Read Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life Online
Authors: Margaret Moore
Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life (11 page)
ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
We've been talking about attention as if it's one pure substance or quality. Actually, scientists describe
two
types or modes of attentionâgoal directed or stimulus driven.
Goal-directed
attention is driven from within, voluntarily by our goals and aspirations. This form of attention is consistent with our own unique life, our specific interests or aims of the moment. This form of attention is “top down,” meaning that it is rooted in those cortical areas of the brain; the ones that, as we discussed in the previous chapter, are associated with cognitive control. For Nancy, her goal-directed attention can be “on” when she is in the midst of paperwork developed for an individual client, which she sees as critical to foster an emerging customer base in a well-to-do suburb.
Stimulus-driven
attention, on the other hand, can be captured by someone yelling fire, a pop-up screen on your computer, a flash of lightning on the horizon or the sound of a power chord on a guitar. Sometimes that information can be life-saving; oftentimes, it is innocuous and arbitrary. This stimulus-driven mode of attention is sensory and external. This may be what is getting in Nancy's wayâthe external
random people and demands that bombard her during the day through her open door.
Scientists continue to debate what makes a stimulus more likely to capture our attention. Perhaps it is the salienceâprominence or relevanceâof the stimuli or some feature of the stimulus itself, like its sudden appearance? Despite our evolutionary advances, maybe it's still just “shiny metal objects” that grab our attentionâas easily as a dangling string attracts the attention of a cat.
Advertisers, who have long studied attention for obvious reasons, understand this well. And some of the most successful ad campaigns are those with messages that are salient to their audienceânot just gimmicky commercials that get our attention briefly. One classic example is the early 1980s ad for the Apple Macintosh, with the tagline “The Computer for the Rest of Us”âa line designed to get the attention of many American consumers who were curious about personal computers and what they could do but still felt that these mysterious machines were comprehensible only to those in white lab coats, who held advanced engineering degrees. That campaign helped launch what has become one of the most ubiquitous, successful brands in the world because its message was simple and salient enough to capture attention.
Fortunately, the brain is remarkable in its ability to manage different and competing modes of attentionâsome of it goal-directed information, which is consistent with our objectives, and some of it stimulus driven, which may run counter to or even change our goals. The optimal balance may be to maintain and develop attentional goals and to allow oneself to be “captured” by only those stimuli that align with our goal at hand.
Consider yourself at a work meeting. While your attention rests on one thing (the speaker at the head of the conference table), your brain continues to evaluate new information (the rustle of papers to
your left, the whispered comment to your right) even at a subconscious level. These new stimuli are competing for your attention, but the organized brain is able to evaluate and screen out what is not worthy of your attention. There is still cognitive work to be done: the ability to properly handle all the noise from the environment and evaluate and prioritize it while not being pulled off the main task at hand (listening to the speaker and taking notes) is a basic and important sign of the organized brain. It's one most of us take for granted. For some, however, that's not so easy.
CASE STUDY: SYSTEMATIC DISTRACTION
Jason was a junior in college, and he was struggling. Distracted from his studies, he had watched his GPA plummet. By the time he came to see me, he was in danger of falling below 2.5, jeopardizing his chances to get into an MBA program, which is what he wanted and what his parents were willing to pay forâprovided he could get in. “I have one semester to turn it around,” he said when he sat down in my office.
“What kind of school are you in?”
He looked quizzical. “What do you mean?”
“Are you at a big university where you have lecture halls with 100 peopleâ¦or a small school with seminars of five or six gathered around a table? Are you living in a dorm in the center of campus or an apartment off campus?”
All of this was important. We needed to lay out his environment. Turns out, he was in a midsize school in the Boston area and lived in a dorm.
“So where do you study?” I asked.
“The library,” he replied. “I'm there for hours sometimes.”
“Do you get a lot done?”
“Wellâ¦not so much,” Jason said as he shifted uneasily in his seat. He told me that, while in the library, he jumps from one assignment to another, taking book after book out of his backpack. He opens them, reviews his notes or reads a page or two and then closes them and puts them away. He watches people walk by. He gets up and rummages through the shelves. He reads the notices on the bulletin boards.
Unable to accomplish much there, he leaves and goes back to the dorm. It happens to be a dorm for upperclassmen, and generally, he told me, it's quiet. “Too quiet,” he said. “It almost distracts me. And if there's any noise somewhereâ¦somebody slams a door upstairs or somethingâ¦it sounds much louder and really throws me off.” Eventually, he said, “I just realize I've been doodling for an hour.”
In addition, and this is important for the evaluation, I learned that Jason had similar issues when he was younger. Talking about his inability to keep his “nose in a book,” even at the library, he chuckled as he recalls his first-grade teacher admonishing him during their reading and writing exercises to keep his eyes on his paper. In middle school, he admitted, his attention wavered as well; in high school, although he did extremely well in some of the classes that he liked, he nearly failed chemistry. “I just wasn't into it,” he said. “I'd find myself watching stuff bubble in the lab or reading the charts up on the wall. I think the teacher passed me, as a favor.”
Although I am confident that we can help him, by the end of our session my diagnosis is made: Jason has ADHD.
THE SCIENCE OF INATTENTION
The people I see with ADHD, like Jason, struggle with the fundamental skill of attention. The name of his condition, attention-deficit
hyperactivity disorder, has changed over time but reflects a fundamental difficulty with the basic unit of attention. In upcoming chapters, we will see that “attention deficits” can be more than just a struggle to pay attention but a struggle to turn attention off as well. Contrary to the popular image, children with ADHD, for example, can spend hours of intense focus on a video game. It's almost as hard for them sometimes to turn that attention off as it is to keep their attention on their schoolwork. Attentional abilities are not just an “on/off” switch. It's about turning attention to the right task at the right timeâand then to turn attention off again, when necessary, and in line with our goals.
Studies of individuals with ADHD have found abnormalities in the brain areas that are responsible for our ability to pay attention, including some of the cortical regions we've already discussed such as the PFC. In comparison to persons without ADHD, the brain regions of those affected by the disorder can actually be different in size, in function and in how they are wired or connected to the rest of the brain.
The neuroscience of attentional deficits in ADHD, as well as in other conditions such as stroke or traumatic brain injury, allows scientists to understand more about the working brain. While we marvel at the remarkable ability of the brain to adapt to the modern, ever-demanding world, the study of persons with medical conditions like ADHD remind us that the attentional system can be thrown into imbalance. So while the chances are you don't have ADHD, your inability to focus and seeming lack of attention could very well be real and not a figment of your imagination. As we have seen, we
do
have limits. Fortunately, while that doesn't mean there's something “wrong” with your brain, you are correct inâpardon the punâpaying attention to your inability to do just that. The good news is that there are ways that we can resharpen our attentional abilities, better manage our cognitive load and pull back from the limits we've reached.
ATTENTION! YOUR BRAIN IS UNDER
AN INFORMATION ASSAULT!
The human brain is facing a technologically driven onslaught of information. The advances in brain science over the past ten years have revealed that the brain is a breathtakingly complex organism. It is perfectly capable of paying attention todayâand tomorrow. Nowhere is the brain's sophistication more evident than in our attentional abilitiesâwhere stimuli and stored information, involving all the senses, are synthesized and interpreted by our brains in seconds. That, of course, is not to dismiss the increasingly complex and information-rich environment that our brains must contend with every day. As noted, attention has its limits; there are times when we may feel overmatched by the speed and volume of all that noise, which is why you may be reading this book. But just as our ancestors' brains had to adapt to new technologies that challenged their ways of thinkingâfrom writing and language to the operation of machines and automobilesâso will we. Trust me, our brains are not going to break down under the strain of one trying to figure out how to work a new handheld device or respond to one more Facebook post.
What research is now telling us is that what “hooks” our attention is usually something consistent with our goals. That's more important than how “loud” or salient the stimulus is. We can process a lot of information about that fire engine, attend to it briefly and then get back on task. But if your cell phone vibrates and you see that it's your spouse, your boss or your physician, well, you're cognitively adept enough to block out the sirens and flashing lights and hook your attention to the phone call, the stimulus that really matters to you. The implication here for someone struggling to stay focused is that we need to foster as much goal-directed attention as we can. We need to
be more discriminating and not just go chasing every fire engineâno matter how shinyâthat comes racing down our street.
That, we
can
learn to do.
COACH MEG'S TIPS
Many of us have early memories of our schoolteachers chiding us to “pay attention!” We discovered at some point that we were good at paying attention to people and things that were engaging and fun, and we struggled with people and things that were boring or uninteresting. Our parents and caregivers diligently watched for the activities that grabbed and sustained our attention, signs of our individual talents and interests.
As we grew up and got into the full swing of adult life, we found ourselves with such a long list of things to pay attention to that it was easy to lose our sense of our innate abilities to pay attention and our unique preferences of activities and people to pay attention to. Recall the early stages of romance when your sweetie commanded your attention beyond anything else. Remember your best memories and how completely absorbed you were in the moment and place. Your ability to pay attention may be lost but not gone.
The ideal state of attention is called “flow,” characterized and studied by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced
Cheek-sent-me-hi
) for thirty years as a professor at the University of Chicago. “Flow,” he wrote, “is the experience people have when they are completely immersed in an activity for its own sake, stretching body and mind to the limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” The term is used by many people to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as “being in the zone.” The more flow
experiences we have in life, the happier and more fulfilled we are. Paying attention fosters well-being.
In his book,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,
Csikszentmihalyi tells the story of a woman with severe schizophrenia in a mental hospital. Her medical team had failed to help her improve. The team decided to follow Csikszentmihalyi's protocol to identify activities where she was motivated, engaged and felt better. A timer went off throughout her day, signaling her to complete a minisurvey on her mood, energy, engagement and so on. Her report showed that her best experience was trimming and polishing her fingernails. So the medical team arranged for her to be trained as a manicurist. She began to offer manicures at the hospital and eventually became well enough to be discharged. She went on to live an independent life as a manicurist. This is the power of paying attention to activities we love to do for their own sake.
It turns out that many of us have most of our opportunities for flow-producing experiences at work, yet we miss out on their pleasure because they are polluted by frenzy (a long to-do list, etc.) or by countless other unnecessary stresses and strains produced inadvertently by most corporate cultures. Sustained attention and flow is a natural state, so rest assured that it is something you can have more of with a little forethought and planning. How can you live a life with more focus, sustained attention and increased flow?
Take an inventory of the times when you're naturally at peak attention
Just as you did with your moments of frenzy, it's important to recognize patterns in your life. Think about your life activities that feel absorbing and effortless and make time fly by and that when you're done, you are energized by a sense of accomplishment. These are times when you are not struggling and when your abilities are stretched slightly by the
challenge, enough so that you are fully engaged and interested. Too much of a challenge makes you feel out of control and too little leaves you bored. You are likely applying your strengths liberally, whether you're good at facilitating meetings, playing tennis or the piano, cooking a new recipe or writing a blog. As Dr. Hammerness noted, the research shows us that goal-directed attention is the type that we are most likely to sustain because it is more meaningful to us. Let's make sure we can identify the activities in our life that engage us in that manner.
