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Saturday, March 5, 2011

An empirical analysis on visual stimulus addiction.

Anime and TV shows have ruined me. I really have no one to blame but myself. Hours of constant visual stimulus via my computer has really warped me in many ways. There are three main observations I would like to point out about this 'addiction' of mine.

  1. Whenever you're away from the visual stimulus, you feel like there's something missing.
  2. The stimulus isolates you. There's so many reasons to go back to it and leaving it almost painful.
  3. It warps your sense of time.
The first two are fairly standard in terms of addiction, but I think the third is the most interesting of all. You know what I caught myself doing one day? I started cooking an egg (hard-boiled) and I started an episode of anime. An anime episode is approximately 1/4 h long excluding intros and endings, so it serves as an ideal timer for hard boiling an egg. I was fast forwarding through the episode like I usually do and I found myself expecting actual time to speed up as well. From here I noticed that other things seemed to have changed about my sense of time. My patience has dropped almost exponentially and activities that take more than 1/4 h now seem to be lengthy and not worth it.

I've decided to wean myself off of anime and tv shows for a while (watching only an hour or so a day). I'll do this for a few weeks to see if I can reverse the time warp that has already occurred. Incidentally, this means that I'll have a lot more time to do stuff like my novel, so you might see me posting a lot more. If not, be sure that I'm still getting stuff done.

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