Ignoring ads - ignoring ourselves?

I was eating a strawberry oatmilk yogurt near my laptop while taking a break from work. On my laptop was a webpage that had an automatic carousel that moved images every few seconds. I could see it in my periphery, but was ignoring it.

As I did, I got to thinking: I’ve had to learn quite a bit, using technology, to ignore things, to not let myself be distracted by the motions and sounds and colors, and all the myriad ways a website tries to get—and keep—your attention.

And I wonder how this affects our everyday life. When we train ourselves to ignore our environment, train ourselves to deliberately not perceive, or act on the things we perceive, what are we actually doing to our behavior? To our brains? To society?

When we grow comfortable ignoring an ad carousel, training our minds to do so, what other ways does this comfort show up? Are we less observant of our surroundings? Less aware of the things, and people, and objects in them? What does this mean for our own inner awareness of our emotions, our moods, even our bodily sensations?

Of course, there’s a distinction between habituation and active suppression. The former is automatic—our nervous systems stop firing for stimuli that produce no new consequence, like the smell of the perfume a coworker is wearing. Active suppression requires more attention to keep something out of conscious concern. The website carousel, I would think then, is somewhere in between the two—I’ve learned that paying attention to it is useless, and I still work to actively suppress attention to it.

But, this brings me to another concern: for the things we actively suppress, that has an attentional and executive resources cost—they’re expensive to maintain neurobiologically speaking. So, then, are we depleting our energy just by ignoring things?

The question is: does this all generalize? Or, do people who adapt to high-stimulation digital environments report lower awareness in general, or vice versa? Basically, chicken or egg?

Still, I have to consider interoception—the awareness of our bodily states. This is both trainable and losable, something we can work hard on being aware of, and something we can lose awareness of by ignoring it. Chronic cognitive load can reduce our interoceptive abilities—which circles back to my thought on energy depletion associated with active suppression. If we deplete our mental reserves suppressing stimuli, and increase our cognitive load thereby, are we inadvertently suppressing our awareness of our own selves?

The idea of “building skills” that ignore a digital carousel are built in part on the idea that the environment is a source of meaningless signal. That’s an operating assumption, that the environment is trying to manipulate you and can, therefore, be safely ignored.

The downstream effect, of course, is emotional regulation. If that depends on noticing and naming emotional states early, all of what I’m saying can have a compound effect on the ability to do so. Is the equation: digital suppression —>reduction of interoception—>reduction of emotional regulation?

There’s an added element: the awareness that social media and the internet are designed to capture your emotional attention. Knowing this, I often find myself ignoring social media posts because they are meant to inflame. But, does this have real-world consequences? If a population collectively develops habits whereby they ignore stimuli that are meant to provoke a reaction, does this transfer to a reduction in civic response, in empathy for those in suffering? in social cohesion?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions. And each one seems to bring up far more questions. But, I do have to wonder about this experience, and whether and how it translates into real-world behaviors, both individually and at the population level.