فصل 05

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FINDING BALANCE

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will,” observed the founder of American psychology, William James. But, as we’ve seen, if you ask people, “Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?” the odds are fifty-fifty their minds will be wandering.1 Those odds change greatly depending on what that current activity happens to be. A random survey of thousands of people found focus in the here-and-now understandably was highest by far while they were making love (apparently even among those people who answered that badly timed inquiry from a phone app). A more distant second was exercising, followed by talking with someone, and then playing. In contrast, mind wandering was most frequent while they were working (employers take note), using a home computer, or commuting. On average, people’s moods were generally skewed to the unpleasant while their minds wandered; even thoughts that had seemingly neutral content were shaded with a negative emotional tone. Mind wandering itself seemed to be a cause of unhappiness some or much of the time. Where do our thoughts wander when we’re not thinking of anything in particular? Most often, they are all about me. The “me,” William James proposed, weaves together our sense of self by telling our story—fitting random bits of life into a cohesive narrative. This it’s-all-about-me story line fabricates a feeling of permanence behind our ever-shifting moment-to-moment experience. “Me” reflects the activity of the default zone, that generator of the restless mind, lost in a meandering stream of thought that has little or nothing to do with the present situation and everything to do with, well, me. This mental habit takes over whenever we give the mind a rest from some focused activity. Creative associations aside, mind wandering tends to center on our self and our preoccupations: all the many things I have to do today; the wrong thing I said to that person; what I should have said instead. While the mind sometimes wanders to pleasant thoughts or fantasy, it more often seems to gravitate to rumination and worry. The medial prefrontal cortex fires away as our self-talk and ruminations generate a background of low-level anxiety. But during full concentration a nearby area, the lateral prefrontal cortex, inhibits this medial area. Our selective attention deselects these circuits for emotional preoccupations, the most powerful type of distraction. Responding to what’s going on, or active focus of any kind, shuts off the “me,” while passive focus returns us to this comfy mire of rumination.2 It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet. THE LAWYER AND THE RAISIN

As a litigator, the lawyer had fueled his career by mobilizing a seething anger at the injustices done his clients. Energized by outrage, he was relentless in pursuing his cases, making his arguments with a fiery force, staying up long into the night researching and preparing. Often he’d lie awake much of the night fuming as he reviewed his clients’ predicament over and over and plotted legal strategy. Then, on a vacation, he met a woman who taught meditation aninstruction. To his surprise, she started by handing him a few raisins. She then led him through the steps in eating one of the raisins slowly and with full focus, savoring the richness of every moment in that process: the sensations as he lifted it into his mouth and chewed, the burst of flavors as he bit into it, the sounds of eating. He immersed himself in the fullness of his senses. Then, as she instructed him, he brought that same full in-the-moment focus to the natural flow of his breath, letting go of any and all thoughts that floated through his mind. With her guidance he continued that meditation on his breath for the next fifteen minutes. As he did so, the voices in his mind went quiet. “It was like flipping a switch into a Zen-like state,” he said. He liked it so much that he has made it a daily habit: “After I’m done, I feel really calm—I like that a lot.” When we turn such full attention to our senses, the brain quiets its default chatter. Brain scans during mindfulness—the form of meditation the lawyer was trying—reveal it quiets the brain circuits for me-focused mental chatter.3 That in itself can be an immense relief. “To the extent absorption means dropping this mind-wandering state and getting a total focus on an activity, we’re likely to be deactivating the default circuits,” neuroscientist Richard Davidson says. “You can’t ruminate about yourself while you’re absorbed in a challenging task.” “This is one reason people love dangerous sports like mountain climbing, a situation where you have to be totally focused,” Davidson adds. Powerful focus brings a sense of peace, and with it, joy. “But when you come down the mountain, the self-referencing network brings your worries and cares right back.” In Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island, trained parrots fly over to people at random and chirp, “Here and now, boys, here and now!” That reminder helps the denizens of this idyllic island pop their daydreams and refocus on what’s happening in this very place and moment. A parrot seems an apt choice as messenger: animals live only in the here-and-now.4 A cat hopping into a lap to be stroked, a dog eagerly waiting for you at the door, a horse cocking its head to read your intentions as you approach: all share the same focus on the present. This capacity to think in ways that are independent of an immediate stimulus—about what’s happened and what might happen in all its possibilities—sets the human mind apart from that of almost every other animal. While many spiritual traditions, like Huxley’s parrots, see mind wandering as a source of woe, evolutionary psychologists see this as a great cognitive leap. Both views have some truth. In Huxley’s vision the eternal now harbors everything we need for fulfillment. Yet the human ability to think about things not happening in that eternal present represents a prerequisite for all the achievements of our species that required planning, imagination, or logistic skill. And that’s just about everything that’s a uniquely human accomplishment. Mulling things not going on here and now—“situation-independent thought” as cognitive scientists call it—demands we decouple the contents of our mind from what our senses perceive at the moment. So far as we know, no other species can make this radical shift from an external focus to an inward one with anything near the power of the human mind, or nearly so often. The more our mind wanders, the less we can register what’s going on right now, right here. Take comprehending what we’re reading. When volunteers had their gaze monitored while they read the entirety of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, erratic eye movements signaled that a great deal of mindless reading went on.5 Wandering eyes indicate a breakdown in the connection between understanding and visual contact with the text, as the mind meanders elsewhere (there might have been far less meandering if the volunteers had been free to choose what they read—say Blink or Fifty Shades of Grey, depending on their taste). Using tools such as fluctuations in eye gaze or “random experience sampling” (in other words, just asking someone what’s happening) while people are having their brains scanned, neuroscientists observe that major neural dynamic: while the mind wanders, our sensory systems shut down, and, conversely, while we focus on the here and now, the neural circuits for mind wandering go dim. At the neural level mind wandering and perceptual awareness tend to inhibit each other: internal focus on our train of thought tunes out the senses, while being rapt in the beauty of a sunset quiets the mind.6 This tune-out can be total, as when we get utterly lost in what we’re doing. Our usual neural settings allow a bit of wandering while we engage the world—or just enough engagement while we are adrift, as when we daydream while we drive. Of course, such partial tuning out bears risks: one study of a thousand drivers drive. Of course, such partial tuning out bears risks: one study of a thousand drivers injured in accidents found that about half said their mind was wandering just before the accident; the more intense the disruptive thoughts, the more likely it was that the driver caused the accident.7 Situations that do not demand constant task-focus—particularly boring or routine ones—free the mind to wander. As the mind drifts off and the default network activates more strongly, our neural circuits for task-focus go quiet—another variety of neural decoupling akin to that between the senses and daydreaming. Since daydreaming competes for neural energy with task-focus and sensory perception, there’s small wonder that as we daydream we make more errors in anything that requires us to pay focused attention. THE WANDERING MIND

“Whenever you notice your mind wandering,” a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, “bring your mind back to its point of focus.” The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own. A meander away from the focus of meditation can last seconds, minutes, or the entire session before we notice, if we do at all. That simple challenge is so hard because the very brain circuits we need to catch our mind as it wanders are recruited into the neural web that sets the mind adrift in the first place.8 What are they doing? Apparently, managing the random bits that fill a wandering mind into a detailed train of thought, like How do I pay my bills? Such thoughts require cooperation between the mind’s drifting circuitry and the organizational talents of the executive circuits.9 Catching a wandering mind in the act is elusive; more often than not when we are lost in thought we fail to realize that our mind has wandered in the first place. Noticing that our mind has wandered marks a shift in brain activity; the greater this meta-awareness, the weaker the mind wandering becomes.10 Brain imaging reveals that at the moment we catch our mind adrift that act of meta-awareness lessens the activity of the executive and medial circuits, but it does not completely suppress them.11 Modern life values sitting in school or an office, focusing on one thing at a time—an attentional stance that may not always have paid off in early human history. Survival in the wild, some neuroscientists argue, may have depended at crucial moments on a rapidly shifting attention and swift action, without hesitating to think what to do. What we now diagnose as an attentional deficit may reflect a natural variation in focusing styles that had advantages in evolution—and so continues to be dispersed in our gene pool. When facing a focus-demanding mental task like tough math problems, as we’ve seen, those with ADD show both more mind wandering and increased activity in the medial circuitry.12 But when conditions are right, those with ADD can have keen focus, fully absorbed in the activity at hand. Such conditions might arise more often in an art studio, basketball court, or stock exchange floor—just not in the classroom. AN EVEN KEEL

On 12/12/12, the very day a quirk in the Mayan calendar supposedly foretold as the end of the world (according to clearly unfounded rumors), my wife and I happened to take one of our granddaughters to the Museum of Modern Art. A budding artist, she was keen to see the offerings of that famous New York City museum. Among the first displays to greet us on entering the first gallery at MoMA were two industrial-sized vacuum cleaners, spotless white three-wheeled cylinders with neat pin-striping. They were stacked one atop the other encased in Plexiglas cubes, the neon lights beneath each making them gleam. Our granddaughter was not impressed; she was eager to see Van Gogh’s Starry Night in a gallery several floors above. Just the night before, the main curator at MoMA had convened an evening on the theme of “attention and distraction.” The focusing of attention holds the key to museum displays: the frames around the art announce where we should look. Those glass cubes and neon lights directed our attention here, toward the sparkling vacuum cleaners, and away from there—whatever else was in the gallery. That point came home to me as we left. Near an out-of-the-way wall in the museum’s cavernous lobby I noticed some chairs stacked haphazardly, placed for some special event. Lurking near them in the shadows, I could barely discern what appeared to be a vacuum cleaner. No one paid it the least attention. But our attention need not be at the mercy of how the world around us gets framed; we can choose to observe the vacuum cleaner in the shadow as much as the one in the spotlight. An even keel in attention reflects a mental mode where we simply notice whatever comes into awareness without getting caught up or swept away by any particular thing. Everything flows through. This openness can be seen in everyday moments when, for instance, you find yourself waiting a turn behind a customer who is taking endless time, and instead of focusing on resentment or on how this will make you late, you simply let yourself enjoy the store’s background music. Emotional reactivity flips us into a different mode of attention, one where our world contracts into fixation on what’s upsetting us. Those who have difficulty sustaining open awareness typically get caught up by irritating details like that person in front of them in the security line at the airport who took forever to get carry-on ready for the scanner—and will still be fuming about it while waiting for their plane at the gate. But there are no emotional hijacks in open awareness—just the richness of the moment. One brain measure for such open attention assesses how well people can track an occasional number embedded in a stream of letters: S, K, O, E, 4, R, T, 2, H, P . . . Many people, it turns out, fix their attention on the first number, 4, and miss seeing the second, 2. Their attention blinks. Those with strong open focus, though, register the second number, too. People who are able to rest their attention in this open mode notice more about their surroundings. Even in the bustle of an airport they can maintain awareness of what’s going on, rather than getting lost in one detail or another. In brain tests, those who score highest on open awareness register a greater amount of detail flashing by in a moment’s time than do most people. Their attention does not blink.13 This enriching of attention applies, too, to our interior life—in the open mode we take in far more of our feelings, sensations, thoughts, and memories than we do when, say, we’re focused on marching through our to-do list or rushing to back-to-back meetings. “The capacity to remain with your attention open in a panoramic awareness,” says Davidson, “lets you attend with equanimity, without getting caught in a bottom-up capture that ensnares the mind in judging and reactivity, whether negative or positive.” It also decreases mind wandering. The goal, he adds, is to be better able to engage in mind wandering when you want to, and not otherwise. RESTORING ATTENTION

On vacation at a tropical resort with his family, magazine editor William Falk bemoans, he found himself sitting staring at his work while his daughter waited for him to go to the beach. “Not so long ago,” Falk reflects, “I would have found it unthinkable to work while on vacation; I recall glorious two-week sojourns where I had no contact with bosses, employees, even friends. But that was before I traveled with a smartphone, an iPad, and a laptop, and learned to like living in a constant stream of information and connection.”14 Consider the cognitive effort demanded by our new normal information overload—the explosion of news streams, emails, phone calls, tweets, blogs, chats, reflections about opinions about opinions that we expose our cognitive processors to daily. That neural buzz adds tension to the demands of getting something done. Selecting one sharp focus requires inhibiting a multitude of others. The mind has to fight off the pull of everything else, sorting out what’s important from what’s irrelevant. That takes cognitive effort. Tightly focused attention gets fatigued—much like an overworked muscle—when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy. The antidote to attention fatigue is the same as for the physical kind: take a rest. But what rests a mental muscle? Try switching from the effort of top-down control to more passive bottom-up Try switching from the effort of top-down control to more passive bottom-up activities, taking a relaxing break in a restful setting. The most restful surroundings are in nature, argues Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan, who proposes what he calls “attention restoration theory.”15 Such restoration occurs when we switch from effortful attention, where the mind needs to suppress distractions, to letting go and allowing our attention to be captured by whatever presents itself. But only certain kinds of bottom-up focus act to restore energy for focused attention. Surfing the Web, playing video games, or answering email does not. We do well to unplug regularly; quiet time restores our focus and composure. But that disengagement is just the first step. What we do next matters, too. Taking a walk down a city street, Kaplan points out, still puts demands on attention—we’ve got to navigate through crowds, dodge cars, and ignore honking horns and the hum of street noise. In contrast, a walk through a park or in the woods puts little such demand on attention. We can restore by spending time in nature—even a few minutes strolling in a park or any setting rich in fascinations like the muted reds of clouds at sunset or a butterfly’s flutter. This triggers bottom-up attention “modestly,” as Kaplan’s group put it, allowing circuits for top-down efforts to replenish their energy, restoring attentiveness and memory, and improving cognition.16 A walk through an arboretum led to better focus on return to concentrated tasks than a stroll though downtown.17 Even sitting by a mural of a nature scene—particularly one with water in it—is better than the corner coffee shop.18 But I wonder. These moments seem fine for switching off intense concentration, but open the way for the still-busy wandering mind-set of the default circuitry. There’s another step we can take in switching off the busy mind: full focus on something relaxing. The key is an immersive experience, one where attention can be total but largely passive. This starts to happen when we gently arouse the sensory systems, which quiet down those for effortful focus. Anything we can get enjoyably lost in will do it. Remember, in that survey of people’s moods the single most focusing activity in anyone’s day, and the most pleasant, is lovemaking. Total, positive absorption shuts off the inner voice, that running dialogue with ourselves that goes on even during our quiet moments. That’s a main effect of virtually every contemplative practice that keeps your mind focused on a neutral target, like your breath or a mantra. Traditional advice for ideal settings for a “retreat” seems to include all the ingredients needed for cognitive restoration. Monasteries designed for meditation are typically in restful, quiet natural environments. Not that we need go to such extremes. For William Falk, the remedy was simple: he stopped his work and went to play with his daughter in the waves. “Tumbling and hooting in the pounding surf with my daughter, I was fully present in the moment. Fully alive.”