The Art of Noticing

Darin Jawahar

On the Plastic Mind

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Welcome back to the Plastic Mind!

It has been a while since I’ve placed anything I’ve noticed into a calculation of the plasticity of my own mind.

Recently, most of my time has unfortunately been consumed with doomscrolling. I’m quite proficient at it while I am distracting myself from my own needs. I’ve been watching a lot of edits of The Office. For those of you who are familiar with it, these edits are mainly of Jim and Pam—my ideal romance.

I call this indulgence impairment—when you wish for something so much, it takes away from your basic functional ability to take care of your own body. We equate our wants to our needs, and slowly, they merge together.

I’ve realized I get indulgence impairment when I spend more time on two things—my phone and the mental spiral of my real life yearning for a relationship. I’ve been avoiding time away from my phone and all the content consumption. Have not taken the time to just process my thoughts as they are and sit with them.

But what does it mean to sit with yourself and your thoughts? What would life be like without our phones, and our algorithmic tiktok content consumption that send us down rabbit holes through perfectly curated for you pages. It makes sense to our dopamine reward system. So why live without it?

In class the other week, we had a discussion on whether we believe AI can be an “enabler.” As a chronic ChatGPT user myself, I immediately felt defensive. I mean, its been fed so much data and trained so extensively. To me, its always been the objective third party. How could it just enable my delusion? My overthinking? My idealism?

But then I thought about curation.

The algorithm doesn’t lie to you. It just learns you. It notices what you linger on. What you replay. What you hesitate over. And then it gives you more of it and more of it until you completely rely on it. Not because it cares. Not because it wants you to grow. But because it wants you to stay.

But isn’t that exactly what my mind does too? I replay the edits. I replay the conversations. I replay the “what ifs.” I curate my own internal For You page. And the more I indulge it, the more it feeds itself.

At the end of the day, maybe AI isn’t just an enabler. Maybe it mirrors the same cognitive bias loops that already exist inside of us. All the confirmation bias. All the idealization and romanticization. And the anticipation for a reward. AI is just faster at recognizing it than we are. It’s more efficient and precise.

The passive thought of “it is what it is, but what even is it” haunts me. How does one break out of that cycle? How do I free myself from being hostage in my own mind?

But maybe I’ve been approaching it wrong by focusing so much on social media or AI or the Office. Maybe this entire time, it was always just the discomfort of unprocessed thought. Neuroplasticity has so much value here. Maybe sitting with myself will mean interrupting the loops that are addictive yet drain me. And maybe that looks like sitting with discomfort. After doing that, perhaps I can curate my social media and AI use into something that can only help me grow and improve on myself, rather than something addictive that I see as a necessity.