Kira (Kira Greene)

What's different is what we choose to devote our attention to and what we choose to remember.

I could still recite my best friend's phone number to you, even like the phone, her home phone number from when she was a kid.

I could still recite that number to you now.

And that's because I dialed that number over and over and over again.

And I needed to know it because I was using a landline.

I don't need to know her cell phone number now.

I can just pick up my phone and call her.

So that's a matter of us deciding what's a good use of our mental resources.

We have a limited amount of attention to go around.

Memory isn't really a limited resource, but attention is.

We have limited bandwidth.

We only have so much of it to go around.

And we choose to devote that to where we want to devote it.

We don't always make those choices very well, which is why we might spend time scrolling on Instagram when we really should be working on a paper.

And yes, I'm speaking about myself here.

But I'm still making that choice that I'm choosing to value the Instagram things.

And it may not be what I ought to value, but it's what I'm choosing to direct my attention to right now.

I could choose to direct it elsewhere.

But the fact that I'm choosing to do that doesn't mean that I've now lost the ability to write a paper.

It's just that I'm directing my attention elsewhere.