Jamie Kreiner

How Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge--and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later.

The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us about Distraction

David Reina

Monks learned how the memory worked —rather than treat it like a black box, as we often do today. Then they took advantage of its mechanisms. They used this construction site and its machinery to reorganize their past thoughts, draw themselves deeper into present thoughts, and establish new cognitive pattems for the future. They were after modes of thinking that felt proactive rather than passive, to engage in a kind of work that was itself a form of deep attention.

To meditate on a concept, to think about what something was or meant, a monk searched her memory for something related to it. Then she’d build on that association, and the next, and the next. The goal was a gradual agglomeration of memories that evolved into something much more revealing than any single-sided view could be. It was an exploratory, probing way of thinking. It was a form of prayer but also an act of discovery and creation.

The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us about Distraction quotes

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