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ATTENTION TOP AND BOTTOM

I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions, apparently without much success,” wrote the nineteenth-century French mathematician Henri Poincaré. “Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside.”1 There, as he walked on a bluff above the ocean one morning, the insight suddenly came to him “that the arithmetical transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.” The specifics of that proof do not matter here (fortunately so: I could not begin to understand the math myself). What’s intriguing about this illumination is how it came to Poincaré: with “brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty.” He was taken by surprise. The lore of creativity is rife with such accounts. Carl Gauss, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mathematician, worked on proving a theorem for four years, with no solution. Then, one day, the answer came to him “as a sudden flash of light.” Yet he could not name the thread of thought that connected his years of hard work with that flash of insight. Why the puzzle? Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems. One has massive computing power and operates constantly, purring away in quiet to solve our problems, surprising us with a sudden solution to complex pondering. Since it operates beyond the horizon of conscious awareness we are blind to its workings. This system presents the fruit of its vast labors to us as though out of nowhere, and in a multitude of forms, from guiding the syntax of a sentence to constructing complex full-blown mathematical proofs. This back-of-the-mind attention typically comes to the center of focus when the unexpected happens. You’re talking on your cell phone while driving (the driving part is back-of-the-mind) and suddenly a horn honk makes you realize the light has changed to green. Much of this system’s neural wiring lies in the lower part of our brain, in subcortical circuitry, though its efforts break into awareness by notifying our neocortex, the brain’s topmost layers, from below. Through their pondering, Poincaré and Gauss reaped breakthroughs from the brain’s lower layers. “Bottom-up” has become the phrase of choice in cognitive science for such workings of this lower-brain neural machinery.2 By the same token, “top-down” refers to mental activity, mainly within the neocortex, that can monitor and impose its goals on the subcortical machinery. It’s as though there were two minds at work. The bottom-up mind is: • faster in brain time, which operates in milliseconds • involuntary and automatic: always on • intuitive, operating through networks of association • impulsive, driven by emotions • executor of our habitual routines and guide for our actions • manager for our mental models of the world

By contrast, the top-down mind is: • slower • voluntary • effortful • the seat of self-control, which can (sometimes) overpower automatic routines and mute emotionally driven impulses • able to learn new models, make new plans, and take charge of our automatic repertoire—to an extent

Voluntary attention, willpower, and intentional choice are top-down; reflexive attention, impulse, and rote habit are bottom-up (as is the attention captured by a stylish outfit or a nifty ad). When we choose to tune in to the beauty of a sunset, concentrate on what we’re reading, or have a deep talk with someone, it’s a top-down shift. Our mind’s eye plays out a continual dance between stimulus-driven attention capture and voluntarily directed focus. The bottom-up system multitasks, scanning a profusion of inputs in parallel, including features of our surroundings that have not yet come into full focus; it analyzes what’s in our perceptual field before letting us know what it selects as relevant for us. Our top-down mind takes more time to deliberate on what it gets presented with, taking things one at a time and applying more thoughtful analysis. Through what amounts to an optical illusion of the mind, we take what’s within our awareness to equal the whole of the mind’s operations. But in fact the vast majority of mental operations occur in the mind’s backstage, amid the purr of bottom-up systems. Much (some say all) of what the top-down mind believes it has chosen to focus on, think about, and do is actually plans dictated bottom-up. If this were a movie, psychologist Daniel Kahneman wryly notes, the top-down mind would be a “supporting character who believes herself to be the hero.”3 Dating back millions of years in evolution, the reflexive, quick-acting bottom-up circuitry favors short-term thinking, impulse, and speedy decisions. The top-down circuits at the front and top of the brain are a later addition, their full maturation dating back mere hundreds of thousands of years. Top-down wiring adds talents like self-awareness and reflection, deliberation, and planning to our mind’s repertoire. Intentional, top-down focus offers the mind a lever to manage our brain. As we shift our attention from one task, plan, sensation or the like to another, the related brain circuitry lights up. Bring to mind a happy memory of dancing and the neurons for joy and movement spring to life. Recall the funeral of a loved one and the circuitry for sadness activates. Mentally rehearse a golf stroke and the axons and dendrites that orchestrate those moves wire together a bit more strongly. The human brain counts among evolution’s good-enough, but not perfect, designs.4 The brain’s more ancient bottom-up systems apparently worked well for basic survival during most of human prehistory—but their design makes for some troubles today. In much of life the older system holds sway, usually to our advantage but sometimes to our detriment: overspending, addictions, and recklessly speeding drivers all count as signs of this system out of whack. The survival demands of early evolution packed our brains with preset bottom-up programs for procreation and child-rearing, for what’s pleasurable and what’s disgusting, for running from a threat or toward food, and the like. Fast-forward to today’s very different world: we so often need to navigate life top-down despite the constant undertow of bottom-up whims and drives. A surprising factor constantly tips the balance toward bottom-up: the brain economizes on energy. Cognitive efforts like learning to use your latest tech upgrade demand active attention, at an energy cost. But the more we run through a once-novel routine, the more it morphs into rote habit and gets taken over by bottom-up circuitry, particularly neural networks in the basal ganglia, a golf-ball-sized mass nestled at the brain’s bottom, just above the spinal cord. The more we practice a routine, the more the basal ganglia take it over from other parts of the brain. The bottom/top systems distribute mental tasks between them so we can make minimal effort and get optimal results. As familiarity makes a routine easier, it gets passed off from the top to the bottom. The way we experience this neural transfer is that we need pay less attention—and finally none—as it becomes automatic. The peak of automaticity can be seen when expertise pays off in effortless attention to high demand, whether a master-level chess match, a NASCAR race, or rendering an oil painting. If we haven’t practiced enough, all of these will take deliberate focus. But if we have mastered the requisite skills to a level that meets the demand, they will take no extra cognitive effort—freeing our attention for the extras seen only among those at top levels. As world-class champions attest, at the topmost levels, where yAs world-class champions attest, at the topmost levels, where your opponents have practiced about as many thousands of hours as you have, any competition becomes a mental game: your mind state determines how well you can focus, and so how well you can do. The more you can relax and trust in bottom-up moves, the more you free your mind to be nimble. Take, for example, star football quarterbacks who have what sports analysts call “great ability to see the field”: they can read the other team’s defensive formations to sense the opponent’s intentions to move, and once the play starts instantly adjust to those movements, gaining a priceless second or two to pick out an open receiver for a pass. Such “seeing” requires enormous practice, so that what at first requires much attention—dodge that rusher—occurs on automatic. From a mental computation perspective, spotting a receiver while under the pressure of several 250-pound bodies hurtling toward you from various angles is no small feat: the quarterback has to keep in mind the pass routes of several potential receivers at the same time he processes and responds to the moves of all eleven opposing players—a challenge best managed by well-practiced bottom-up circuits (and one that would be overwhelming if he had to consciously think through each move). RECIPE FOR A SCREWUP

Lolo Jones was winning the women’s 100-meter hurdles race, on her way to a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In the lead, she was clearing the hurdles with an effortless rhythm—until something went wrong. At first it was very subtle: she had a sense that the hurdles were coming at her too fast. With that, Jones had the thought Make sure you don’t get sloppy in your technique. . . . Make sure your legs are snapping out. With those thoughts, she overtried, tightening up a bit too much—and hit the ninth hurdle of ten. Jones finished seventh, not first, and collapsed on the track in tears.5 Looking back as she was about to try again at the 2012 London Olympics (where she eventually finished fourth in the 100-meter race), Jones could recall that earlier moment of defeat with crystal clarity. And if you asked neuroscientists, they could diagnose the error with equal certainty: when she began to think about the details of her technique, instead of just leaving the job to the motor circuits that had practiced these moves to mastery, Jones had shifted from relying on her bottom-up system to interference from the top. Brain studies find that having a champion athlete start pondering technique during a performance offers a sure recipe for a screwup. When top soccer players raced a ball around and through a line of traffic cones—and had to notice which side of their foot was controlling the ball—they made more errors.6 The same happened when baseball players tried to track whether their bat was moving up or down during a swing for a pitched ball. The motor cortex, which in a well-seasoned athlete has these moves deeply etched in its circuits from thousands of hours of practice, operates best when left alone. When the prefrontal cortex activates and we start thinking about how we’re doing, how to do what we’re doing—or, worse, what not to do—the brain gives over some control to circuits that know how to think and worry, but not how to deliver the move itself. Whether in the hundred meters, soccer, or baseball, it’s a universal recipe for tripping up. That’s why, as Rick Aberman, who directs peak performance for the Minnesota Twins baseball team, tells me, “When the coach reviews plays from a game and only focuses on what not to do next time, it’s a recipe for players to choke.” It’s not just in sports. Making love comes to mind as another activity where getting too analytic and self-critical gets in the way. A journal article on the “ironic effects of trying to relax under stress” suggests still another.7 Relaxation and making love go best when we just let them happen—not try to force them. The parasympathetic nervous system, which kicks in during these activities, ordinarily acts independently of our brain’s executive, which thinks about them. Edgar Allan Poe dubbed the unfortunate mental tendency to bring up some sensitive topic you resolved not to mention “the imp of the perverse.” An article fittingly called “How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion,” by Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, explains the cognitive mechanism that animates that imp.8 Flubs, Wegner has found, escalate to the degree we are distracted, stressed, or otherwise mentally burdened. In those circumstances a cognitive control system that ordinarily monitors errors we might make (like don’t mention that topic) can inadvertently act as a mental prime, increasing the likelihood of that very mistake (like mentioning that topic). When Wegner has had experimental volunteers try not to think of a particular word, when they then are pressured to respond quickly to a word association task, ironically they often offer up that same forbidden word. Overloading attention shrinks mental control. It’s in the moments we feel most stressed that we forget the names of people we know well, not to mention their birthdays, our anniversaries, and other socially crucial data.9 Another example: obesity. Researchers find that the prevalence of obesity in the United States over the last thirty years tracks the explosion of computers and tech gadgets in people’s lives—and suspect this is no accidental correlation. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near-constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control. Forget that resolve to diet. Lost in the digital world we mindlessly reach for the Pringles. THE BOTTOM-UP SKEW

A survey of psychologists asked them if there might be “one nagging thing” that they did not understand about themselves.10 One said that for two decades he had studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bleak, unless you become aware of how the gloom worsens your mood—but that even though he understood all that, gloomy skies still made him feel bad. Another was puzzled by his compulsion to write papers that show how some research is badly misguided, and how he continues to do so even though none of the relevant researchers has paid much attention. And a third said that though he had studied “male sexual overperception bias”—the misinterpretation of a woman’s friendliness as romantic interest—he still succumbs to the bias. The bottom-up circuitry learns voraciously—and quietly—taking in lessons continually as we go through the day. Such implicit learning need never enter our awareness, though it acts as a rudder in life nonetheless, for better or for worse. The automatic system works well most of the time: we know what’s going on and what to do and can meander through the demands of the day well enough while we think about other things. But this system has weaknesses, too: our emotions and our motives create skews and biases in our attention that we typically don’t notice, and don’t notice that we don’t notice. Take social anxiety. In general, anxious people fixate on anything even vaguely threatening; those with social anxiety compulsively spot the least sign of rejection, such as a fleeting expression of disgust on someone’s face—a reflection of their habitual assumption that they will be social flops. Most of this emotional transaction goes on out of awareness, leading people to avoid situations where they might get anxious. An ingenious method for remedying this bottom-up skew is so subtle that people have no idea that their attention patterns are being rewired (just as they had no idea that wiring was going on as they acquired it in the first place). Called “cognitive bias modification,” or CBM, this invisible therapy has those suffering from severe social anxiety look at photos of an audience while they are asked to track when flashing patterns of lights appear and press a button as quickly as they can.11 Flashes never appear in the area of the pictures that are threatening, like frowning faces. Though this intervention stays beneath their awareness, over the course of several sessions the bottom-up circuitry learns to direct attention to nonthreatening cues. Though people haven’t a clue about the subtle repatterning of attention, their anxiety in social situations dials down.12 That’s a benign use of this circuitry. Then there’s advertising. The old-school tactics for getting attention in a crowded marketplace—what’s new, improved, surprising—still work. But a mini-industry of brain studies in the service of marketing has led to tactics based on manipulating our unconscious mind. One such study found, for example, that if you show people luxury items or just have them think about luxury goods, they become more self-centered in their decisions.13 One of the most active areas of research on unconscious choice centers on what gets us to reach for some product when we shop. Marketers want to know how to mobilize our bottom-up brain. Marketing research finds, for instance, that when people are shown a drink along with happy faces that flit across a screen too rapidly to be registered consciously—but nonetheless are noticed by the bottom-up systems—they drink more than when those fleeting images are angry faces. A review of such research concludes that people are “massively unaware” of these subtle marketing forces, even as they shape how we shop.14 Bottom-up awareness makes us suckers for subconscious primes. Life today seems ruled to a troubling degree by impulse; a flood of ads drives us, bottom-up, to desire a sea of goods and spend today without regard to how we will pay tomorrow. The reign of impulse for many goes beyond overspending and overborrowing to overeating and other addictive habits, from bingeing on Twizzlers to spending countless hours staring at one or another variety of digital screen. NEURAL HIJACKS

Walk into someone’s office, and what’s the first thing you notice? That’s a clue to what’s driving your bottom-up focus in that moment. If you’re set on a financial goal, you might immediately take in an earnings graph on the computer screen. If you have arachnophobia, you’ll fixate on that dusty web in the corner of the window. These are subconscious choices in attention. Such attention capture occurs when the amygdala circuitry, the brain’s sentinel for emotional meaning, spots something it finds significant; an oversize insect, wrathful look, or cute toddler gives you an idea of the brain’s settings for such instinctual interest.15 This midbrain fixture of the bottom-up system reacts far more quickly in neural time than does the top-down prefrontal area; it sends signals upward to activate higher cortical pathways that alert the (relatively) sluggish executive centers to wake up and pay attention. Our brain’s attention mechanisms evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive in a fang-and-claw jungle where threats approached our ancestors within a specific visual range and set of rates—somewhere around the lunge of a snake and the speed of a leaping tiger. Those of our ancestors whose amygdala was quick enough to help us dodge that snake and evade that tiger passed on their neural design to us. Snakes and spiders, two animals that the human brain seems primed to notice with alarm, capture attention even when their images are flashed so fast we have no conscious awareness of having seen them. The bottom-up circuits spot them more quickly than neutral objects, and send an alarm (flash those images by an expert on snakes or spiders and she will still have attention capture—but no alarm signal).16 The brain finds it impossible to ignore emotional faces, particularly furious ones.17 Angry faces have super-salience: scan a crowd and someone with an angry face will pop out. The bottom brain will even spot a cartoon with V-shaped eyebrows (like the kids in South Park) more quickly than it takes in a happy face. We are wired to pay reflexive attention to “super-normal stimuli,” whether for safety, nutrition, or sex—like a cat that can’t help chasing a fake mouse on a string. In today’s world, ads that play on those same pre-wired inclinations tug at us bottom-up, too, getting our reflexive attention. Just tie sex or prestige to a product to activate these same circuits to prime us to buy for reasons we don’t even notice. Our particular proclivities make us all the more vulnerable. That’s why alcoholics are riveted by vodka ads, randy folks by the sexy people in a spot for a vacation getaway. This is bottom-up preselected attention; such capture from below is automatic, an involuntary choice. We’re most prone to emotions driving focus this way when our minds are wandering, when we are distracted, or when we’re overwhelmed by information—or all three. Then there are emotions gone wild. I was writing this very section yesterday, sitting at my desktop, when out of the blue I had a crippling attack of lower back pain. Maybe not out of nowhere: it had been building quietly since morning. But then as I sat at my desk it suddenly ripped through my body, from my lower spine straight up to the pain centers in my brain. When I tried to stand, the bolt of pain was so severe I crumpled back into my chair. What’s worse, my mind started racing about the worst that might happen: I’ll be crippled by this for life, I’ll have to get regular steroid injections . . . and that train of thought brought my panicked mind to recall that a fungus in a poorly run drug-compounding facility had led to the death from meningitis of twenty-seven patients who had gotten just those very injections. As it happens, I had just deleted a block of text on a related point, which I intended to move to about here in this book. But with my attention in the grip of pain and worry, I completely forgot about it—and so it has vanished into a black hole. Such emotional hijacks are triggered by the amygdala, the brain’s radar for threat, which constantly scans our surroundings for dangers. When these circuits spot a threat (or what we interpret as one—they are often mistaken), a superhighway of neuronal circuitry running upward to the prefrontal areas sends a barrage of signals that let the lower brain drive the upper: our attention narrows, glued to what’s upsetting us; our memory reshuffles, making it easier to recall anything relevant to the threat at hand; our body goes into overdrive as a flood of stress hormones prepares our limbs to fight or run. We fixate on what’s so disturbing and forget the rest. The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation. Hijacks are the superglue of attention. But the question is, How long does our focus stay captured? That depends, it turns out, on the power of the left prefrontal area to calm the aroused amygdala (there are two amygdalae, one in each brain hemisphere). That amygdala-prefrontal neuronal superhighway has branches to the left and right prefrontal sides. When we are hijacked the amygdala circuitry captures the right side and takes over. But the left side can send signals downward that calm the hijack. Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient—who bounce back right away—can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient.18 The good news: as we’ll see in part 5, we can increase the strength of the amygdala-calming left prefrontal circuitry. LIFE ON AUTOMATIC

My friend and I are rapt in conversation in a busy restaurant, toward the end of our lunch. He’s immersed in his narrative, telling me about a particularly intense moment he’s had recently. He’s been so lost in telling me about it that he’s not done with his food. My plate was cleared a while ago. At that point the server comes to our table and asks him, “Are you enjoying your lunch?” He barely notices her, mutters a dismissive, “No, not yet,” and continues on with his story without missing a beat. My friend’s reply, of course, was not to what the server actually said, but rather to what waiters usually say at that point in a meal: “Have you finished?” That small mistake typifies the downside of a life lived bottom-up, on automatic: we miss the moment as it actually comes to us, reacting instead to a fixed template of assumptions about what’s going on. And we miss the humor of the moment: Waiter: “Are you enjoying your lunch?” Customer: “No, not yet.” Back in the day when there were often long lines in many offices as people waited to use a copier, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer had people go to the head of the line and simply say, “I’ve got to make some copies.” Of course, everyone else in line was there to make copies, too. Yet more often than not, the person at the head of the line would let Langer’s confederate go ahead. That, says Langer, exemplifies mindlessness, attention on automatic. An active attention, by contrast, might lead the person at the front of the line to question whether there really was some privileged urgent need for those copies. Active engagement of attention signifies top-down activity, an antidote to going through the day with a zombie-like automaticity. We can talk back to commercials, stay alert to what’s happening around us, question automatic routines or improve them. This focused, often goal-oriented attention, inhibits mindless mental habits.19 So while emotions can drive our attention, with active effort we can also manage emotions top-down. Then the prefrontal areas take charge of the amygdala, tuning down its potency. An angry face, or even that cute baby, can fail to capture our attention when the circuits for top-down control of attention take over the brain’s choices of what to ignore.