How Interest Develops
The story of one professor's lasting impact.
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I can’t recall exactly why I selected the Philosophy of the Arts as a general education class in college. I was an engineering student consumed mostly with the technical work I needed to complete, and clinging to what remained of my childhood passion - ski racing.
But I do recall the first day of class quite clearly. Prof. Whittier’s bombastic remarks on the personally destructive value of pop music left their mark. Especially reggae. He did not like reggae. Not one bit.
Over the course of the first few classes his singular goal for the course became clear: he was going to develop our interest in classical music.
He lectured us wildly and prolifically on how popular music manipulates our biology. It is designed to provoke simplistic, sensory reactions. It aims to trigger synesthetic responses through sounds (ie, bass drops). It leverages the same chord progressions endlessly (artfully captured by the Axis of Awesome) in every song to feed off the patterns you’ve already learned instead requiring you to make the attentional investment in new ones.
He broke down the process of satiation from beginning to end. At the beginning, all you have is attention. It’s all work and limited enjoyment. It is essentially memorization. You have to recognize a pattern, a progression, something, before satiation begins.
Once you’ve memorized some aspect of it, something special gets unlocked - anticipation. And with that anticipation comes joy. It feels good. This is your interest taking shape. In this way, interests can be thought of as biological reinforcement of your attention.
As you continue to listen, for a while, you keep improving your understanding of the pattern. You are in your proximal zone of learning on this specific pattern. While you keep learning and developing an understanding of the complexity of the art, the joy continues.
As we all know - at some point the joy starts to fade. You’ve mastered the pattern. It doesn’t trigger the same anticipation and joy. You play the song again and again, but realize after the fact that it has played completely without you even noticing. You feel a sense of loss for the joy you once experienced.
We’ve all felt this and it can even persist years later. All the art that has affected me in my life now also has a tinge of sadness. I want to be able to experience it the same way as I did before. I can rekindle it a little bit if I wait long enough. But it’s never the same. I am changed forever by the art. The pattern is encoded in my biology in a way that keeps the same joy from occurring.
Then thankfully, and gratefully, if you allow space for it - new patterns break through and restarts the joyful satiation process.
One of Professor Whittier’s points was that the duration that satiation plays out is proportional to the complexity of the art. The simpler the art, the faster you satiate. The more complex, the longer it lasts. Extended joy in our lives was one of his quite worthy goals for us in advocating classical music. But there was another piece to it. With complexity comes a more complex inner transformation, from a biological reaction to higher orders of consciousness. You’ve mastered a more complex pattern. You have become more complex as a human. And he wanted art to inspire us to be better, more complex people too.
Professor Whittier had almost no assignments throughout the semester. He preferred to lecture us wildly if not occasionally offensively. It was never boring. Learning after the fact that Radiohead’s OK Computer - one of my all time favorite and personally transformational albums - came out during that course made me wish I’d heard it then and shared it with him, just to see what he would’ve said.
His final exam was relatively simple. All you had to do was listen to a sample of a 15 second random clip from Beethoven’s 5th and Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony and correctly identify which one it is. The clips were sampled from different parts of the various movements within each.
To do this well, you needed to memorize enough of each symphony that it became a pattern you could recognize. As I noted before, all he wanted was for us to get past our attentional resistance and find the patterns that would start the process of satiation in our minds. This final exam forced us to do this.
I can say with certainty that it worked and I have been changed forever…just not precisely how he intended.
I didn’t become a classical music lover.
But it did incline me to move past simplistic art aimed at instant gratification and seek more complicated art.
Yet this wasn’t even the most profound result.
What it really did is that it changed how I approached developing an interest in almost everything I did.
I stopped resisting new experiences based on how I reacted to them in the moment. I stopped hanging onto past experiences with sadness at joy lost. I committed myself to paying attention to discover new patterns in all my pursuits. I started to give things a chance before I say they are or aren’t interesting to me. I started listening better. To music. To people.
This helped me move past the rut I was stuck in with my childhood interests of skiing, and into design, technology, entrepreneurship, the field of education, and so much more. I’ve learned over time I can develop interest in anything if I pay enough attention to it.
Ultimately it taught me to let my attention be my guide, not my reactions. The interests come and the joy takes care of itself if I do. But I also understand that the joy will always end. So my quality of life is sustained through better attention. By developing new interests, not by attaching to the fleeting joy from past satiation. And my life has been immensely better for it.
Your Turn: Have you any experiences similar to the one Brian describes above? When has a teacher, professor, or even a parent showed you how to unlock the truth of something by paying attention? Leave a comment on this post and let us know.
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I can definitely relate to Brian's experience. I had a professor in college who was very passionate about his subject, and he really inspired me to learn more about it. He would often give us challenging assignments that forced us to think critically and creatively.
One assignment that I remember particularly well was to write a paper on a topic that we were interested in, but that we knew very little about. This was a daunting task, but it was also rewarding. I learned a lot about this "origami" topic, and I also learned a lot about myself. I realized that I was capable of learning new things, even if they were difficult. This experience gave me the confidence to pursue my interests, even if they were outside of my comfort zone.
Paying attention is one of the most important skills that we can learn. When we pay attention, we are opening ourselves up to new experiences and new learning opportunities. We are also more likely to be creative and innovative. I am grateful for the teachers and professors who have helped me to develop this skill. They have helped me to become a more well-rounded and knowledgeable person.
I believe that paying attention is a skill that can benefit us in all areas of our lives. It can help us to learn, to be creative, and to be successful. We all owe a deep debt of gratitude for the teachers and professors who have helped us to develop this skill.