a straightaway, which is important because then the rider can initiate braking later), while a peakier profile will have a larger contact patch while the cyclist is leaned over in the turns. Choice of tire profiles therefore depends somewhat on the track and a team’s race strategy. Different rubber compounds break loose with more or less abruptness, which influences the rate at which the rider can apply throttle coming out of a corner (in this situation traction, not horsepower, is the limiting factor; in general, traction is “conserved” and must be judiciously allocated among lean angle, acceleration, and braking). Some tires communicate better than others. The rider also feels the road through the suspension, which on race bikes is separately adjustable for compression and rebound damping, as well as effective spring rate. Some racers are particular even about the steering head bearings, claiming they can feel the difference between tapered roller bearings and ball bearings.

The philosopher Adrian Cussins writes about two different ways of knowing about speed.

“Forty-five miles per hour” is not speed, it is a representation of speed.

These two ways of knowing about speed “are taken up in very different, sometimes competing, cognitive orientations to the world,” as Cussins puts it. When the objective representation of speed interposes itself between the motorcyclist and his perception of his situation, it can interfere with his direct world-inhabiting. Cussins writes that “the great advantage of experiential content is that its links to action are direct, and do not need to be mediated by time-consuming—and activity-distancing—inferential work.”

If Cussins is right, reliance on a speedometer tends to subtly bump us out of a skillful way of driving, and this is due to the interference of objective knowledge with experiential knowledge.

But Cussins doesn’t elaborate how this interference might happen. Following some clues in the cognitive science literature, I’d like to suggest that the interference is due to a substitution that occurs, wherein the symbolic representation of speed becomes an object of attenti...

The negative affordances that a motorcyclist sees aren’t limited to things like oily spots on the pavement. The road is, after all, a social place. You do well to notice the brunette in the short skirt standing at the intersection, because the guy driving the car in front of you may slam on the brakes. But the old lady following closely in the car behind you won’t. You have been watching the old lady with interest. As far as you can make out in your vibrating mirror, she has a look of sour disapproval on her face, and it is directed at your taillight. You also notice the driver of the delivery truck that has just appeared at a side street. He appears to be laughing: he is engaged in a conversation with someone else in the cab of the truck, seated on the side opposite to the side that you are approaching from. The driver looks like just the slovenly sort who would pull out without double-checking. (Motorcyclists become ethnographers of necessity, or rather rank stereotypers, for the same reason that cops do: they face risk. Stereotyping is efficient for snap judgments.)

Sheba sits with Sarah (another chimp), and two plates of treats are shown. What Sheba points to, Sarah gets. Sheba always points to the greater pile, thus getting less. She visibly hates this result but can’t seem to improve. However, when the treats arrive in containers with a cover bearing numerals on top, the spell is broken, and Sheba points to the smaller number, thus gaining more treats. The interpretation is that the numerals, because they don’t look tasty, “allow the chimps to sidestep the capture of their own behavior by ecologically specific, fast-and-frugal subroutines.” They provide “a new target for selective attention and a new fulcrum for the control of action.”17

Abstracting from the concrete objects of their environment, the chimps become better at maximizing their utility. They become more Protestant, we might say: to get maximum treats in the future requires a bit of asceticism for the moment, and this becomes possible if you redirect your attention to something abstract, such as money (for the Protestant) or numerals (for the chimp). The abstract thing becomes “a new fulcrum for the control of action,” as Clark says. Thus is born civilization.

Is there a role for explicit thinking in this kind of performance?

Bernt Spiegel is a German automotive psychologist who spent much of his career consulting for Porsche. He was also a motorcycle road race instructor. His book The Upper Half of the Motorcycle, an unobtrusive masterpiece,

He gives the example of seeing your own shadow directly in front of the bike on the road. This happens to occur at just those times when you have excellent visibility ahead, and therefore feel especially relaxed. But the sight of your shadow should trigger an alarm: oncoming traffic or motorists waiting to cross in front of you likely cannot see you. It doesn’t feel dangerous; you have to have a theory about the situation, as it were. That is, to ride safely you have to actively summon a bit of knowledge that can be stated as a proposition, using language. Initially, this knowledge is abstract and obtrusive; it interferes with your flow. But this theoretical knowledge becomes integrated with your perception-action-affect circuits after you have had a number of close calls. (This is my own assertion, not Spiegel’s.)

Gary Klein has famously studied the decision making of firefighters, and discusses their ability to discern when a building is about to collapse, allowing them to get out in the nick of time. Klein emphasizes their ability to integrate subtle sensual data and recognize patterns.

Getting things right requires triangulating with other people. Psychologists therefore would do well to ask whether “metacognition” (thinking critically about your own thinking) is at bottom a social phenomenon. It typically happens in conversation—not idle chitchat, but the kind that aims to get to the bottom of things. I call this an “art” because it requires both tact and doggedness.

we tend to ride according to a “risk composite.”

On the street, riding like Marc Márquez (the current MotoGP champion) is an ideal that is in fruitful tension with the demand for continued vigilance by the conscious mind. Managing this tension is itself an art. As Spiegel puts it, the role for the conscious mind is “alert watchfulness, without meddling.”

Andy Clark writes that even for experts, “verbal rehearsal supports a kind of perceptual restructuring via the controlled disposition of attention…”22 We use these verbal prompts to maintain performance in challenging circumstances.

Spiegel gives the example of feeling your consciousness “flowing down through the contact patches.”

The formula may sound like mysticism, but is meant to capture what it feels like when your riding is totally dialed in and the bike has been incorporated into your extended body.

This drive to continually tone and shape up a skill is lost sight of if we take tying one’s shoes as the paradigm of skilled action. That is an activity for which we adopt a “sufficing” standard: Is the shoe tied or not? Being able to tie your shoe is a secure accomplishment, a state of stasis.

But in activities that we take seriously, such as music and sports and going fast, we strive for excellence. Unlike animals that live in the moment and merely cope with their world (however smoothly), we are erotic: we are drawn out of our present selves toward some more skilled future self that we emulate. What it means to be erotic is that we are never fully at home in the world. We are always “on our way.” Or perhaps we should say that this state of being on our way to somewhere else is our peculiar human way of being here in the world.

The boundaries of the self seem to expand.

To emphasize the role that our bodies play in determining how we inhabit and therefore perceive the world, and to entertain the notion of cognitive extension, is to put oneself on a collision course with the central tenets of the official anthropology of the West.

More precisely, it expresses what philosophers call a metaethical position. That is, it carries with it a certain understanding of the underpinnings of ethics: a picture of the moral agent and how she stands in relation to the world beyond her head.

The adult will is not something self-contained; it is situated in, and formed by, the contingencies of the world beyond one’s head. The kind of self that accepts this elemental fact contrasts with, and therefore brings into clarifying relief, the more fragile kind of self that is posited in contemporary ethics and fostered by contemporary technology.

As Thomas de Zengotita points out in his beautiful book Mediated, representations are addressed to us, unlike dumb nature, which just sits there. They are fundamentally flattering, placing each of us at the center of a little “me-world.”

In the old Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, by far the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration, or rather demonic violence. Fold-down beds, ironing boards, waves at the beach, trailers (especially when Goofy is at the wheel of the towing vehicle, on a twisty mountain road), anything electric, anything elastic, anything that can become a projectile. Anything that can suffer termite damage that remains hidden until the crucial moment. Springs are especially treacherous, as are retractable blinds. Snowballs can be counted on to grow by a couple of orders of magnitude on their way down the slope toward your head. At any given moment, the odds of being seized by the collar by a severely overwound grandfather clock are nontrivial. Icicles: don’t stand anywhere near them. Bicycles tend to become unicycles, unpredictably, and rubber cement is easily mistaken for baking powder. Why do they have nearly identical labels?

This cartoon magic may be fanciful, but one would be hard-pressed to find any meaningful distinction between it and the utopian vision by which Silicon Valley is actively reshaping our world. As we “build a smarter planet” (as the IBM advertisements say), the world will become as frictionless as thought itself; “smartness” will subdue dumb nature.

The appeal of magic is that it promises to render objects plastic to the will without one’s getting too entangled with them. Treated from arm’s length, the object can issue no challenge to the self.

The clearest contrast to the narcissist that I can think of is the repairman, who must subordinate himself to the broken washing machine, listen to it with patience, notice its symptoms, and then act accordingly. He cannot treat it abstractly; the kind of agency he exhibits is not at all magical.

It is a cultural project that is unfolding along lines that Immanuel Kant sketched for us: trying to establish the autonomy of the will by filtering material reality through abstractions.

“Autonomy of the will is the property of the will through which it is a law to itself independently of all properties of the objects of volition,” Kant writes. “If the will seeks that which should determine it … in the constitution of any of its objects, then heteronomy always comes out of this.” In such a case “the will does not give itself the law but the object through its relation to the will gives the law to it.” Autonomy requires that we “abstract from all objects to this extent—they should be without any influence at all on the will so that [the will] may not merely administer an alien interest but may simply manifest its own sovereign authority as the supreme maker of the law.”3

As the title of the Groundwork suggests, Kant tries to lay out not the actual content of moral principles, much less a detailed account of our obligations to others, but rather what kind of thing morality is. He insists that it exists in the realm of the ideal, not the empirical.

But in our discussion of affordances and cognitive extension, we learned that we may acquire purposes through initiation into a skill, such that affordances perceived in the environment provide not just handles for actions previously decided upon by pure reason, but new motivations; a new space of reasons for action. This is precisely what Kant calls heteronomy, if I have understood him correctly, and I call the foundation of human agency as we actually experience it.

The basic design intention guiding Mercedes in the last ten years seems to be that its cars should offer psychic blow jobs to the affluent. Just sit back, relax, and think of something pleasing. The eyes take on a faraway glaze. As for other drivers, there is a certain … lack of mutuality.

This fetish of automaticity and disconnection can’t be called a tendency of “technology,” if we insist that the proper standards of technology are simply those of function. Rather, it is the tendency of a peculiar consumer ethic that has embraced Kant’s metaphysics of freedom. Disconnection—pressing a button to make something happen—facilitates an experience of one’s own will as something unconditioned by all those contingencies that intervene between an intention and its realization.