The Third Circuit - Learning To Pay Attention
The foundational skill of all meditation practices, quieting the default mode network, and being aware of awareness.
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"The faculty of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character and will”
William James declared in his Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. James went on to say that
“an education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence."
Pretty bold statement. So what about attention is so special and how does it help?
Why Is Attention So Important To Well-Being?
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change. – Gautama Buddha
Paying attention and being aware is fundamental to our happiness and well-being. The above quote to me captures that idea of being present - witnessing something as it is, without thought or ideas, simply being present to it and all it brings can be quite extraordinary.
An Attempt To Quantify Mind Wandering
Attentiveness (awareness, mindfulness) and well-being are closely linked. To paraphrase a study published by social psychologists at Harvard, “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
Researchers created a website called trackyourhappiness.org in an effort to figure out how attention or the lack of it (mind wandering) correlated with how people felt. The study randomly sent people signals throughout the day, asking them three questions:
How do you feel?
What are you doing?
Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?
They have gathered a remarkable amount of data (650K real-time reports from over 15K people) from a diverse group (18-80 years of age, varying levels of education, income, demographics, etc).
We’re Doing A Lot Of Wandering
They have found that 47 percent of the waking lives (of those surveyed) was spent not paying attention to what they’re doing.
They were able to measure this across a range of activities and found that our minds wander quite a bit during many different daily life activities:
% Of Time Not Focused On Activity
Showering - 65%
Brushing Teeth - 50%
Working - 40%
Exercising - 30%
Sex - 10%
In every activity measured other than sex, peopel’s minds were wandering more than 30% of the time.
When We Wander We Are Less Happy
Additionally, they found there was a strong correlation between happiness and how often our minds wandered. Specifically, we are happier when are present (here and now) vs. when we are ruminating or trapped in our thoughts (known in Buddhism as the monkey mind).
Additionally, mind wandering is a pretty decent predictor of happiness (as opposed to income for example).
We Are Pretty Much Always Happier When We’re Present
In this same study, remarkably, when people focused on being here vs. when their mind wandered they were far happier regardless of the activity.
Even if people hate commuting, they were happier when they focused on their commute vs. letting their minds wander during their commute.
The Antidote To Wandering Is Paying Attention
Mindfulness is often spoken of as the heart of Buddhist meditation. It’s not about Buddhism, but about paying attention. – Jon Kabat-Zinn
As I mentioned last week, I've uncovered a book on the neuroscience of meditation authored by Richard Davison and Daniel Goleman, the former is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well as founder and chair of the Center for Healthy Minds and the latter a writer for the NYT for over two decades, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences.
The book has been fascinating because the main goal is to parse through the scientific literature on meditation, separate fact from fiction, and help us better understand how meditation can change our brain and what are the resulting effects of those changes.
In this newsletter, I dive into one of the core focuses of meditation - attention - and look at what exactly is attention, how does attention help us, and what happens to our brain as we practice it.
What Is Attention and What Are The Benefits?
Attention, in Buddhism, is the art or acquired skill that helps us see into the true nature of all things. The true nature of all things is too lofty a topic to also get into in this newsletter but suffice it to say attention helps with a variety of things which we typically bucket under a few terms such as mindfulness or awareness.
Among, the variety of techniques in Buddhist meditation, attention is the common thread that underpins all schools of meditation. Its importance is illustrated well through this Zen parable:
A student said to Master Ichu, “Please write for me something of great wisdom.” Master Ichu picked up his brush and wrote one word: “Attention.” The student said, “Is that all?” The master wrote, “Attention. Attention.” The student became irritable. “That doesn’t seem profound or subtle to me.” In response, Master Ichu wrote simply, “Attention. Attention. Attention.” In frustration, the student demanded, “What does this word ‘attention’ mean?” Master Ichu replied, “Attention means attention.
Attention is a revered art in Buddhism and a critical skill that can be cultivated within meditation, but what is it exactly and how does it help? In altered traits, Goleman and Davidson, look at attention through the lens of neuroscience to reveal that attention is too gross a term.
Attention, generally speaking, covers a wide range of skills.
Selective Attention
The ability to choose what we pay attention to. This is one of the most fundamental skills of attention, trained by meditation, which is getting better at choosing what we are focused on and ignoring all else. A good example is reading a book in a noisy airport. The stronger we are at selective attention, the better we are able to focus on a particular task regardless of distractions.
Sustained Attention
The ability to stay vigilant or maintain awareness without habituating (i.e. diminish awareness, going into auto-pilot). This one is extremely interesting especially because so much of our brain is wired to put things into auto-pilot once we get good at them.
An example is a regular or routine walk we might take from our home to the gym. In that walk, you might shift into autopilot as a result of having done it so often - what that feels like is we get lost in thought and almost "wake up" when we're at the place we wanted to arrive at.
When that happens we've gone into autopilot and we probably did not notice the trees on our way over, the noises from the cars one street over, or how we felt while walking.
Heightened vigilance looks like sustained awareness - i.e. we fall into auto-pilot less frequently, see, hear, and experience more, more often.
Cognitive Control
The ability to focus on an activity or stimulus over a long period of time. It's what makes it possible for us to focus on an activity as long as it takes to finish, regardless of distractions.
Cognitive control can include things like getting through your to-do list, accomplishing what you set out to do in a meeting you scheduled or finishing your workout.
Not only does cognitive control strengthen our ability to "set our minds to doing something" and actually finish, but it also improves working memory. Turns out our ability to transfer things from short-term to long-term memory is really dependent on strengthening our cognitive control.
Meta Awareness
Meta awareness is the ability to pay attention to the movements of the mind. This lets us notice thoughts, emotions, and feelings without being swept away or getting caught up in them.
For example, if you have ever had your anxiety shoot up because you start to get really worried about a potential problem you may face later in the week, meta-awareness is the ability to see those emotions, thoughts, and feelings come up without getting "caught up in them".
The result is you notice what is happening in your mind more often, which offers us a crucial ability - to choose what we do next. One thing is to feel anxious, another thing is to be aware that you feel anxious.
Meta-awareness is a skill that underpins a huge range of things that make us effective in the world. Everything from learning to finishing your to-do list, to realizing you've had an amazing insight can be improved through stronger meta-awareness.
Can Attention Be Trained?
Be where you are; otherwise you will miss your life - Buddha
The short answer is yes and one of the methods is meditation. The problem is that meditation represents a vast range of practices and different approaches strengthen different skills.
It's like saying working out helps you be more fit, but when you get more specific you realize that yoga will train one set of muscles and lifting weights another set of muscles entirely.
Given attention is a key component of any form of meditation, most meditation methods will develop these different skills (selective attention, sustained attention, cognitive control, and meta-awareness).
It’s worth noting though that the method influences the result when picking your particular brand of meditation.
State vs. Lasting Trait: How Does Training Attention Change Your Brain?
If you meditate earnestly, through spiritual disciplines you can make an island for yourself that no flood can overwhelm.” - Buddha
One of the big questions this book aims to answer is can meditation or mindfulness practices fundamentally alter traits (i.e. create permanent changes in our biology and biochemistry). They explore that by studying meditators across a wide skill range to see if they can find evidence of lasting changes to the brain that are driven by meditation.
The answer is yes, meditation fundamentally alters certain traits. Additionally, the more you practice meditation the more certain benefits become lasting traits and fundamentally change the circuitry in your brain (i.e. big difference between 1,000 lifetime hours and 50,000 lifetime hours of meditation).
Lastly, expert guidance (working with teachers) and intensive practice (meditation retreats) play crucial roles in accelerating our learning curve.
So how does the attention circuitry in our brain get rewired as we meditate?
The Default Mode Network - We Spend A Lot Of Time Ruminating
Interestingly, the brain makes up only about 2% of the body’s mass, but it burns about 20% of the body’s metabolic energy, even when we’re doing nothing. The reason for that is when we’re not focused on anything specific, the brain’s default mode network—the node connecting the prefrontal cortex to the limbic system (the part of the brain involved in our emotional and behavioral responses) —becomes highly active.
The DMN weaves together thoughts, emotions, hopes, and dreams into a cohesive self-narrative - i.e. it's the thing that kicks into hyperdrive and brings on rumination and the wandering mind. When you find yourself "sitting lost in thought" or getting caught up in fears about what's going to happen in a week, that is your DMN at work.
Meditation quiets the DMN processes, training us to notice when our mind wanders and bring it back into focus. By doing that repeatedly, researchers find that we strengthen the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the default mode, and that is one of the ways our brain changes to quiet down the self-obsessed mind.
Additionally, as we deepen our practice the DMN lights up less frequently and appears to be less active, consistent with reports we hear from practitioners that their sense of self loosens.
What's The Point of All This Anyway
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.” - Buddha
Life races by in the blink of an eye and we miss so much of it, trapped in rumination. Practicing and strengthening attention is possible and evidenced by momentary changes in how our brain acts all the way to fundamentally altering the wiring of our brain as we deepen our practice and engage in it more consistently.
The net effect of this is not only do we improve certain cognitive skills such as selective attention, sustained attention, cognitive control, and meta-awareness, we also just feel better.
We feel better because we spend less time ruminating and less time trapped in thoughts. We spend more time in the here and now. And we sit a little more loosely to some of the random noise - thoughts, feelings, emotions - our mind generates.
This results in a lightness of being that Buddhism has long touted as an ideal.
I for one, think it’s a trait worth strengthening, and the spillover effects are much broader than us feeling better. I think it’s a fundamental component of creating a more compassionate and connected world.
Join Me In Deepening Your Meditation Practice
I've recently joined a group meditation program, led by expert meditators and co-founded by Jack Kornfield. It's 90 minutes of expert-led meditation once per week and if you're interested you should check it out here!
Until next time,
Alvaro
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