{"id":227,"date":"2022-12-08T09:46:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-08T09:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/?p=227"},"modified":"2022-12-04T21:52:43","modified_gmt":"2022-12-04T21:52:43","slug":"competence-and-focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/2022\/12\/08\/competence-and-focus\/","title":{"rendered":"Competence and Focus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-jetpack-markdown\"><p>Over the last couple of decades I\u2019ve been very interested in making anagrams \u2013 and not just small ones. My efforts have included songs, poetry and even spam emails.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve also noticed that I make more and more typo\u2019s in which letters are scrambled. While working on a story recently, I thought \u2018toad\u2019, but my fingers typed \u2018today\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>If these two things are related, it might have interesting implications. Could it be that once the brain begins to learn new skills that involve breaking through old boundaries such as normal spelling, it can also get confused by the new range of options available? In other words, as competence expands beyond usual boundaries, does focus decline?<\/p>\n<p>I have encountered similar phenomena in other contexts. A good example is that I sometimes mistakenly pull a door handle when I see the word \u2018PULL\u2019, and only afterwards realise that the word is on the other side of the glass and appears to be written backwards. I remember a time in my childhood when backwards writing was pretty much impossible to read \u2014 but eventually I became interested in practising the skill, and now I find it relatively simple. Perhaps this has wired my word recognition neurons up to my \u2018backwards reading\u2019 neurons in such a way as to make the forwards\/backwards nature of the source image incidental to comprehension.<\/p>\n<p>A slightly more hazardous instance of this problem arises sometimes when I\u2019m driving. If I\u2019m leaving a car park, and \u201cNO ENTRY\u201d is painted on the road in such a way as to be legible to errant incoming drivers, sometimes I read it upside down and hit the brakes before I understand that it isn\u2019t intended for me.<\/p>\n<p>I think we need a name for this phenomenon. I\u2019d like to suggest \u201cDomain Creep\u201d, because the usual domain of a comprehension skill gets expanded when we toy with the edges of it, and eventually it unravels a little.<\/p>\n<p>Just a short one this time \u2013 I\u2019m musing\u2026 if you have any other examples of domain creep, I\u2019d love to hear about them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/2022\/12\/08\/competence-and-focus\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &ldquo;Competence and Focus&rdquo;<\/span>&hellip;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"1","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[22],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-journal","tag-wordplay","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/pull-reversed.jpg?fit=1000%2C720&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}