Memory management. In humans, consciousness is a memory buffer, containing data structures composed from sensory data, sometimes called qualia, or figuratively, the "atoms of human experience".
When we consciously study a thing, we step through a loop of forming conscious structures, then transferring those to the subconscious, longer-term memory storage locations, then emptying the conscious buffer, then attempting to recall from the subconscious the thing we wanted to learn. Often while performing this loop, we find that we can't empty the conscious buffer, at which point we need to pause the loop, to pay extra attention to clearing the conscious buffer.
Since verbal and information is largely mediated by the auditory and visual sense modalities, an understanding of how to manipulate those modalities in the imagination is of particular interest. Commonly we find that displacing such modal images is possible ... therein people use music, and vistas, or other forms of ambient sensation ("ambiance") to keep the loop going. But in a fatigued state, that is not enough, so one has to specifically with fuller attention, vacate the said images from the conscious buffer. In doing so, we often find that the remaining imagery from the somatic sense modalities ... the interoception of heat, pressure, balance, vibration, pain, cold, etc. which are glomped together as "kinesthesia" ... becomes the main focus of one's conscious attention ("the loop"). This is where kinesthetic activities such as walking and other forms of exercise can be adopted to aid in the vacation of verbal information from conscious memory.
Actively monitoring the balance of each sense modality's data in conscious memory, and the rate of transfer for each modality, between conscious and subconscious memory, is the business ("art", or "skill") of maintaining one's mind in the short term. These are the basic skills of tactical phenomenology.
The "mid" term memory adjacent to one's conscious buffer is a space often used for nouminous rumination ... that is, mutation of structures, simulatory exercises, and preparation of thoughts for further processing. I want to briefly address two major sorts of cognitive activities which take up much of our computational time. Elsewhere I have noted, that "analysis" may be understood to be the reductive process of applying prioritised paradigms as filtering operators upon new data ... whereas "synthesis" may be understood to be the generative process of deprioritising known filtering operators, in order to test the efficacy of new mutations in the space of operators. (There are loads of ways to define "analysis vs. synthesis" so just bear with this arbitrary distinction for the purpose of this note.)
The business of synthesis is thus of higher risk, and involves a modification of one's own cognitive apparatus in-flight. The business of analysis is simply a matter of following orders and getting on with business as usual in a lower risk fashion.
Study is a risk-on activity. Politics is risk-off. Science is risk-on. Engineering is risk-off.
Anyway, those are just some notes from my meditations today. I developed most of this understanding during my years in college, and now it is good to reflect and refine them, as I pursue my newer studies this year.
