THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOCUS AND COHERENCE
Why should we care?
Most people have a sense of focus -- but apparently few people have a sense of coherence.
When it comes to clarity, both are essential.
Why?
That has to do with the difference between focus and coherence.
What happens when we focus?
We narrow our field of attention; we concentrate.
Think of a magnifying glass concentrating the rays of the sun. The image of the sun on the other side of the magnifying glass is smaller, the more focussed it gets. Two things result:
- It's hot enough to start a fire -- unlike naked sunlight.
- More details become visible in whatever we are magnifying.
What happens when something becomes more coherent?
See? Not so obvious, is it?
I'll fill in the gap.
The opposite of coherence is, noise.
What happens when something gets more coherent is that the noise, in it, diminishes. The signal-to-noise ratio improves. It's the difference between a radio tuned on-station (clear) and the signal between stations (noisy). It sounds better in an obvious way: Even at a lower level of volume, it's easier to understand than a noisy signal at a higher volume.
Here's another illustration.
The laser. We've seen them in market checkout stands. The red laser light has a peculiar, "dotty" appearance -- just so you know what I'm talking about.
A one hundred watt light bulb is not very intense. A one watt laser is intense enough to melt steel.
The light from a light bulb is incoherent; the light rays interfere with each other, like two people talking at cross-purposes, so more energy is needed to illuminate anything -- or to get anything done, together. Lots of wasted effort.
The light from a laser is coherent; the light rays reinforce each other, like people agreeing upon and building on what each has said. More efficient. More fun.
When we are acting in an incoherent manner, we contradict ourselves or our thoughts are chaotic. We seem a bit crazy.
What happens when we are being coherent is that our thoughts are organized and our actions are efficient. We seem more sane, to others (unless their attention is scattered, incoherent, in which case everything seems incoherent, to them).
No matter how focussed we get on the words of an incoherent person, they still seem incoherent.
However coherent a person may be, if they're not focussed, (e.g., bringing up irrelevant points), they're harder to follow.
Now, you have a sense of what I mean by, coherence. Things fit together. Another term for this is, integrity.
So, when we focus, we exclude distractions, which we experience as noise -- and we exclude things we consider extraneous -- we narrow our attention.
When we're coherent, everything we say or do reinforces everything else we are saying or doing, so if we broaden our attention, that broadening serves our original intention.
Focus highlights details; coherence reveals how the details are related.
Now, you understand why both focus and coherence are necessary, for clarity.
Now comes the $64,000 question:
How do we get from incoherence to coherence?
It gets back to our four core expressions of intelligence -- attention, intention, memory, and imagination.
If any one of those is out of balance with the others, our intelligence becomes noisier, rather than clearer. People can hear it in our speech (disjointed thinking, wandering thoughts, irrelevancy); they see it in our actions (inconsistency, lack of integrity, wasted effort).
So, the key to clarity -- which requires both focus and coherence -- is to balance our intelligence.
Balanced intelligence -- something few people recognize for what it is (even though it is more functional -- and beautiful -- than unbalanced intelligence).
Balance your intelligence. Do it, today!
I know, you may not know how. That's coming.
Next expostulation in a couple of days, or so.
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