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Monday, June 4, 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
2
Rapt : attention and the focused life / Winifred Gallagher.
p. cm.
“My experience is
what I agree to attend to.”
—WILLIAM JAMES
INTRODUCTION:
Choosing the Focused Life
We’re all amateur
psychologists who run private experiments on how best to live.
Some of us specialize in relationships and mostly explore
bonding. Others concentrate on
work and test ways to be more productive and creative. Still
others look to philosophy or
religion and investigate the big picture: the ultimate way
things are. Five years ago, a
common-enough crisis plunged me into a study of the nature
of experience. More
important, this experiment led me to cutting-edge scientific
research and a psychological
version of what physicists trying to explain the universe
call a “grand unified theory” or
“theory of everything”: your life—who you are, what you
think, feel, and do, what you
love—is the sum of what you focus on.
That your experience
largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects
that you choose to pay attention to or ignore is not an
imaginative notion, but a
physiological fact. When you focus on a STOP sign or a
sonnet, a waft of perfume or a
stock-market tip, your brain registers that “target,” which
enables it to affect your
behavior. In contrast, the things that you don’t attend to
in a sense don’t exist, at least for
you. All day long, you are selectively paying attention to
something, and much more
often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this
process to good effect. Indeed,
your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key
to controlling your experience
and, ultimately, your well-being.
Attention is
commonly understood as “the concentration of the mental powers” or
“the direction or application of the mind to any object of
sense or thought.” Recently,
however, a rare convergence of insights from both
neuroscience and psychology suggests
a paradigm shift in how to think about this cranial laser
and its role in behavior: thoughts,
feelings, and actions. Like fingers pointing to the moon,
other diverse disciplines from
anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family
counseling, similarly suggest
that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua
non of the good life and the key
to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from
mood to productivity to
relationships.
If you could look
backward at your years thus far, you’d see that your life has
been fashioned from what you’ve paid attention to and what
you haven’t. You’d observe
that of the myriad sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings
that you could have focused
on, you selected a relative few, which became what you’ve
confidently called “reality.”
You’d also be struck by the fact that if you had paid
attention to other things, your reality
and your life would be very different.
Attention has
created the experience and, significantly, the self stored in your
memory, but looking ahead, what you focus on from this
moment will create the life and
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person yet to be. Since Sigmund Freud, psychology has mostly
examined our pasts to
explain and improve our lives. If you think in terms of the
present and future instead, you
might encounter an intuition lurking in the back of your
mind, as it was in mine: if you
could just stay focused on the right things, your life would
stop feeling like a reaction to
stuff that happens to you and become something that you
create: not a series of accidents,
but a work of art. MY INTEREST IN attention goes back to childhood,
when I ran the
usual experiments on its effects on behavior. I saw that by
focusing on one thing, you
could ignore another. If you concentrated on some enjoyable
activity, you could make
time simultaneously race and stand still. Staying focused on
a goal over time might not
guarantee you’d achieve it but was a crucial step in that
direction.
In midlife, an
attention experiment of a different magnitude set me on the path
that led to this book. Walking away from the hospital after
the biopsy from hell—not just
cancer, but a particularly nasty, fairly advanced kind—I had
an intuition of a highly
unusual blue-white clarity. This disease wanted to
monopolize my attention, but as much
as possible, I would focus on my life instead.
As Samuel Johnson
observed, the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates
the mind. Right from the start, my attention experiment went
well. Through many months
of chemo, surgery, more chemo, and daily radiation, I mostly
stayed focused on taking
care of business in the present—suddenly all I could count
on—and on the things that
matter most and make me feel best: big ones like my family
and friends, spiritual life, and
work, and smaller ones like movies, walks, and a 6:30 p.m.
martini. As a result, I spent
very little time and energy on the past or future or on the
suddenly very many things that
seemed unimportant or negative. I began to relish corny
admonitions to “Have a good
day!” and my husband started referring to our house as
“Harmonia.”
That’s not to say
that cancer was the proverbial “best thing that ever happened to
me,” or that I’m glad I had it: it wasn’t, and I’m not. Nor
was my focusing strategy 100
percent effective 24/7. There are moments in life—when
someone hands you a pink slip,
perhaps, or can’t find your “good” chemo vein—when you just
can’t immediately shift
your attention to what to have for dinner, much less to the
music of the spheres. Then too,
stimuli that you don’t consciously focus on, such as a
scowling face in a crowd or an
unpleasant noise, can sometimes sneak into your brain and
influence your behavior, albeit
weakly.
Nevertheless,
throughout a long, grueling ordeal, I cleaved to the principle that
your life is the creation of what you focus on—and what you
don’t. Whenever possible, I
looked toward whatever seemed meaningful, productive, or
energizing and away from
the destructive, or dispiriting. I found that I could pretty
much carry on with business as
usual and stay in pretty good spirits, too. No doubt partly
because I was really present in
the moments we shared, kind people appeared to enjoy my
seemingly sepulchral,
bald-headed company. Although that year was not my easiest,
neither was it the hardest.
Certainly, it was my most focused.
A psychological
theory—your life consists of what you focus on—is one thing in
your mind or on paper, and something else again when you
test-drive it over rough
terrain. I was impressed enough to start thinking seriously
about attention not just
personally but also professionally, as someone who writes
about behavior. I began with
some questions:
What is attention,
exactly? What happens in your brain when you focus on
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something? Does the same process apply to thoughts and
feelings as to sights and
sounds? How does your characteristic way of focusing affect
who you are? Why do
certain things “grab” your attention? How come bad stuff,
like the site of a car crash or an
overheard insult, is more riveting than good stuff, like
pretty scenery or a direct
compliment? Is the difference between common glitches such
as mind-wandering and
serious problems such as ADHD one of quality or quantity?
How do you “pay attention”
to something over long periods of time, as you do to your
career or health?
After some reporting
in pursuit of answers, I learned that attention is now a hot
subject in both neuroscientific and behavioral research,
which increasingly reveals its
importance to functions from the simplest learning to Homo
sapiens’ distinctive search
for meaning. I found that my small-scale experiment simply
illustrates what a tremendous
amount of eclectic science proves: you cannot always be
happy, but you can almost
always be focused, which is the next best thing. As the poet
says in Beowulf, “Every life
has more than enough sadness and more than enough joy.” By
skillfully managing your
attention, you’re able to experience both in a balanced way
and stay oriented in a
positive, productive direction. John Milton might have been
thinking of the power of
focus when he wrote: “The mind is its own place, and in
itself / Can make a heav’n of
hell, a hell of heav’n.”
THEY LACKED THE
tools to explore it fully, but even back in the nineteenth
century, scientists, including Freud, were intrigued by
attention. The human brain was
still a mysterious “black box” that couldn’t be studied
directly in an ethical way, so their
insights were largely descriptive and limited to inferences
from brain-injured patients and
observations of their own and others’ behavior. The formal
“discovery” of attention is
often credited to the German physician Wilhelm Wundt, but
William James (1842-1910),
his great contemporary and fellow founder of psychology,
remains its philosopher king.
Just as modern
cognitive psychology is a response to the recent revolutions in
communications and information, the behavioral science of
James’s era was shaped by its
important cultural developments, including the theory of
evolution and the growing
conflict between reason and religion. A philosopher before
he became a psychologist,
James broke with the rationalism of the influential Germans
Immanuel Kant and Georg
Hegel to become a “pragmatist,” who rejected abstract
verities that conflict with the
individual’s own “feeling of reality” and experience of the
way things are. Thus, he
accepted evolution but not the implication that nature
rigidly determines your behavior,
making you a ghastly biological robot. As he wrote, “The
whole sting and excitement of
our voluntary life depends on our sense that in it things
are really being decided from one
moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off
of a chain that was forged
innumerable ages ago.”
Attention is woven
into the warp and woof of James’s defense of your freedom,
individuality, and ability to create your own unique
experience. Because your mind is
profoundly shaped by what it imposes on itself, he argued,
where you choose to focus it
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is vitally important. This conviction underlies many of his
best maxims, such as “The
greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one
thought over another.”
In his master work
The Principles of Psychology (1890), James offered one of the
earliest scientific definitions of attention, which is still
admired for both substance and
style. With an opening flourish as bold as it is
disingenuous, he wrote, “Everyone knows
what attention is. It is the taking possession of the mind,
in clear and vivid form, of one
out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or
trains of thought.
Focalisation, concentration, of consciousness are of its
essence. It implies a withdrawal
from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”
On a certain level,
everyone does know what attention is. We can even feel it in
our bones. The legendary mime Marcel Marceau specialized in
wordlessly conveying the
profound concentration of an athlete or artist poised for
action. When the drill sergeant
barks, “Atten-hut!” soldiers instantly snap into the alert,
erect position that conveys
intense focus. For me, the word evokes what I think of as
the “cobra feeling”: an almost
muscular albeit mental bearing-down on a subject or object,
which you rise above, hood
flaring to block distractions, and hold steady in your
unblinking focus. Despite this kind
of gut-level understanding, however, until recently,
scientists agreed with a
turn-of-the-twentieth-century predecessor who compared the
investigation of attention to
“the discovery of a hornet’s nest: the first touch brought
out a whole swarm of insistent
problems.”
The first modern
efforts to explore that hornet’s nest began a half-century after
James, when World War II made attention a life-or-death
matter for the radar operators
and combat pilots who had to monitor multiple signals on
screens and in cockpits.
(Anyone who has tried to drive a car in fast-moving heavy
traffic while talking on a cell
phone knows something of the challenge.) Still unable to
penetrate the black box,
psychologists kept trying to probe attention from the
outside in. In a typical experiment,
subjects wearing headphones that played different words into
the right and left ear were
told to listen to just one side; then, to see what had
“gotten through” anyway, they were
tested on material from both sources.
In the 1950s,
researchers investigated attention in peacetime situations, such as
the settings that created the “cocktail party effect.” At a
noisy gathering, they wondered,
how do you screen out the din and attend to your companion’s
voice? When someone in a
nearby cluster mentions you, why do your ears prick up, even
though you hadn’t been
listening to their chatter? Some theories stressed the
stimulus’s physical characteristics,
such as a voice’s volume or proximity, others its content,
such as your own name or a
sexy remark, and still others both.
Despite accumulating
research, however, well into the twentieth century,
psychologists were hard pressed to improve on James’s
definition of attention. Their
efforts were so vague and various—“the will to see,”
“psychic energy,” “the mental
condition or physiological precondition of certain
experiences”—that some feared the
field was destined to remain “a hodgepodge.”
By the 1960s,
however, neuroscience began to transform the study of behavior in
general and attention in particular with new technology that
revealed much more of what
goes on inside the black box. At the National Institutes of
Health, researchers recorded
electrical signals from the brains of primates as they
performed focusing tasks. Over the
past twenty years, this process has been accelerated by
increasingly sophisticated tools,
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such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and
magnetoencephalography
(MEG), that allow scientists to see parts of the brain
activate and appear to light up and
turn different colors when people think, feel, and act.
Researchers now have
a good grasp of the brain’s sensory, perceptual, and motor
processes, but their understanding of the high-flying mental
acrobatics of emotion and
cognition is less well developed. Indeed, the “mind/brain
problem” complicates all efforts
to comprehend how a neurological event, such as an
electrochemical shift, gets translated
into a human experience, such as a sudden insight or a rush
of desire. Nevertheless, one
picture is indeed worth a thousand words, and neuroscience’s
inside-out physiological
facts now constrain psychology’s hitherto outside-in
theories about behavior.
Where attention is
concerned, most experiments involve vision and hearing,
because those systems are most amenable to measurement and
study. There’s no single,
widely accepted way to measure attention, which involves
lots of mental processes, but
many tests can measure the efficiency of its different
aspects by analyzing how you
perform various tasks. In a “visual search” experiment, for
example, scientists measure
how long it takes you to find a particular target among
distractions. The basic insights
derived from these studies generally apply to the other
senses as well as to focusing on
thoughts and feelings.
Research now
suggests that like consciousness or mind, attention is a term for a
complex neurological and behavioral business that seems like
more than the sum of its
parts. There’s no tidy “attention center” in the brain.
Instead, an ensemble of alerting,
orienting, and executive networks collaborate to attune you
to what’s going on in your
inner or outer world in a coherent way that points you
toward an appropriate response.
The brain’s parietal and frontal cortexes are especially
important to this process, but the
sensory systems and many other structures are also involved;
indeed, every neuron, or
nerve cell, shows some sort of attentional modulation.
Neuroscience’s truly
groundbreaking insight into attention is the discovery that its
basic mechanism is a process of selection. This two-part
neurological sorting operation
allows you to focus by enhancing the most compelling, or
“salient,” physical object or
“high-value” mental subject in your ken and suppressing the
rest. Outside an elite
scientific circle, however, this finding’s implications for
everyday life have been
stunningly unremarked.
As the expression
paying attention suggests, when you focus, you’re spending
limited cognitive currency that should be wisely invested,
because the stakes are high. At
any one moment, your world contains too much information,
whether objects, subjects, or
both, for your brain to “represent,” or depict clearly for
you. Your attentional system
selects a certain chunk of what’s there, which gets valuable
cerebral real estate and,
therefore, the chance to affect your behavior. Moreover,
this thin slice of life becomes
part of your reality, and the rest is consigned to the
shadows or oblivion.
Attention’s
selective nature confers tremendous benefits, chief of which is
enabling you to comprehend what would otherwise be chaos.
You couldn’t take in the
totality of your own experience, even for a moment, much
less the whole world. Whether
it’s noise on the street, ideas at the office, or feelings in
a relationship, you’re potentially
bombarded with stimuli vying for your attention. New
electronic information and
communications technology continually add to the overload.
By helping you to focus on
some things and filter out others, attention distills the
universe into your universe.
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Along with
performing the Apollonian task of organizing your world, attention
enables you to have the kind of Dionysian experience
beautifully described by the
old-fashioned term “rapt”—completely absorbed, engrossed,
fascinated, perhaps even
“carried away”—that underlies life’s deepest pleasures, from
the scholar’s study to the
carpenter’s craft to the lover’s obsession. Some individuals
slip into it more readily, but
research increasingly shows that with some reflection,
experimentation, and practice, all
of us can cultivate this profoundly attentive state and
experience it more often. Paying
rapt attention, whether to a trout stream or a novel, a
do-it-yourself project or a prayer,
increases your capacity for concentration, expands your
inner boundaries, and lifts your
spirits, but more important, it simply makes you feel that
life is worth living.
Your ability to
screen and select your experience, create order from chaos, and
delight in fascination are attention’s great benefits, but
they exact a price. That little piece
of reality that you tune in on is literally and figuratively
far sketchier and more subjective
than you assume. This underappreciated discovery has
particularly important implications
for your relationships and other social exchanges. Because
different people focus on
different things—even different aspects of the same thing—to
say that someone else
“lives in a different world” is to speak the plain truth.
STAYING FOCUSED IS
an excellent strategy for well-being but not necessarily
an easy one at first. Just grasping attention’s role in
determining your experience can be a
challenge, because it requires seeing the forest instead of
the trees. As psychology
increasingly investigates what makes people feel and
function well rather than poorly, it’s
ever more clear that the skillful management of attention is
the first step toward any
behavioral change and covers most self-improvement
approaches like a vast umbrella.
Then too, the
mastery of focus is a skill, which like any other takes discipline and
effort to develop. Considering attention’s importance, it’s
surprising that until recently,
science has come up with few strategies to improve it. Since
the Arab world first
discovered coffee’s bracing effects, pharmacology has
produced attention-boosting
stimulants such as Ritalin and its variations and newer
agents such as modafinil, but all
have side effects and the potential to be abused. Where
behavioral approaches are
concerned, James suggested various tricks, such as taking a
fresh perspective on your
target or elaborating on its various aspects. Some of his
modern heirs are experimenting
with computerized workouts to improve focusing ability.
However, most new strategies
have a “back to the future” quality derived from their
origin in meditation, secularized
and made amenable to scientific study. These cognitive
regimens can strengthen attention
and improve well-being and are both free and safe, all of
which must appeal to the 75
million baby boomers and their aging children, who are
equally concerned about
maintaining both their mental and their physical health.
The focused life
requires not just a robust capacity for paying attention but also
the discerning choice of targets that will invite the best
possible experience. Much is
made of the fact that human beings are the only creatures to
know that we must die, but
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we’re also the only ones to know that we must find something
engaging to focus on in
order to pass the time—increasingly, a lot of time. As Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who was
William James’s godfather, put it, “To fill the hour—that is
happiness.”
Deciding what to pay
attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a
lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your
quality of life largely depends on
how you handle it. Moses got his focus from God, and Picasso
from his nearly
supernatural creativity. We have other motivations and
gifts, and most of us have to go
through a more complicated process to find the right things
to focus on. We must resist
the temptation to drift along, reacting to whatever happens
to us next, and deliberately
select targets, from activities to relationships, that are
worthy of our finite supplies of
time and attention.
Some decisions about
what to focus on, such as which profession to pursue or
person to live with, automatically receive serious
attention. Other choices may be less
obvious but are just as important to the tenor of your daily
experience: deciding to
concentrate on your hopes rather than your fears; to attend
to the present instead of the
past; to appreciate that just because something upsetting
happens, you don’t have to
fixate on it. Still other targets may seem inconsequential:
focusing on a book or guitar
instead of a rerun; a chat instead of an e-mail; an apple
instead of a doughnut. Yet the
difference between “passing the time” and “time well spent”
depends on making smart
decisions about what to attend to in matters large and
small, then doing so as if your life
depended on it. As far as its quality is concerned, it does.
Abundant research
shows that most of the rich and famous, brainy and beautiful
are little or no happier than individuals of ordinary means
and gifts, because no matter
who you are, your joie de vivre mostly derives from paying
attention to someone or
something that interests you. Even in the hell of the Nazi
death camps, many inmates
avoided depression because they took charge of and
concentrated on the one thing that
was left to them: their inner experience. The rates of
psychological problems as well as
mortality among people in extreme situations such as
shipwrecks and plane crashes in
remote areas are surprisingly low—often lower than in normal
settings. Vicissitudes
notwithstanding, these people are not sitting around
brooding about the past or killing
time by channel surfing but are living the focused life.
It’s not a
coincidence that the term distracted once referred not just to a loss or
dilution of attention but also to confusion, mental
imbalance, and even madness. It’s all
too easy to spend much of your life in such an unfocused,
mixed-up condition, rushing
toward the chimera of a better time and place to tune in
and, well, be alive. It’s the
fashion to blame the Internet and computers, cell phones and
cable TV for this diffused,
fragmented state of mind, but our seductive machines are not
at fault. The real problem is
that we don’t appreciate our own ability to use attention to
select and create truly
satisfying experience. Instead of exercising this potential,
we too often take the lazy way
out, settle for less, and squander our mental money and
precious time on whatever
captures our awareness willy-nilly, no matter how
disappointing the consequences.
Where the quality of
your life is concerned, focus is not everything, but it is a
great deal. The question is: If all the world’s a stage, as
Shakespeare puts it, where do you
shine the spotlight of your attention?
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THIS BOOK FOLLOWS a
loose time line of paying attention over fractions of
seconds to moments, days, weeks, months, years, and even a
whole life. First, we’ll look
at some basic operating principles that apply whenever you
become aware of something
in your world—a changing traffic signal, a sudden stab of
jealousy—focus on it, and
prepare to respond. Next, we’ll explore the two-way
relationship between how you feel
and what you attend to. We’ll consider different styles of
paying attention, which are as
unique as fingerprints, and the evidence that just as who
you are affects how you focus,
what you focus on affects who you are. Then we’ll consider
attention’s role in major
aspects of life, including learning, memory, emotion,
relationships, work,
decision-making, and creativity. After looking at some
normal attentional glitches and
more serious problems, we’ll take the long view and examine
the role of focus in
motivation, health, and the quest for life’s meaning.
Five years of
reporting on attention have confirmed some home truths. “The idle
mind is the devil’s workshop” conveys the fact that when you
lose focus, your mind tends
to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of
what’s right, putting you in a bad
frame of mind. As “look for the silver lining” suggests,
focusing on the productive
aspects of difficult situations does indeed lead to a more
satisfying experience.
Common wisdom aside,
attention research is full of surprises. Focusing on upbeat
emotions such as hope and kindness literally, not just
figuratively, expands your world,
just as dwelling on negative feelings shrinks it. Contrary
to the messages from our wired,
workaholic culture, multitasking is a myth. Not just
individuals but also cultures have
characteristic ways of attending that create different
realities. The reason you can’t
remember the name of the person you just met isn’t impending
Alzheimer’s, but because
you didn’t pay attention to it in the first place. Even very
smart people can make dumb
decisions about important matters if they focus on the wrong
things. Despite its
prevalence, shockingly little is known about
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Perhaps the most
important things I’ve learned are that it shouldn’t take a crisis to
show you that your life is the sum total of what you focus
on or to make you question the
notion that your well-being depends on what happens to
happen to you. After running
that tough experiment, however, I have a plan for living the
rest of my life. I’ll choose my
targets with care—writing a book or making a stew, visiting
a friend or looking out a
window—then give them my rapt attention. In short, I’ll live
the focused life, because it’s
the best kind there is.
CHAPTER 1
Pay Attention: Your Life
Depends on It
Far more than you
may realize, your experience, your world, and even your self
are the creations of what you focus on. From distressing
sights to soothing sounds,
protean thoughts to roiling emotions, the targets of your
attention are the building blocks
of your life. Sometimes your focus is captured by a
compelling stimulus—a bee sting or a
fender-bender—but much of the time it’s potentially under
your control. Like other forms
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of energy, this mental sort is used most effectively by
those who understand how it
works.
Rapidly developing
neuroscience of which many psychologists still aren’t aware
shows that, as the terms in focus and out of focus suggest,
attention shapes your
experience by selecting and clearly depicting something in
your external or internal
world, leaving the rest in a blur. This two-part
neurophysiological process basically
functions in the same way whether you’re zeroing in on a cat
or a concept, a fragrance or
a feeling, but it’s easier to grasp in the sensory world.
You have only to
walk down a city street or a country lane to notice that the
environment contains approximately a zillion more things,
from traffic and buildings to
flora and fauna, than your three-pound brain can process for
you at any given moment.
Your ability to focus on just a few of those things and
screen out the rest allows you to
experience a more or less orderly world. (Indeed, the
terrifying “bad trips” associated
with large doses of LSD are partly attributed to the drug’s
release of the brain’s
attentional brakes, which floods the user with way, way too
much information.) By
filtering your experience, however, attention also assembles
a reality that’s far more
partial and individual than you think.
Let’s say that you
decide to take a stroll in New York City’s Central Park.
Surprisingly, this oasis of green in a desert of concrete is
one of America’s ten best spots
for bird-watching. Within minutes of your arrival, a
splendid red cardinal zooms into a
crowd of less charismatic wrens and sparrows pecking at the
ground and immediately
“grabs your attention.”
This common
expression captures the essence of one of the two basic ways of
focusing that enable you to tune in on what is most
interesting in your world: involuntary
“bottom-up” attention. This passive process is not driven by
you, but by whatever thing
in your environment is most salient, or obviously
compelling, such as that arresting
scarlet cardinal.
Thanks to evolution,
bottom-up attention has hard-wired you to zoom in on
brightly colored flowers, startle at a snake’s hiss, wrinkle
your nose at the smell of
spoiled meat, and otherwise detect and react to things that
could threaten or advance your
survival. Whether it concerns a crouching predator to dodge
or a tasty bit of prey to stalk,
the potentially life-or-death information that attracts your
involuntary focus is likelier to
come from something new or different in your environment than
from something old and
familiar. That’s why you, like your prehistoric ancestors,
are particularly drawn to
“novel” stimuli. Because you’re especially attuned to new
things that suggest danger or
reward, you’ll instantly notice the angry growl that warns
you to fight or flee and the
honking that signals a possible dinner on the wing.
Bottom-up attention
automatically keeps you in touch with what’s going on in the
world, but this great benefit comes with a drawback,
particularly for postindustrial folk
who live in metropolitan areas and work at desks rather than
on the savannah: lots of
fruitless, unwelcome distractions. Maybe you want to focus
on your book or computer
instead of the fly that keeps landing on your arm or that
ambulance’s siren, but just like
your evolutionary forebears, you’re stuck with attending to
those insistent stimuli.
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IF BOTTOM-UP
ATTENTION asks, “What’s the obvious thing to home in on
here?” top-down attention asks, “What do you want to
concentrate on?” Because this
active, voluntary form of focusing takes effort, the harder
you concentrate, the better
you’ll attend, but the longer you persist, the likelier
you’ll fade. If you were to spend a
few hours identifying Central Park’s birds in May, when
perhaps eighty species flit
through the trees, you’d eventually get glassy-eyed and
woolly-brained and have to stop
for a rest.
Like bottom-up
attention, the top-down sort has advanced our species, particularly
by enabling us to choose to pursue difficult goals, such as
nurturing the young for
extended periods or building and operating cities. Where the
individual is concerned, this
deliberate process is the key to designing your daily
experience, because it lets you
decide what to focus on and what to suppress.
Many extraordinary
achievers are distinguished by their ability to pay rapt
attention. David Lykken, the University of Minnesota’s late,
great personality
psychologist, observed that these individuals have vast
stores of “mental energy,” which
he defined as the capacity “to focus attention, to shut out
distractions, to persist in search
of a solution” for a challenging problem over long periods
without tiring. Among his
exemplars is the slightly built, one-eyed, one-armed
Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who
helped save Britain from Napoleon. In one diary entry, he
observed: “I have been 5
nights without sleep (at work) and never felt an
inconvenience.” Another such attentional
Olympian was the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. After a
colleague idly remarked
that he had just ridden in a taxi identified as #1729, which
seemed like dull digits, the
genius immediately took exception: “No, it is a very
interesting number. It is the smallest
number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different
ways.” His peers attributed
such mind-boggling feats to Ramanujan’s way of regarding
numbers as “friends” and
focusing on them “all the time.”
In the summer of
2008, after winning his fourth U.S. Open tournament despite a
severe, painful knee injury, the golfer Tiger Woods’s
imperturbable top-down focus on
his game brought him near godlike status in our increasingly
distractible culture.
(According to his father, by the age of six months, little
Tiger could settle into his
bouncy-chair and focus on watching golf for two hours.) Even
the New York Times’s
psychologically savvy political columnist David Brooks took
a break from election-year
commentary to enthuse about the hero’s mental energy: “In a
period that has brought us
instant messaging, multitasking, wireless distractions and
attention deficit disorder,
Woods has become the exemplar of mental discipline.” Like
all great athletes, he has
superb physical skills, but as Brooks points out, “It is his
ability to enter the cocoon of
concentration that is written about and admired most.”
Attention à la Tiger
offers the great advantage of sharpening your focus on your
target, but the nearest and dearest of such top-down champs
can attest to its drawback:
shrinking your larger experience. Perhaps reflecting on his
own home life and that of his
extended family—the novelist Henry was his brother—William
James acknowledges that
a Nelson, Ramanujan, or Woods more than likely “breaks his
engagements, leaves his
letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly,
because he is powerless to
14
turn his attention down and back from those more interesting
trains of imagery with
which his genius constantly occupies his mind.”
An amusing
experiment on “change blindness” illustrates the stunning intensity of
top-down focus. First, some inventive psychologists filmed
volunteers passing a
basketball back and forth in a gym; at a certain point, a
large “gorilla” walked by the
group and even stopped to beat its chest. Next, the
researchers showed their movie to an
audience that had simply been instructed to track the ball’s
movement by counting the
number of passes made. Some were told to attend to the team
wearing white shirts and
others to the black shirts.
So powerful is
deliberate, voluntary attention that half of the participants didn’t
even notice the appearance of the outrageous ape. Moreover,
viewers who tracked the
white shirts were much likelier to miss the black gorilla.
Many other studies of change
blindness confirm that once you’re familiar with a
situation, your top-down conviction
that you know what’s going on can cause you to miss even
dramatic alterations to it, such
as the substitution of a horse’s head for a human one. It’s
hard to overstate the
implications for daily life, from finding fresh solutions to
problems at work to keeping
the zest in marriage.
ALL DAY LONG, your
reality develops from the shifting targets of your
automatic and deliberate attention. As you wander through
Central Park, a crow’s loud,
insistent call has the most bottom-up salience. However,
those raucous squawks become
mere background noise when you choose to tune in to an
operatic cluster of Hollywood
finches.
Like your either/or,
bottom-up visual focus on the glamorous cardinal, which
turned its less-colorful peers into dull little blobs, your
top-down auditory fix on the
melodic finches and suppression of the crow illustrates
attention’s fundamental
mechanism: the enhancement of one target, which wins nice,
clear representation, or
depiction, in your brain, and the suppression of the
also-rans, which are consigned to
negligible status, if not oblivion. A little knowledge about
this neurological “biased
competition,” which was discovered by the neuroscientists
John Duncan of Cambridge
University and Robert Desimone of MIT, underscores the
importance of your choices
about what to attend to in constructing your daily
experience.
Near Central Park’s
Strawberry Fields, some bird lovers have scattered lots of
seed in a clearing, creating an avian mosh pit that’s a
natural laboratory for
experimenting with biased competition. Because we assume
that “seeing is believing”
and because sight lends itself to measurement, which is
science’s gold standard, research
on vision provides the clearest demonstration of what
happens in your brain when you
focus on a target and of how selective your ability to
process reality actually is.
According to the
Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Steve Yantis, who researches
attention and vision, when you first come upon the feeding
area and its array of winged
life-forms, you glance randomly at the bustling tableau,
which allows passive,
15
stimulus-driven bottom-up attention to take over. Your eye
gathers some surprisingly
scanty information about the scene—mostly its light
intensities, edges, and color—which
is transmitted to your brain’s visual-processing regions,
where a huge population of
neurons can portray colors, shapes, sizes, and other
features.
Left to their own
bottom-up devices, these neurons will be biased toward the
scene’s most salient object, which is that big blue jay,
whose sharp edges and bright color
they “like” more than, say, the wrens’ and sparrows’ drab
hues and pouchlike little forms.
The nerve cells translate your eyes’ incoming information
into an explicit representation
that’s supported by your previous knowledge of the world—in
this case, regarding
ornithology—and bingo! The eye-popping jay wins the
competition for the kind of strong
brain representation that makes you go, “Some bird!”
Things change
upstairs when you decide to use active, goal-oriented top-down
attention to scan the busy feeding area for a particular
target, such as a little woodpecker
called the yellow-bellied sapsucker. The mere anticipation
of spotting this not-so-rara
avis immediately intensifies your attentional capacity for
doing so. If you’re told to
concentrate on a spot where something will soon appear,
simply having this deliberate
objective ramps up activity in your visual cortex, which
will further increase when the
object finally manifests. In other words, just thinking
about paying attention affects your
brain, revving it up for the actual experience.
Instantly, your
top-down objective biases the competition for your attention in
favor of any birds that might be sapsuckers. In a
still-mysterious process, the activity
level of many nerve cells that were depicting the blue jay
changes in a way that both
suppresses it and other probable losers, like robins and
doves, and enhances possible
winners, such as wood-peckers and birds with black-and-white
mottling, red spots, or
lemony wings. Thus stacked, the battle for your focus
ensues, ending when you locate
your target as if it were spotlighted amid its horde of
rivals. In this “zero-sum game,”
says Yantis, the sapsucker’s winnings equal the jay’s
losses: “Your neuron populations
can represent pretty much anything, but not everything at
once. You have to choose—or
they do.”
The big lesson from
this little experiment is that depending on how the
competition for your attention is biased, whether by you or
your neurons, you can have
very different experiences of the same scene. All day long,
you focus on what seems
most important—the blue jay and the sapsucker—and suppress
what doesn’t, such as the
drab little grey birds. If you happen to gaze idly at your
backyard, bottom-up attention
makes sure you won’t miss that salient blazing red maple
tree and leaves the rest in a
greenish blur. However, if you peer out with a top-down aim,
such as checking on your
dog, you’ll see Rex but might not even notice the maple.
Of course, vision is
just one of five sensory systems that collaborate with your
attentional networks to construct your physical world. By
way of illustration, Yantis
draws an analogy to a control panel whose dials you can
twiddle as you go from one
activity to another. By turning the volume knob up or down
on smell, say, or by
switching from the touch to the taste circuit, you can tune
in the information you want
and tune out competing stimuli.
“If I ask, ‘What
does your chair’s pressure feel like on your back?’ you’ll
instantly access that information,” says Yantis. “That
tactile input was present all along,
but when you turn up its volume, you permit it to come up to
the level of your
16
awareness.” Similarly, when you drive a car, everything
framed by the windshield is
technically visible. If you become engrossed in the news on
the radio or a conversation
with a passenger, however, you’re unaware of most of that
scenery. As Yantis says,
“You’ve turned down the sight dial and allowed audition to
capture your attention.”
ATTENTION’S
SELECTIVE MECHANISM of biased competition boosts your
efficiency by allowing you to fashion a coherent world, but
it also imposes boundaries on
that construct, making it more idiosyncratic and fragmented
than you assume. For
verification, you have only to note the honest differences
in perspective that surface in
your next disagreement with friends or family. Renowned as a
poetic treatment of
memory, the classic Japanese film Rashomon, which portrays
four characters’ very
different accounts of the same event, is also a documentary
on attention.
You get a chance to
experiment with attention’s subjective, piecemeal dimension
near Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, where a crowd is
gathered around a magician
who’s performing tricks for donations. He’s dressed as an
Edwardian gent in a tuxedo
and top hat, and when he lets his old-fashioned monocle
fall, your gaze follows the
plummeting eyepiece. By creating this bottom-up distraction,
however, the magician can
“make a steal” of a billiard ball from under his jacket. The
trick takes place right in front
of you, yet because it goes unattended, it’s undetected and
as far as you’re concerned,
never happened.
The magician has
many other ways to misdirect your attention and fool you about
the reality of what’s going on. If he looks you in the eye,
chances are that you’ll look
right back at him, allowing him to do whatever he wants with
his hands. To produce
cards from thin air, he could wave his iconic wand above his
head. When your focus
moves up too, he’d pull the cards from his other sleeve,
held low along his thigh, then
bring the wand—and your gaze—back down. In short, magic is
what happens when
you’re paying attention to something else.
As it is in magic,
so it is—at least more often than we like to imagine—in life. To
condense the vast, encyclopedic world down to a
comprehensible pocket edition, your
attentional system, like the magician, focuses you on some
things at the expense of
others. As you continue your stroll, you realize that
although you vividly recall that
top-hatted trickster, with the exception of a woman in a
bright violet jacket who stood
right beside him, you only fuzzily recall the rest of the
scene.
Whether your hazy
processing of the larger setting at Bethesda Fountain even
merits the official label of “attention” is debatable.
However, research shows that
“implicit” information, or material that you don’t
explicitly attend to, can slip into your
brain without quite reaching your conscious awareness yet
weakly affect your memory
and experience. Unlike peers who see a dichotomy between
attended and unattended
things, the Carnegie Mellon neuroscientist Marlene Behrmann
sees more of a continuum.
To describe her nuanced view of how attention works, she
tells a little story about
looking for your keys on your cluttered desk. (She throws in
a nifty trick that you can try
17
at home: as you search for them, hold your eyes still and
“just move your attention
around.”) When you spot the keys, the competition for your
focus would seem to be over,
but to Behrmann, it’s not so simple, because even the losers
in the battle get some points
for just being there.
Like the woman in
the violet jacket beside the magician, the objects that are
closest to the winning keys—perhaps your glasses and cell
phone—get a little “boost” by
virtue of their mere proximity to your top-down goal.
Attention’s spotlight is so powerful
that when you pass your desk later on, you’re likelier to
notice the specs and phone that
benefited from the peripheral glow than you would if you
hadn’t searched for your keys
earlier. Thus, says Behrmann, “it’s not so clear to me that
your life is really constructed
only from the material of attention. There are influences outside
of that penumbra as
well.”
To many other
researchers, however, such implicit influences are too fleeting and
feeble to be called “attention” and muddy the traditional
understanding of the term as a
conscious phenomenon. They argue that stable, goal-directed
selective attention gives the
winner the kind of strong representation that supports
conscious experience in a way that
a loser’s weak representation cannot. In one experiment, for
example, subjects who
focused on a task while researchers flashed images of faces
in the periphery knew the
pictures were there but couldn’t tell much about them, even
their gender.
In short, scientists
agree that stimuli can activate parts of your brain and even
influence your experience without your conscious awareness,
but most won’t dignify a
phenomenon of such weak intensity, duration, and effect with
the term attention. Taking
a stance to be applauded by English majors everywhere, their
position is: “Subconscious
information? Okay. Subconscious attention? No way.”
ATTENTION’S
SELECTIVE NATURE is an important reason why your reality
is quirkier and less complete than you assume, but not the
only one. As the poet John
Ashbery observes, “Calling attention to / Isn’t the same
thing as explaining . . .” Once out
of your cradle, you don’t focus on the world in the
abstract, perceiving things for the first
time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge,
which enriches and helps
define your experience, as well as ensuring its uniqueness.
As you pause at one
of Central Park’s small ponds, an ebullient old birder in
steel-rimmed specs bounds up the trail and gives you an
exciting top-down goal to focus
on. “There’s a woodcock just over the rise, by the little
rill!” he says. “He’s hard to see,
though.” Fortunately, you know just enough about birds to
realize that the man is talking
about a small, shy, brown-speckled bird with an
extraordinarily long bill. Your
attentional apparatus processes his tip in the context of
your existing command of avian
species, and you spot the elusive creature with dispatch.
The efficiency with
which attention integrates new information with previous
knowledge suggests that there’s something like 2001’s HAL or
a medieval homunculus
in your head: a supervisory agent that takes in bits and
pieces of information, analyzes
18
them, then tells you, “That funny little dappled bird over
there is a woodcock.” You have
no need for such a cranial wizard, however. As research on
the “beauty bias” shows, your
attentional system doesn’t just focus you on sensory stimuli
but also helps you to turn
them into a coherent event. You can gauge a stranger’s
attractiveness in as little as one
hundred milliseconds because you don’t process facial
features abstractly, but filtered
through your previous knowledge of comely eyes, noses, and
mouths. Your “Ugh!” or
“Ooh-la-la!” doesn’t just depend on the stranger’s visuals
per se, but on whether they jibe
with the concept of beauty you’ve acquired.
The evolving
understanding of attention’s role in how you learn (acquire
knowledge and skills) and remember (store and retrieve
information) is complicated but
crucial to the management of the focused life. To make a
long story short: if you want to
master and retain certain material, from a bird’s name to
your Speak French Like a Native
tapes, you’d best really pay attention to it in the first
place.
That’s easy enough
to do in simple, leisurely situations, when you can indulge in
the close concentration required for serial “binding,” or
integrating your target’s different
features, such as shape, color, and motion. You focus on
that bird improbably traveling
upside-down on a branch, take in its bill shape, size, call,
and body form, then conclude:
“A white-breasted nuthatch!” Because you took the time to
focus closely on it, the little
creature gets clearly represented and securely stored in your
brain.
After much research
on binding and attention’s interaction with experience, the
Princeton cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman distinguishes
between the slow,
“narrow” attention that you paid to the nuthatch and the
“broad” sort required when you
must rapidly take in a complex new scene, such as the path
that bisects the Central Park
Zoo. As you stride briskly past the seals and sea lions
cavorting in their pool, you blithely
assume you’re taking in the entire milieu. However, your
eyes see sharply and in full
color only a tiny area around your focal point, which
happens to be the shiny black beast
that’s catching a fish tossed by its keeper. Your brain
quickly blends this new sensory
information with your previous knowledge of zoos in general
and seals in particular to
“fill in the blanks.” What you perceive, however, is not a
kind of photograph of the
marine playground but a mental model that your attentional
system has produced for you.
Like narrow
attention, the quick and dirty broad sort has advantages—notably, the
rapidly acquired big picture—and drawbacks, starting with
sketchiness. Just as it binds
lots of stuff into a coherent experience a.s.a.p., an
expansive focus also reduces certain
things to averages. If Treisman showed you a display of
circles of different diameters,
you’d be very good at guessing the average size, but not at
knowing if you’d seen a
particular size—a bias toward the least common denominator
that’s handy in real life.
Were she to ask you to look for and identify “an animal” in
scenes that were shown very
quickly, you’d do so easily but loosely, answering “bird” or
“fish,” rather than “magpie”
or “trout.” If she rapidly flashed colored letters at you,
then asked you what you’d seen,
sometimes you’d get it right—a red O and a green T—but you
might also make an
“illusory conjunction” and perhaps say, with equal
conviction, “a red T.” Attention’s
unpredictable, fractured, subjective aspects incline
Treisman to describe your experience
as being “at one remove from the physical stimuli”: a
collage of objective reality rather
than a blueprint.
19
AFTER CONSIDERING
THE idea that your life is the sum of what you focus on,
Steve Yantis says, “I like that. I like the notion that
attention is the key to awareness, the
essence or center of our mental life as we go through time.
That makes all kinds of
sense.” Where attending to ideas and emotions rather than
sights and sounds is
concerned, he says, “To the degree that you can control what
enters your awareness, you
have to be able to focus on some things, let other things
go, and move on, or your
thoughts can control you.”
Even an allegorical
meander through Central Park illustrates the neurological
basics of how attention helps you to take charge of your
experience in two different ways.
The stimulus-driven bottom-up sort automatically attunes you
to compelling events, and
the deliberate top-down kind lets you direct your focus.
Thus, you can concentrate on
birds as you walk, confident that you’d immediately detect
any information, such as the
smell of food or the rumble of thunder, that signals promise
or peril.
Attention’s
selective, this-or-that nature enables you to create a coherent but also
custom-tailored reality. The things that you focus on, such
as that physically salient blue
jay and psychologically high-value sapsucker, will win turf
in your brain and influence
over your experience, while the losers, like the
greyish-brownish avian hoi polloi, for
your purposes don’t exist. Reinforcing this subjectivity,
your attentional system combines
new information with your previous knowledge to invest what
you focus on with certain
meanings. Thus, you could identify that eremitical woodcock
that most strollers would
have missed.
Most important where
the quality of your life is concerned, this imaginary ramble
shows that by choosing to focus on something specific—birds,
and certain ones at
that—you had a very particular experience in the park. If
you had paid rapt attention to
flora rather than fauna, or to thinking over a personal
problem or chatting with a
companion, your time there would have been very different.
Moreover, by attending to
any of these deliberately selected targets, or even making a
conscious decision to “veg
out” for a spell, you would have had a far better experience
than many of us have much
of the time, captured by whatever flotsam and jetsam happens
to wash up on our mental
shores. In short, to enjoy the kind of experience you want
rather than enduring the kind
that you feel stuck with, you have to take charge of your
attention.
CHAPTER 2
Inside Out: Feelings
Frame Focus
Just as it orders
your experience of the physical world, attention organizes your
ideas and emotions, giving you an inner reality that’s
comprehensible but also limited.
Homo sapiens has evolved to focus not only on howling
coyotes, flickering flames,
sugary tastes, and other salient sensory signals, but also
on compelling thoughts (“Get to
work on time” or “All men are created equal”) and feelings
(“I love you” or “I wish you
were dead”). Moreover, these mental stimuli not only attract
your attention but also affect
how it operates.
20
The inextricability
of thought and emotion is one of contemporary psychology’s
most important discoveries. Until recently, like Western
academe in general, the field
accepted Greek philosophy’s major distinction between
supposedly lofty cognition,
which focuses on reason and absolute truth, and funky
emotion, which centers on
subjective value judgments. Over the past ten years,
however, scientists have discovered
that thinking and feeling often have a chicken-or-the-egg
relationship and are hard to
tease apart. Speculating about the complicated relationship
between focus and the yoked
capacities of emotion and cognition, Leslie Ungerleider, the
National Institute of Mental
Health’s attention expert, says, “You have to prioritize
your options in life, because you
simply can’t do everything. Depending on where you put
value, those are the possibilities
you’ll tend to select. Being a good mother, for example, is
highly valued, so you’ll be
motivated to attend to all the cues that are wrapped up in
that process and to expend
energy on it. You’ll organize your day around that focus and
see other things in that
context.”
It’s the business of
great artists to focus on intangible thoughts and emotions and
give them form, and within moments of entering the Frick
Collection, a jewel box of a
Manhattan museum, you’re drawn to a prime example of that
skill, hanging in an exhibit
of the works of George Stubbs. The eighteenth-century
British painter is famed for his
pictures, really portraits, of horses, which in his day were
considered to be the creatures
closest to man in grandeur, virtue, and beauty. Most of his
noble thoroughbreds appear
remarkably composed in their tranquil manorial settings. Any
feelings they harbor seem
to be along the complacent lines of “How lucky to be me.”
Horse Frightened by
a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different
situation. Stubbs painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate
the nature of the sublime,
which was one of his era’s most popular philosophical
concepts, and its relation to a
timelessly riveting feeling: fear. The magnificent horse
galloping through a vast
wilderness encounters the bottom-up stimulus of a crouching
predator and responds with
a dramatic display of what psychologists mildly call
“negative emotion.” The equine
superstar’s arched neck, dilated eyes, and flared nostrils
are in fact the very picture of
overwhelming dread. The painting’s subject matter reflects
the philosopher Edmund
Burke’s widely circulated Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, which asserts that because “terror”
is unparalleled in commanding
“astonishment,” or total, single-pointed—indeed,
rapt—attention, it is “the ruling
principle of the sublime.”
Just as the horse is
completely focused on the lion, you and the other
museumgoers are totally focused on this pair of animals,
compressed into the painting’s
lower right corner. Like these glorious beasts, you barely
notice the landscape that takes
up three-quarters of the big canvas. As Stubbs and Burke
knew, what psychologists call a
high-value idea or emotion is as compelling as a flash of
lightning or volley of thunder,
and it biases the competition for your attention so
thoroughly that everything else fades
into the background.
21
SCIENTISTS AS WELL
as artists have documented emotion’s influence on
attention, starting with those early “cocktail party”
experiments that showed that despite
the din, you’re apt to overhear your own name or a risqué
remark. If you take an
“attentional blink” test, in which you’re asked to focus on
a certain word in a list, you’ll
spot its first appearance, but probably not the
second—unless it happens to be an
emotional word. The so-called Stroop effect predicts that if
you’re given a list of words
such as red, blue, and green that are respectively printed
in blue, green, and red ink, and
are then asked to name each word’s color, the anxiety caused
by the conflicting input will
interfere with your concentration on the task. The reason
you have such a vivid memory
of your circumstances when you heard that the World Trade
Center had been destroyed is
that the intense emotion you felt riveted your focus and
heightened your perception.
Just as you’re
primed to attend to swarming insects and snarling dogs, you’re
strongly wired to focus on the negative ideas and emotions
that signal threats of a
different kind. Indeed, whenever it’s not otherwise
occupied, your mind is apt to start
scanning for what could be amiss, allowing unpleasant
thoughts along the lines of “I feel
fat” or “Maybe it’s malignant” to grab your attention.
Like physical
discomfort, the psychological sort is meant to focus you on a
possible problem and motivate you to solve it. If you’re
camping in grizzly bear habitat,
for example, a frisson of fear keeps you alert and reminds
you to be careful about food
storage. The desolation or anger you feel at the loss of a
relative, friend, or lover testifies
to our highly social species’ crucial dependence on such
ties for survival.
As Charles Darwin
wrote, “Pain is increased by attending to it.” In August 2007,
the National Public Radio show This American Life aired an
episode called “Break-Up,”
which explored just how hard it can be to stop focusing on
the pain of a lost love. The
British pop star Phil Collins and the writer Starlee Kine
discussed their own melancholic
fixations and the sad lyrics they inspired. “The Three of
Us,” co-written with Joe
McGinty and Julia Greenberg, stresses Kine’s inability to
shift her attention from her
tragic target, despite understanding the effects on her
life. Judging by the responses
posted on the show’s website, many listeners have
experienced a similar dark obsession.
According to
psychology’s “negativity bias theory,” we pay more attention to
unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because
they’re simply more
powerful than the agreeable sort. (This would have come as
no surprise to Freud, who
saw life as a struggle filled with conflict, guilt, grief,
anger, and fear.) An
all-too-abundant body of evidence attests to psychological
pain’s bottom-up grip on your
attention. In a survey of which topics we spend the most
time thinking about, problematic
relationships and troubled projects topped the list. You’ll
work harder to avoid losing
money than you will to gain the same amount. If you hear both
something positive and
something negative about a stranger, you’ll take the
negative view. If something bad
happens, even if something good does too, you’ll still feel
dispirited. You’re likelier to
notice threats than opportunities or signs that all’s well.
The grim testimony
to a dark emotion’s way of grabbing your attention goes on
and on. You’ll spot an angry face in a crowd of cheery
people much faster than a cheery
one in an angry crowd. You’ll process and remember negative
material better than the
positive sort. You’ll spend more time looking at photographs
depicting nasty rather than
nice behavior and react to critical words more slowly and
with more eye blinks—signs of
22
greater cogitation—than to flattering ones. Asked to focus
on printed adjectives that
describe personality, such as sadistic and honest, and then
to name each word’s ink color,
you’ll take longer to answer for words referring to a nasty
trait. You’ll listen longer to
complaints about yourself than to compliments. Even when you
sleep, most of your
dreams are the bad kind. Here’s the icing on the cake: on
your birthday, you’re up to 20
percent likelier to have a heart attack, perhaps prompted by
stress caused by fears of
aging or disappointed hopes.
For the species in
general and the individual in particular, the main advantage of
paying attention to an unhappy emotion is that it attunes
you to potential threat or loss
and pressures you to avoid or relieve the pain by solving
the associated problem. Thus,
your fear of becoming ill induces you to get a flu shot.
Your guilt over a divorce pushes
you to give extra consideration to the children. Your shame
at being fired hardens your
resolve to go out there and get an even better job.
Then too, a
pessimistic, warts-and-all focus is helpful when you’re stuck in a
tough, let’s-get-to-the-bottom-of-this situation. Looking at
the dark side of things can
also confer a certain objectivity; indeed, according to one
school of thought, the
depressed person’s bleak focus on life tends to be more
realistic than the sanguine
person’s upbeat view. After all, it took a grim, paranoid
Richard Nixon to open relations
with Communist China, because no one could suspect him of
too much optimism or
altruism.
Notwithstanding the
flinty advantages, focusing on negative emotions,
particularly when they don’t serve their primary purpose of
promoting problem-solving,
exacts a high cost: you spend a lot of time feeling crummy
even if your life is pretty
good.
CITIZENS OF THE
twenty-first century are likelier than were Stubbs and Burke
to apply such terms as sublime and rapt to romantic passion
than to terror, but the two
feelings are just extreme examples of the kind of intense
emotion, positive as well as
negative, that can command your bottom-up attention. After
some somber contemplation
of Horse Frightened by a Lion, it’s pleasant to adjourn to
one of the Frick’s grandest
rooms, which is devoted to the masterwork of Jean-Honoré
Fragonard, Stubbs’s French
contemporary.
A supreme expression
of amorous delight, The Progress of Love is a series of
eleven painted panels commissioned by Madame du Barry, a
mistress of Louis XV.
Beginning with The Pursuit, the pictures portray stages in
the rapturous romance of a pair
of beautiful, young, dressed-to-the-nines aristocrats.
Perhaps the most captivating is The
Meeting, which shows the moment when the ardent young lover
scales a low wall to
focus on his beloved as she intently searches for him in the
opposite direction.
Just as we evolved
to attend to negative thoughts and emotions that could promote
survival, we’re also drawn to the positive sort that serve
the same purpose in a different
way. If fear and sadness warn us of danger and loss, joy,
curiosity, and contentment
23
invite us to reach out and explore the world. Summarizing
passion’s riveting effect on
attention, the French dramatist Jean Racine compares it to
“Venus entire and whole
fastening on her prey.” Love’s intense, other-directed focus
is essential for a species that
must form lasting bonds to nurture the young for prolonged
periods and cooperate to
prosper.
Where the individual
is concerned, good feelings such as affection, pride at a
promotion, and enthusiasm for a new project are the carrots
on the stick that keep you
moving smartly along life’s up-and-down road. The Bible puts
it this way: “A woman
when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is
come: but as soon as she is
delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish,
for joy that a man is born
into the world.”
Countering the
baleful negativity bias theory, the cheery “positivity offset” thesis
allows that nasty stuff more readily snags your immediate
focus but in the end, you spend
more time attending to nice things. In fact, some research
asserts that most people feel
“mildly pleased” most of the time. According to complementary
studies, you’ll tend to
put a positive spin on even neutral situations, focus hard
on upsets because they’re
relatively rare, and forget unhappy events faster than
pleasant ones. From this upbeat
perspective, barring a profound blow such as losing a loved
one or getting fired, whether
you get a flat tire or a raise today, you’ll soon revert to
feeling pretty good.
Theories about the
power of positive versus negative emotion inspire research
papers with droll titles such as “Bad Is Stronger Than Good”
and “Being Bad Isn’t
Always Good.” Where real life is concerned, however, the
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung
makes an important point that’s often overlooked: “There are
as many nights as days, and
the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course.
Even a happy life cannot be
without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose
its meaning if it were not
balanced by sadness.”
SOME EXCITING NEW
research examines the surprising relationships between
attention and pleasant or painful feelings and suggests how
to exploit those connections
to improve the quality of your life. Based on objective lab
tests that measure vision,
Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
shows that paying attention to positive emotions literally
expands your world, while
focusing on negative feelings shrinks it—a fact that has
important implications for your
daily experience.
In one type of
experiment on emotion’s effect on focus, subjects are first
prompted to entertain good feelings by watching short film
clips that have uplifting
themes. Then they’re told to look at complex, abstract
computerized visual displays.
Compared to control subjects who are in a neutral or
negative emotional state, these
benignly disposed people are far likelier to attend to an
image’s larger, global
configuration than to its small details.
In complementary
research, subjects in so-called eye-tracking experiments are
24
first asked to look at a visual display’s central object.
However, if they’re then prompted
to feel a positive emotion, such as gratitude, they proceed
to take in significant peripheral
material, despite the earlier instruction. In contrast,
subjects who remain in a neutral or
negative state continue to focus on the display’s central
element and tune out the
surrounding stimuli. Like the similarly disposed
participants who were asked to look at
the complex visual displays, they just don’t take in the big
picture. These findings shed
light on a well-documented phenomenon called the “weapons
effect.” Caught at a violent
crime scene, a frightened spectator’s attention often
narrows to the point that all he or she
can accurately recall is the knife or the gun, which makes
much vaunted “eyewitness
testimony” notoriously unreliable.
These inventive
experiments on emotion’s effects on attention confirm something
that you’ve often experienced, most recently perhaps when
you focused on Stubbs’s
terrified horse and suppressed the expanse of surrounding
scenery. When you feel
frightened, angry, or sad, reality contracts until whatever
is upsetting you takes up the
whole world—at least the one between your ears. Life seems
like a vale of tears, the
future looks bleak, and the only memories that come to mind
are unpleasant. The best
explanation for why bad feelings shrink your focus is that
in a potentially ominous
situation, homing in on and reacting to any trouble quickly
is more important than taking
your time to get the big picture.
Just as bad feelings
constrict your attention so you can focus on dealing with
danger or loss, good feelings widen it, so you can expand
into new territory—not just
regarding your visual field, but also your mind-set. This
broader, more generous
cognitive context helps you to think more flexibly and
creatively and to take in a
situation’s larger implications. Offering an example,
Fredrickson says that when you feel
upbeat, you’re much likelier to recognize a near-stranger of
another race—something that
most people usually fail to do. “Good feelings widen the
lens through which you see the
world,” she says. “You think more in terms of relationship
and connect more dots. That
sense of oneness helps you feel in harmony, whether with
nature, your family, or your
neighborhood.”
RESEARCH ON the
relationship of attention to affect and cognition distinguishes
between positive and negative emotions, but life is often
more complicated than scientific
journals suggest, and the two sorts of feelings aren’t
always easy to tell apart. Here’s
Prince Andrei in War and Peace, focusing on his
beloved:
[He] looked at the singing Natasha and something new and
happy occurred in his soul.
He was happy, but at the same time he felt sad . . . About
what? . . . The main thing he
wanted to weep about was a sudden, vivid awareness of the
terrible opposition between
something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him,
and something narrow and
fleshly that he himself, and she, was. This opposition
tormented him and gladdened him
while she sang. The
type of complex inner experience that cascades from Andrei’s
focus on Natasha is of particular interest to the
Northwestern University cognitive
25
scientist Don Norman. According to his conceptual model, the
brain has three major
parts, which focus on very different things and sometimes
conflict. The “reactive”
component, which handles the brain’s visceral, automatic
functions, concentrates on stuff
that elicits biologically determined responses, such as
dizzying heights and sweet tastes.
The “behavioral,” or routine, component attends to
well-learned skills, such as riding a
bike or typing. According to Norman, these two “lower” modes
of brain functioning
handle most of what you do, and mostly without requiring
your conscious attention. He’s
not alone in taking this seemingly iconoclastic view. The
influential Dutch psychologist
Ap Dijksterhuis, a co-author of “Of Men and Mackerels:
Attention and Automatic
Behavior,” boldly states on his website: “My research
basically highlights the automatic
and unconscious side of behavior and although I do sometimes
investigate conscious
processes, I’m more and more inclined to draw the conclusion
that consciousness is a
pretty unimportant thing.”
Consciousness, which
is the “reflective” element of Norman’s conceptual brain,
handles the “higher” functions at the metaphorical tip of
the very top of that complicated
organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your
thoughts, you tend to
identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure
out exactly how you run your
business or care for your family, you soon realize that you
can’t grasp that process just by
thinking about it. As Norman puts it, “Consciousness also
has a qualitative, sensory feel.
If I say, ‘I’m afraid,’ it’s not just my mind talking. My
stomach also knots up.”
The brain’s reactive,
behavioral, and reflective elements pursue their own
agendas, yet they also constantly communicate with one
another. When your alarm
triggers an argument over whether to roll over or get up and
go to the gym, you
experience a mild version of the kind of conflict that
occurs when two or more of these
networks insist that you focus on different things. Offering
a more complicated example,
Norman says, “Take jumping out of an airplane.” On the
reactive level, your brain
attends to the bottom-up imperative of the earth far, far
below and goes, “What the hell
are you doing?” In order to proceed, you have to pay
top-down attention to messages
from its behavioral component, where you’ve stored your
routine skydiving skills, and to
the reflective voice that says, “You’ll be okay, and think
of how much you’ll enjoy this
experience afterward.”
Drawing on his
fascinating research on our emotional relationships with everyday
things, from can openers to MacBooks, Norman offers a
potentially costly example of
how your feelings can affect what you attend to and vice
versa. When you first decide to
buy a car, you focus earnestly on the reflective level. You
do lots of research and analysis
to figure out which auto best meets your needs and offers
the most value, and you settle
on a medium-priced Toyota. Then, says Norman, “You go to the
dealer and drive away in
something else.”
Once you leave home,
your spouse’s admonitions, and your well-thumbed copies
of Consumer Reports and head to the glittering showroom,
redolent of new-car smell,
your attention shifts from the brain’s sober, cerebral,
reflective voice to the reactive,
sexy, visceral one. As Norman says, “If you buy a white
Camry instead of a red BMW,
that says something about you, and you’re aware of that.”
Your focus moves from gas
mileage and child safety to that hot little convertible’s
sensual upholstery, high-status
brand, and other emotional payoffs. The same
affective-attentional dynamic explains why
clean, shiny used cars sell better than dirty ones and why a
salesman trying to close the
26
deal doesn’t ask “Do you want the car?” but “What color?”
SPEAKING OF THE
proverbial shifty car salesman, you might not be entirely
surprised if you heard that he tries to manipulate his
customers’ attention with more
unscrupulous appeals to their emotions. After all, in the
1950s and ’60s, amid anxieties
about Cold War brainwashing and extraterrestrials from
increasingly accessible outer
space, some major companies were accused of focusing an
unsuspecting public on
“subliminal advertising.” These emotionally arousing images
or cues to Drink, Eat, or
Smoke Brand X were supposedly flashed so quickly on movie
and TV screens that
viewers were not consciously aware of, yet were somehow
influenced by, them.
Claims that such
covert signals could snare your attention, subvert your free will,
and turn you into a kind of zombie who followed corporate
orders were never proved.
Nevertheless, the Federal Communications Commission banned
subliminal advertising in
the 1970s, but its specter lingers on. In 2006, the
California Milk Processor Board hung
some “Got milk?” advertising posters that emitted the smell
of chocolate chip cookies at
San Francisco bus stops, and protesters complained of an
underhanded scheme to snag
their attention and lighten their wallets.
Although “attention”
implies “conscious experience,” you can sometimes take in
subliminal information that flies under the radar of
awareness yet influences your
behavior—especially when the material carries an emotional
charge. Research on a
fascinating group of brain-injured patients, some of whom
have been studied by the
Carnegie Mellon neuroscientist Marlene Behrmann, supplies
some particularly intriguing
evidence of attention paid to seemingly unattended
information.
Usually following a
stroke that causes a lesion in one hemisphere of the brain,
patients afflicted with “hemispheric neglect” can attend to
only half of the world. If the
lesion is in the right hemisphere, the person eats only from
the left side of the plate and
sees only the numerals 1 through 6 on a clock. One such was
Federico Fellini, an artist as
well as a filmmaker, who did some drawings that illustrate
this hemi-demi reality. In one
of his sketches, a ghostly figure represented by a left
shoulder and arm waters a daisy. In
another, half of a woman rides half of a bicycle.
Despite their
apparent inability to focus on half the world, however, hemispheric
neglect patients seem to absorb some sort of information
from it, especially if the
stimulus is freighted with emotion. In one much-cited
experiment, a man is shown a
picture of a normal house and another whose left side is on
fire. Asked to describe what
he’s looking at, the man, who doesn’t consciously see the
fire, simply says, “Two
houses.” When asked which house he’d prefer to live in,
however, he chooses the one
that’s not ablaze, because he somehow feels uneasy about the
dangerous one.
If you took part in
an experiment in which you saw images of faces wearing a
neutral expression as well as some angry ones that were
followed by a so-called masking
stimulus, like the man who couldn’t see the flames, you
wouldn’t know you’d seen the
vexed visages. Nevertheless, just as the invisible fire made
him uncomfortable,
27
physiological monitoring would probably reveal that the
negative images elicited a
galvanic skin response from you, which indicates that you
experienced stress. Because a
stimulus you weren’t aware of could affect what you are
aware of, when you leave the
lab, some trivial matter might upset you or you might feel
on edge without understanding
why.
It’s unclear how
your brain could react to something that’s beneath the level of
conscious attention yet is capable of influencing your
behavior. Certain low-flying
information, particularly the affective sort, may not have
to be handled by the brain’s
cortex, as attended material is, but could be processed
automatically by the amygdala.
This interesting structure, which is involved in regulating
fear and other emotions, could
mediate a kind of subconscious awareness of an event and a
weak learning response of
the sort that could account for your vague uneasiness as you
leave the psych lab.
TO FUNCTION IN the
external world of the senses, you often don’t need to
spend much energy on directing your attention. You’ll
involuntarily focus on the ringing
phone, the stinky garbage, the red-hot pepper. To hear your
companion in a noisy
restaurant, you’ll automatically home in on her voice and
damp down the chatter from
nearby tables. Waiting to cross the street, you’ll focus on
the traffic signal and let the
surroundings blur.
Where operating in
the internal world of thoughts and feelings is concerned,
however, staying focused on the optimal target requires more
effort, beginning with your
mindfulness of attention’s either/or dynamics. Just as
you’re geared to attend to loud
crashes and lovely smells, you’ll home in on very pleasant
or unpleasant ideas and
emotions. For evolutionary, self-protective reasons, however,
you’re apt to focus more on
the latter. Nevertheless, to protect the quality of your
experience, you must shift your
focus from dull or dispiriting ideas and feelings that serve
no useful, problem-solving
purpose, as many if not most don’t, and concentrate as much
as possible on the
productive, life-enhancing sort.
Thus, the first step
toward getting on with your work despite a financial setback
or repairing a relationship after a nasty quarrel is to
direct—perhaps yank—your attention
away from fear or anger toward courage or forgiveness.
Thanks to positive emotion’s
expansive effect on attention, your immediate reward for
that effort is not just a more
comfortable, satisfying affective state, but also a bigger,
better worldview. Where the
long-term benefits are concerned, you’ve come closer to
making a habit of the focused
life.
CHAPTER 3
Outside In: What You
See Is What You Get
An arousing target
such as Stubbs’s lion or Fragonard’s lover can capture your
rapt attention and roil your emotions, but you often
deliberately employ the reverse
28
dynamic: you shift your focus to change how you feel.
Capitalizing on attention’s
selective nature, you deliberately spotlight something in
your external or internal world
and suppress the rest, thereby customizing your experience.
As the poet W. H. Auden put
it, “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore
that—is to the inner life what
choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is
responsible for his choice and
must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”
As you travel to
your next destination after leaving the celestial Frick Collection,
attending to the interior of a rush-hour bus during flu
season brings you back down to
earth with a thud. In response, you take responsibility for
your choice of focus, wrest
your bottom-up attention from the chorus of coughs,
microbial air, and recent history of
the sticky pole you’re clutching, and fervently concentrate
on a top-down target: the
audiobook stored on the iPod you carry for just such
moments. The zeal with which many
of your fellow passengers focus on their newspapers, books,
or MP3 players attests to a
similar strategy of using attention to regulate their
emotional state, albeit at the cost of
tuning out a lot of wild and woolly reality.
Your ability to deal
with Homo sapiens’ universal fear of contamination is a good
example of the way you use attention to control your
experience and function smoothly in
everyday life. Because public transportation rubs your nose
in a highly unpleasant
universal reality—you live in a filthy world—it’s an ideal
laboratory for proving that
although controllable top-down attention isn’t “better” than
the involuntary bottom-up
sort, it’s the key to managing your experience.
Stuck in a germy,
jam-packed bus or subway, you have two choices. You can
allow a compelling bottom-up target—the hacking, sneezing
seatmate who’s spraying
you with a viral mist—to hold your attention and generate
stress, or you can direct your
top-down attention to your paperback or music. Most of us
are able to shift focus in that
comfortable way most of the time. Those who can’t stop
concentrating on the awful truth
are said to suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The irony, of
course, is that psychiatric diagnosis notwithstanding, these
tormented attenders are “the rational ones,” says the Penn
psychologist Paul Rozin. “The
rest of us live in a disgusting world, too, yet to function,
we somehow don’t concentrate
on that. We focus on something else, unless the
contamination is overtly called to our
attention.” As he tells his students, they happily accept
small change in a shop, but they
wouldn’t think of taking a coin from a grubby, smelly
derelict: “That’s disgusting—but
you’re getting his quarter in the store!” Fortunately, all
cultures try to help you bias the
competition for your focus on what’s clean and what’s dirty
in a way that helps you cope
with the unpleasant reality. Indeed, this observation leads
Rozin to a stunning conclusion:
“Disgust is the basic emotion of civilization.”
In a dirty world, by
focusing on certain stuff as particularly disgusting, we reduce
the number of things to worry about and avoid. We also
assert that we are people, not
animals—despite the fact that the things that most offend us
are those we share with other
creatures, including our bodies, waste products, and
especially death. Unlike them, we
regard the smell of decay as the most revolting odor—a
distinction that is, as Rozin says,
“partly a way of thinking that we’re immune to mortality,
which is an ‘animal problem.’”
To help you manage
the dread of contamination, every society designates certain
places, such as parlors and offices, as “clean,” and assigns
others, such as bathrooms and
kitchens, for focusing on worrisome stuff. Should a
complication arise, however, the
29
world’s ubiquitous filth easily recaptures your attention.
Offering an example, Rozin says
that you accept that it’s okay, if not ideal, to attend to
body wastes in a public restroom.
Yet if someone before you fails to flush or wash up before
leaving, the lapse draws your
attention to the room’s inherent pollution. In response, you
might avoid touching the door
handle as you leave.
From a Freudian
perspective, even in the bathroom of your officially clean home,
you may choose to focus on a top-down target—that handy
reading material again—to
distract yourself from what you’re really doing there.
However, as Rozin points out, the
things that disgust us often have “an ambivalent, yes-and-no
quality, because there’s also
a fascination with what we do in the bathroom.” When we want
to be entertained, as the
commercial success of Borat, Animal House, and other
intentionally gross films proves,
we may decide to pay attention to offensive stuff from a
safe distance. As Rozin says,
“Someone else stepping in dog dirt is funny.”
Like elimination,
eating is animalistic, and to distract ourselves from what our
talons and fangs are doing, we focus on crooking our pinkies
and making polite
conversation. (Freud notwithstanding, Rozin argues that most
of us pay far more attention
to food than sex, which is one reason why he studies
eating.) To differentiate ourselves
from critters red in tooth and claw, we dine with fancy
utensils, sit erect at tables, chew
with closed mouths, and socialize at meals. Noting a
hallmark of civilization, Rozin says,
“We can even talk while chewing with the mouth almost
closed, which is really quite a
remarkable feat.”
Different cultures
offer different top-down approaches to diverting attention from
our ravening jaws and gurgling guts. The French famously
concentrate on the taste and
quality of the food and the whole experience of the meal. In
contrast, says Rozin,
“Americans focus on food in the body and what it’s going to
do to us. We’re very
concerned with its content of fiber or anti-oxidants.” With
their fixation on food as
calories, anorexics and bulimics are just extreme examples
of this pervasive cultural bias.
The number of people
who have severe eating disorders is relatively small, but
many if not most Americans focus on the purity of drinking
water. That attention
underlies the recent bottled-water boom comes through loud
and clear in the rallying cry
of Californians who battle against consuming recycled water:
“From Toilet to Tap!” As
Rozin points out, the consumer craze is a true marketing triumph,
considering that most
packaged water is neither tastier nor more healthful than
the free stuff. Indeed, he says,
“All water goes through something like a toilet at some
point or other.” Nevertheless, the
silly slogan focuses you on something you usually manage not
to think about: the history
of what comes out of the faucet. “The battle isn’t over
water quality,” says Rozin, “but
over what you attend to.”
A similar
attentional-emotional dynamic kicks in when you think about your body
image. You can get more accurate information about how men
and women really
look—their girth of middle and depth of thigh—from old
masters’ paintings in a museum
than from contemporary media. Thanks to the latter, however,
thin is in, and both
American women of all ages and older men tend to think
they’re too heavy. As a result,
many women seem to be either on the latest diet or planning
to start soon. Men, however,
respond very differently. Unlike women, they often don’t
focus on their weight, which
therefore doesn’t affect their behavior. As Rozin says, “In
terms of attention, there’s a
gender difference both in the perception of body image and
the desire to change it.”
30
Similarly, he finds that some obese people feel that fat is
just the way they are, and they
focus on other things. Other heavyweights react much like
people afflicted with
obsessive-compulsive disorder and can’t stop concentrating
on something that makes
them miserable.
Just as different
individuals focus on their physical appearance in different ways,
we vary in how much attention we pay to the gap between the
beau-ideal self and the
all-too-real one. Being the best you can be is a major
top-down focus for saints,
workaholics, and others who continually strive to improve;
some may decide to listen to
Prozac to help ensure that they’re functioning at 110
percent of normal. Others figure that
hey, nobody’s perfect, and easily suppress comparisons
between themselves and Nelson
Mandela or Hillary Clinton. As Rozin says, “How much do you
attend to your desire to
be a certain way? How much of a disparity between your real
and ideal self is there? As a
focus, it may or may not be important to you, but it’s an
attentional issue.”
The particular ways
in which you direct your focus to cope with your mixed
emotions about dirt, food, body image, and ego illustrate
your ability to use attention to
shape and improve your experience in general. Offering a
modest personal example,
Rozin says, “My home has a beautiful view. Many people would
have stopped noticing
it, but I enjoy it as much now as fifteen years ago.” At
first glance, choosing to assign a
few moments each day for stopping to smell a fine vista’s
literal or figurative roses may
not seem like a big deal. However, it’s just such efforts to
pay rapt attention to things that
give you pleasure and help you feel and function well that
make the difference between
the good life and the kind that William James described as
feeling like “the dull rattling
off of a chain.”
AS THE ABUNDANCE of
vaguely annoying sayings such as “When life gives
you lemons, make lemonade” proves, the idea of restoring
emotional equilibrium by
refocusing on a problem in a different way is not new. What
is is the impressive research
that increasingly shows that Pollyanna’s insistence on
“looking at the bright side,” even
in tough situations, is a powerful predictor of a longer,
happier, healthier life. In one
large, rigorous study of 941 Dutch subjects over ten years,
for example, the most upbeat
individuals, who agreed with statements such as “I often
feel that life is full of promise,”
were 45 percent less likely to die of all causes during the
long experiment than were the
most pessimistic. They surely had more fun, too.
If a snowstorm
prevents a trip to the store for groceries, one person curses the
weather and has a rotten day, while another quickly focuses
on what a good thing it is to
be snug inside and to have that nice leftover meatloaf.
Research on the so-called
cognitive appraisal of emotions, pioneered by the
psychologists Magda Arnold and
Richard Lazarus, confirms that what happens to you, from a
blizzard to a pregnancy to a
job transfer, is less important to your well-being than how
you respond to it. Because
your reaction to any event is at least partly a matter of
interpretation, the aspects you
concentrate on become what the UNC psychologist Barbara
Fredrickson calls “leverage
31
points” for a simple attentional-attitudinal adjustment that
works as an emotional “reset
button.” If you want to get over a bad feeling, she says,
“focusing on something positive
seems to be the quickest way to usher out the unwanted
emotion.”
That’s not to say
that when something upsetting happens, you immediately try to
force yourself to “be happy.” First, says Fredrickson, you
examine “the seed of emotion,”
or how you honestly feel about what occurred. Then you
direct your attention to some
element of the situation that frames things in a more
helpful light. After a big blowup
over an equitable sharing of the housework, rather than
continuing to concentrate on your
partner’s selfishness and sloth, you might focus on the fact
that at least a festering
conflict has been aired, which is the first step toward a
solution to the problem, and to
your improved mood. Interestingly, people who are depressed
and anhedonic—unable to
feel pleasure—have particular trouble using this venerable
attentional self-help tactic.
This difficulty suggests to Fredrickson that they suffer
from a dearth of happiness rather
than a surfeit of sadness: “It’s as if the person’s positive
emotional systems have been
zapped or disabled.”
Of course, it’s one
thing for a jilted lover or tournament loser to stop focusing on
rejection or defeat and start thinking about new
possibilities, but quite another for the
victim of a devastating natural catastrophe or a fatal
illness. On the other hand, even such
dire situations can afford various targets for attention. By
way of illustration, one
psychologist recalls the experience of his mother-in-law,
who had just been told that she
had only a few months to live: “She got up the next morning
and said to herself, ‘I’m
dying.’ Then she realized that she actually still felt
pretty good.” The woman decided that
she’d concentrate on living well for as long as possible,
then deal with dying at the
appropriate time. This ability to direct her focus to the
present moment and its rewards
and away from fears of the future immediately made her feel
more in control—a
powerful influence on well-being—and her tough situation
became more comfortable.
It’s a hard thing to
accept, but as Fredrickson says, “Very few circumstances are
one hundred percent bad.” Even in very difficult situations,
she finds, it’s often possible
to find something to be grateful for, such as others’ loving
support, good medical care, or
even your own values, thoughts, and feelings. Focusing on
such a benign emotion isn’t
just a “nice thing to do,” but a proven way to expand your
view of reality and lift your
spirits, thus improving your ability to cope.
IN OUR YOUTH-CRAZED
media and popular culture, one situation that’s
generally regarded as very unfortunate indeed is old age.
The assumption is that,
considering the wrinkles, aches and pains, and unchic
footwear, old people must be
unhappy with life, but new research shows that by and large,
barring some crisis, they’re
not. Despite certain obvious declines, elders’ emotional
well-being is as good as, if not
better than, that of younger people. One major reason for
their surprisingly upbeat
attitude is their increased skill in focusing on things that
foster feelings of contentment.
Chances are that
your grandmother didn’t need a psychologist to tell her to try to
32
see the proverbial glass as half-full. When you were acting
droopy, she listened to your
tale of woe—your teacher gave you a D in math or your father
docked your
allowance—then reframed your reality by pointing out that
you were lucky to be taught
by someone who wanted you to realize your true potential or
to have a parent who cared
about your character development. Think of all the poor
children who have neither!
Research shows that
it’s no accident that many grandparents are experts in
making such empowering attentional adjustments. Indeed,
seeing that glass as at least
half-full may be aging’s greatest underremarked benefit.
Compared with the young, the
old experience fewer unpleasant emotions and just as many
delightful ones. They’re also
more satisfied with their relationships and better at
solving problems that crop up in
them. Elders who have a particularly positive focus tend to
be healthier as well as
happier: according to the Ohio Longitudinal Study, they live
7.5 years longer.
To William James,
wisdom was “the art of knowing what to overlook,” and many
elders master this way of focusing. Lots of studies show
that younger adults pay as much
or more attention to negative information as to the positive
sort. By middle age, however,
their focus starts to shift, until in old age, they’re
likely to have a strong positive bias in
what they both attend to and remember.
The differences in
what young and old people focus on and in their emotional
well-being may have more to do with chronological changes in
motivation rather than
age per se. In her studies of “socioemotional selectivity,”
the Stanford psychologist Laura
Carstensen finds that when your lifespan seems open-ended,
as it typically does in youth,
you focus on the future and on acquiring
information—expanding your horizons and
seeking new experiences. When your lifespan seems limited,
as it does among elders,
your attention sensibly shifts to emotional satisfaction in
the here-and-now and to
worthwhile “sure things” rather than novelty. Interestingly,
when young people are thrust
into situations that highlight life’s fragility, such as war
or serious illness, they too tend to
focus on fulfilling experiences in the present moment. As
Carstensen puts it, “Age does
not entail the relentless pursuit of happiness, but rather
the satisfaction of emotionally
meaningful goals, which involves far more than simply
‘feeling good.’”
As elders’ more
benign outlook suggests, older brains attend to and remember
emotional stimuli differently from younger ones. In one
study, compared to younger
people, they remembered nearly twice as many positive images
as the negative or neutral
sort. Moreover, when the experiment was repeated using fMRI
brain scans, the tests
showed that in younger adults, the amygdala, an emotional
center, reacted to both
positive and negative images, but in older adults, only in
response to the positive cues.
Perhaps because elders use the “smart” prefrontal cortex to
dampen activity in the more
volatile amygdala, their brains actually encode less
negative information, which naturally
reduces their recall of it and its impact on their behavior.
FACED WITH A
DIFFICULT situation, your grandmother and hers knew that
sometimes the best strategy is to “grin and bear it,” or to
“look for the silver lining.”
33
However, the appreciation of such attentional-attitudinal
coping tactics is a recent
development in Western psychology. Since Freud, most forms
of therapy have
maintained that the best way to deal with a problem or
trauma is to concentrate on it.
Through this “processing,” the theory goes, you’ll
eventually gain insight and feel wiser,
and hopefully better. Accordingly, most people who’ve taken
Psych 101 think they’re
more or less obliged to chew over a breakup or career
reversal, alone or with a friend or
therapist, or maybe all of the above.
This common wisdom
notwithstanding, some eclectic research suggests that
rather than being helpful, focusing top-down attention on a
psychic wound can make you
feel worse. Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often
aggravates the victim’s
stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved
people do better without grief
therapy.
Directing your
attention away from a negative experience not only is not as
maladaptive as many of his peers think but, according to the
Columbia psychologist
George Bonanno, can be a superior coping strategy. Indeed,
he finds that in the wake of
an upsetting event, “self-deception and emotional avoidance
are consistently and robustly
linked to a better outcome.”
Even when you’re
reeling from a severe blow, such as a loved one’s death,
diverting your focus from your grief can boost your
resilience. Bonanno interviewed and
tested people who had lost a spouse or a child, at four
months and eighteen months after
the deaths. When he asked them to perform a difficult lab
task, their physiological stress
responses predictably increased. This evidence
notwithstanding, some individuals
reported that they weren’t upset by the challenging chore—an
indication that they
weren’t fully attending to the stressor. Accordingly, these
tended to be the same people
who were coping better with bereavement. The idea that
directing your attention away
from negative events can be adaptive is supported by a
complementary study in China,
where the culture’s mourning rituals focus the
grief-stricken person outward toward the
community, rather than inward on the solitary processing of
loss.
Individuals of
sanguine temperament, such as certain politicians, CEOs, and
salesmen, seem naturally to excel at directing their focus
away from negative targets.
Research shows that when they confront a potentially
unpleasant situation, such as some
unfriendly faces at a gathering, these extraverts are apt to
shift their attention rapidly
around the room and zero in on amiable or neutral visages,
thus short-circuiting the
distressing images before they can get stored in memory.
WHATEVER YOUR
TEMPERAMENT, living the focused life is not about
trying to feel happy all the time, which would be both
futile and grotesque. Rather, it’s
about treating your mind as you would a private garden and
being as careful as possible
about what you introduce and allow to grow there. Your
ability to function comfortably
in a dirty, germy world is just one illustration of your
powerful capacity to put mind over
matter and control your experience by shifting your focus
from counterproductive to
34
adaptive thoughts and feelings. In this regard, one reason
why certain cultures venerate
the aged for their wisdom is that elders tend to maximize
opportunities to attend to the
meaningful and serene, and to the possibility that, as E. M.
Forster put it in A Room With
a View, “. . . by the side of the everlasting Why there is a
Yes—a transitory Yes if you
like, but a Yes.”
CHAPTER 4
Nature: Born to
Focus
Your characteristic
way of focusing is an important factor in making you who you
are. Attention is a basic human capacity, like memory or
intelligence, not a personality
trait, like shyness or thrill-seeking. Yet a person’s
individuality and experience are much
affected by his or her attentional style.
Consider the role of
focus in the character and daily life of Bill Brown, who’s the
director of the Surveillance Camera Players, a group that
opposes the use of these
security devices in public places. As he puts it, “I am
observant about things that are
observant.” To illustrate his assertion, he points out that
he has personally detected six
thousand of the perhaps fifteen thousand such cameras in
Manhattan alone, despite the
fact that many are just fist-sized and cleverly embedded
inside lamps and moldings or
affixed to the edges of buildings. The particular way Brown
uses attention to organize yet
limit his world by enhancing certain targets—hidden
cameras—and suppressing
competing stimuli is just one example of the complex
relationship between identity and
attention, from Martha Stewart’s focus on the home to Barack
Obama’s concentration on
politics.
When discussing his
favorite targets, Brown also describes the two expressions of
the quintessential personality trait—often called
“extraversion”—and the different
attentional styles that tend to complement them. At one end
of this continuum lies the
introverted disposition and inward concentration typical of
many “knowledge workers”
drawn to the big cities where surveillance cameras abound.
As Brown says, “Most of
them are not really in the world. They’re just hooked into
themselves, paying attention to
their own thoughts and fears, as well as their cell phones,
iPods, and BlackBerries. They
walk very, very quickly with their eyes down diagonally,
towards people’s shoes. They
tunnel through urban space.”
A person who has an
extraverted personality and an outward focus behaves very
differently when out and about. Like Brown, who founded as
well as leads his activist
group, such an individual engages with the physical and
social environments rather than
burrowing through them. As he puts it, “There is an
important reason why I notice these
cameras while others do not. I tend to walk slowly and look
up. I pay attention to the
architectural details, and once you start, you begin to find
other details.” Practice makes
perfect, and after a civil rights group in Boston failed to
find any cameras in a particular
neighborhood, Brown retraced their steps and located more
than a hundred.
Whether you’re an
extravert, who mostly directs attention outward to the great
world, or an introvert, who tends to focus inward on your
own thoughts and feelings,
your disposition inclines you to home in on the very aspects
of your experience and
environment that reinforce it. Thus, the outgoing person
gravitates to the situations, such
as leading a group tour of a stimulus-packed city, that make
him even more focused on
35
and engaged with the world. In contrast, the introvert is
drawn to the quiet, familiar
settings, such as home or office, that protect his
sensitivity and shyness.
Just as it interacts
with an outward- or inward-looking disposition, attention is
bound up with an individual’s temperamental orientation
toward positive or negative
emotionality. At one end of this affective spectrum are
people whose innately cheerful,
optimistic nature inclines them to focus on the world
through rose-colored glasses and to
pick up numerous cues to feel upbeat. At the other end are
people whose dark,
pessimistic dispositions incline them to regard the world as
bleak or threatening and to
search for signals of potential danger or loss. Even when
focusing on neutral situations,
they can often find reasons to be worried, mad, or sad.
Among these
temperamentally unhappy campers are “reactant” personalities, who
focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others’
attempts to control them. In one
experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to
think of two people they
knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type
who preached la dolce
vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects
too briefly to register in their
conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to
perform. Those who had
been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly
worse than those exposed to
the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to
an emotional cue that
suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up
and cause them to act to their
own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take
and cooperation, so a person
who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions
like a bull to a red flag is in for
big trouble in both home and workplace.
A particularly interesting
example of how the dynamic between attention and
personality can affect daily experience pops out of an
exhaustive survey of 9,211
employees and managers. Analysis showed that a worker’s
tendency toward
perfectionism, manifested by a persistent focus on small,
inconsequential details and
errors, correlated with an inability to distinguish between
what is or isn’t doable and with
being unsuited for risky tasks. Because they consistently
pay too much attention to the
wrong things, these hardworking but anxious zealots end up
reducing their productivity.
ARGUABLY THE MOST
intriguing characteristic assessed by the
Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), a widely
used test developed by the
University of Minnesota’s eminent psychologist Auke
Tellegen, is “absorption,” which
describes a particular style of focusing. If you get a high
score in this trait, you’re
naturally inclined toward what he calls a “respondent” or
“experiential” way of focusing.
As did Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and Glenn Gould,
you tend to become totally
engrossed in what you’re doing and in “experiencing the
moment.” Prone toward deep,
effortless states of rapt attention, you might, for example,
weep spontaneously at the
sound of beautiful music—a reaction that Tellegen calls “the
involuntary response of
your being to a stimulus, as opposed to the kind of
concentration shown by a rat learning
a maze.” It’s not possible to break down nature’s and
nurture’s contributions to a single
36
individual’s identity, but among a group, genes account for
50 percent of the variation in
this trait.
At its extreme, a
habitually experiential mode of attending produces true space
cadets who have trouble focusing on and coping with
practical realities. However, more
moderate exemplars often prosper as artists, academics,
actors, writers, musicians, or
advertising whizzes. Then too, in daily life, the ability to
pay rapt attention to the matter
at hand is a good strategy for increasing well-being.
“Absolutely!” says the Northwestern
neurologist Marsel Mesulam. “It’s that wonderful Eastern
approach. Instead of wolfing
down your dinner, if you could savor every bite, reflecting
on how wonderful it is to be
eating, you’d be ecstatic, but life doesn’t always work out
that way.”
Some individuals,
however, including certain epileptics as well as some
celebrated saints and gurus, are prone to experiences that
go beyond rapt attention to a
prolonged state of rapture. The Hindu mystic Ramana
Maharshi, the model for the sage in
Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, had a kind of
near-death experience in his teens.
Suddenly, he experienced the “cosmic consciousness” that,
according to his Advaita
Vedanta tradition, is all that there is. For his remaining
fifty-odd years, Ramana stayed
focused on it in a state of apparent bliss: the elusive goal
that would later draw the
Beatles and hordes of Western hippies to Indian ashrams.
Their quest reminds Mesulam
of Faust’s search for the true essence of life (“was die
Welt im Innersten
zusammenhaelt”). “The wish to attend to and extend the
present moment is certainly a
wonderful idea, a beautiful literary conclusion,” he says.
“Whether it’s the definition of
happiness . . .”
A person’s
attentional style doesn’t operate in a vacuum, but in the larger context
of his or her other traits. For an individual who has an
upbeat personality, such as Walt
Whitman, a state of profound experiential absorption can be
what Tellegen calls “a very
positive stretching of the self ’s boundaries.” For someone
whose sense of self is
fragmented or whose temperament has an angry, depressive,
alienated cast, such a
responsive state can be overwhelmingly unpleasant,
frightening, or even disintegrative, as
it often is for the seriously mentally ill. As Tellegen
says, “Deep absorption is not always
a ‘peak experience.’”
If your MPQ results
show a low score in absorption, you don’t tend toward the
deep, experiential, expansive attentional style that can
turn listening to a bubbling brook
or watching a sunset into a quasi-mystical experience. If
your personality is also
goal-oriented and controlled, you may be inclined toward the
“instrumental,”
take-care-of-business way of focusing that helps a traveler
find a hotel in a strange city or
a householder put together those “some assembly required”
furnishings from Target or
IKEA. Everyone has some capacity for this practical,
down-to-earth attention—if you
didn’t, you couldn’t insert flap A into slot B—but it
ideally suits individuals who mostly
function in realistic frames of reference, from an operating
room to a bridge game.
Certain individuals
excel at paying both experiential and instrumental attention.
They can focus in a very pragmatic, goal-oriented manner and
also be “carried away” by
thoughts, feelings, and sensory stimuli. Tellegen describes
a visit that Mozart made to
Leipzig, where he stopped at the church where Bach had been
cantor. Apparently, he
hadn’t yet heard Bach’s music, so someone obligingly played
one of the master’s
cantatas. After a few seconds, Mozart shot up and said,
“What’s this?” Rapt, he focused
intently on the glorious sound, then declared, “This is
someone a fellow can learn from!”
37
Savoring this anecdote of one incomprehensible genius
attending to another, Tellegen
says, “Mozart would have listened to Bach in experiential
fascination, but also
instrumentally, so that afterward he could have reproduced
the whole cantata from
beginning to end.”
This lovely vignette
reminds Tellegen of other exceptional experiences of deeply
absorbed attention that resemble the effortlessly focused
state often called “flow.”
There’s a certain opera singer who, when she finally masters
an extremely difficult aria,
is so totally focused on singing it that when she’s
finished, she doesn’t even remember
performing. “It’s almost as if an experiential mind-set has
replaced the instrumental one
required to learn the piece,” he says, “so that her singing
no longer requires effortful
attention. A talented cellist might play a Bach sonata the
way an average person can relax
his frontalis muscle. The high-level instrumental skill has
become so well assimilated that
it happens automatically.”
Where visual artists
are concerned, the Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini and
the painter and sculptor Picasso were clearly adept at both
experiential and instrumental
attending, says Tellegen, as is the modern architect Frank
Gehry. Choosing a literary
example, he says that F. Scott Fitzgerald once admitted to
“wrapping one of his romantic
flings in cellophane” for later artistic use and notes that
“this kind of heartless but honest
professionalism is not uncommon among creative people.”
Colorful artistic
types are by no means the only people who excel in paying both
pragmatic and experiential attention. Turning to
politicians, Tellegen points out that when
asked how he could focus on his duties during the huge
distraction of impeachment,
President Bill Clinton described an extremely practical,
feet-on-the-ground response to
the stressor: “It’s simple. I go to work, look at my
calendar, and do what I’m supposed to
do!” Yet whether erupting in rage at a hapless journalist or
eloquently eulogizing Coretta
Scott King, the political virtuoso is also known for being
captured by emotion. As
Tellegen says, “Bill—see, I call him Bill—feels my pain, but
the next moment, when we
are both still teary-eyed, he is twisting my arm. He’s
genuinely experiential, but he also
uses that capacity in the service of ‘getting the job done,’
which comes across as
manipulative to the more refined. If you can attend in both
highly experiential and
pragmatic modes, then the question is whether you can
integrate these dispositions in a
way that works.”
Your attentional
style is shaped not just by your personality traits but also by your
other capacities, such as intellectual ability. Referring to
his research on different kinds of
intelligence, the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner says
that someone who’s
particularly strong in one area—music, say—might very well
focus there, and thus have a
very different experience at a Bach concert than someone
who’s tone-deaf or has musical
talent but lacks familiarity with the classical idiom. He
recalls that when he took his own
three children to Cats, each saw the same show yet
interpreted its narrative, characters,
dances, visuals, and songs in very different ways. “No
doubt,” says Gardner, “what you
focus on is determined in significant part by the strengths
of your intelligences, which
channel your attention.”
Different styles of
attending are also complemented by different physical and
social environments. In one experiment, some experientially
prone subjects were asked to
relax while listening to music; they quickly and
effortlessly complied. However, when
they were asked to monitor feedback about whether their
muscles were relaxing—a
38
structured, goal-oriented task—the same people found it
harder to “just let go.” In
contrast, pragmatically inclined subjects felt uncomfortable
when they were told to relax
and simply listen, but they did better in the feedback
situation. As Tellegen says, “The
attentional trait interacts with the circumstances.”
Neither the
instrumental nor the experiential attentional style is good or bad per
se, and both have benefits and drawbacks. We delight in the
imagination and fantasy of a
Roz Chwast or a George Balanchine, but we don’t want our
airline pilots and accountants
to get lost in contemplation of the starry heavens or the
complexities of our tax returns.
From personal experience, Tellegen finds that the propensity
for abstract thought that’s
prized in academe is unhelpful in the supermarket: “When I
go to the store to buy a
certain item, I might end up coming home with something else
altogether.”
If you’re prone
neither to habitual states of laserlike problem-solving nor to
flights of fantasy, you have lots of company. As is the case
with capacities such as
intelligence and memory or personality traits such as
boldness and conscientiousness,
most people fall somewhere in between the extreme ends of
the spectrum. Where your
attentional style or any other deeply rooted characteristic
is concerned, the real trick is to
figure out how to make it work for you.
By the age of
eighteen, the West Virginia farm boy Chuck Yeager was an aircraft
mechanic in the army, where he already manifested the bold
temperament, 20/10 vision,
and raptor’s instrumental focus that underlie “the right
stuff.” By twenty, the country kid
was a fighter pilot who went on to become a highly decorated
flying ace in World War II.
As a test pilot, he once flew an experimental aircraft that
dropped 51,000 feet in fifty-one
seconds before he righted it and landed safely. Of his many
exploits, Yeager is best
known for being the first to break the sound barrier in a
plane and for penetrating space
without a spacecraft. Although he is the epitome of
temperamental derring-do, Yeager
modestly credits his success more to his careful, pragmatic,
instrumental attentional style
than to machismo: “It was my fear that made me learn
everything I could about my
airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying
respectful of my machine and
always alert in the cockpit.”
Just as some
instrumental little boys become fighter pilots who pay rapt attention
to high-flying mechanics, others who are naturally engrossed
in the rapt contemplation of
truth or beauty become artists. Despite their impoverished
circumstances in the grim
Soviet industrial town of Ufa, the mother of scrawny little
Rudolf Nureyev managed to
sneak him into a ballet performance at the age of seven.
Mesmerized by this new world,
“Rudik” was soon performing in local folk dances. Despite
his sketchy training,
Nureyev’s naturally experiential focus helped to make him
the perfect vehicle to express
the divine frenzy of the dance. The young provincial made it
all the way to Leningrad’s
famed Kirov ballet school, where he concentrated on
acquiring ballet’s formal
instrumental skills before leaping to astounding artistic
heights. As if describing the two
ways of focusing, he said, “Technique is what you fall back
on when you run out of
inspiration.”
39
AS WITH PERSONALITY
or intelligence, attentional capacity is the creation of
both nature and nurture, which account for our individual
differences. For reasons of
biology, for example, a color-blind person focuses on a
different world than someone
who has normal vision. Similarly, physiological differences
in tongues and taste buds
mean that people eating from the same bowl of Brussels
sprouts may attend to very
different gustatory experiences. So-called supertasters find
the sprouts and certain other
strongly flavored vegetables very bitter and hate them.
“Tasters” perceive some
astringency but find the veggies palatable enough. Those who
ask for seconds are
“nontasters,” who detect no bitterness.
Anyone who has an
intact brain can pay attention, but brains differ, and so do
their focusing capacities. Over his long career—“William
James is not around anymore,
so I’ve been working on it longest!”—the University of
Oregon neuroscientist Michael
Posner has developed a well-known three-part model of the
brain’s attentional system.
He describes its alerting, orienting, and executive
networks, each with its own
neurophysiology and function, as nothing short of “the
mechanisms through which we
have experience and control the sequence of our ideas.”
With the University
of Oregon psychologist Mary Rothbart, who’s known for her
research on temperament, Posner has recently been looking at
how the attentional
networks get organized in early life. He finds significant
neurophysiological differences
among children that shape their different ways of focusing
and aspects of their identities,
from the capacity for learning to the control of thoughts
and emotions.
If you took Posner’s
computerized Attention Network Test, which is meant to
gauge the strength of an individual’s three networks, you
might find that you’re
especially strong in orienting. Therefore, you’re adept at
getting your bearings in your
internal or external environment and directing your
attention to a particular target. This
skill has obvious benefits if you’re a hunter, say, or Bill
Brown. More surprisingly,
Rothbart finds that you’ll also be inclined to notice and
appreciate the little things in life
that make it worth living, which she winningly calls “low
pleasures.” (In Delta Wedding,
Eudora Welty describes just such a child in the character of
the bride’s younger sister:
“Bluet was a gentle little thing . . . filled with
attention, quick to show admiration and
innumerable kinds of small pleasures.”) This tendency to
focus on the seemingly minor
delights of a good, crisp apple or your favorite song on the
radio is an important element
in the construction of an optimistic, upbeat personality and
corresponds with a greater
overall satisfaction with life. Conversely, a chronic
inability to focus on small
opportunities to cheer up and enjoy yourself correlates with
depression and its dour
worldview.
If your attentional
system has a strong executive network, you can easily direct
your focus despite distractions and respond to your target
swiftly and appropriately.
When you spot that piece of cake on the kitchen counter, you
remember your waistline
and seamlessly switch your attention back to your objective
of washing the dishes. This
capacity, which old-fashioned report cards called
“self-control” and psychologists now
call “self-regulation,” often figures in the high achiever’s
personality, just as its opposite
trait of impulsiveness often appears in a self-defeating
person’s profile. Moreover, a
well-developed executive network makes it easier to shift
your attention from
unproductive thoughts and feelings to the energizing,
generative sort, which is a big
40
advantage in the pursuit of the focused life.
Biological
differences in brains can account for different attentional and
temperamental profiles, but nurture as well as nature plays
an important role. In
Rothbart’s research on cultural differences in executive
attention and self-regulation, she
finds that the capacity for effortful control is a very good
thing for both American and
Chinese children. However, in the United States, kids who
have this ability focus on
keeping a lid on feelings like anger, fear, and
frustration—an important skill in our
up-tempo, gregarious society. In China, on the other hand,
self-regulating kids
concentrate on curbing their exuberance and trying not to
stand out, which is an equally
desirable attribute in their Asian culture. Depending on
social or genetic differences, or
both, says Posner, “the same behavior of focusing on a
dimension of self-control seems to
be involved in creating quite different personalities.”
Even within a single
individual, a biologically based behavioral predisposition
doesn’t operate in isolation, but in concert with the
person’s other qualities and
environments. As Posner points out, whether their small
child’s innate temperament is
sunny or stormy, parents will intuitively draw the tot’s
attention to smiles, laughter, and
hugs, thus reinforcing the desirability of positive emotion.
To help children who are not
naturally inclined to focus on their schoolwork—or on life’s
little pleasures—he and
Rothbart have developed exercises that significantly improve
the executive attentional
skills of four- and six-year-olds. Such training could help
the millions of schoolchildren
who struggle with attention, mood, and self-control
problems.
Nature and nurture
have combined forces to give you a characteristic way of
focusing that’s part of who you are, but research on the
brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability
to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections
throughout life, proves that your
identity isn’t written in stone. Posner is speaking of the
children he works with, but his
observation increasingly seems to apply to people of any
age: “Kids have strong genetic
make-ups, but you can also shape them through experience.”
CHAPTER 5
Nurture: This Is
Your Brain on Attention
Who you are—Chuck
Yeager or Rudolf Nureyev—affects what attracts your rapt
attention (jets or jetés), but what you focus on also
affects who you are. New research on
its recently unimagined neuroplasticity shows that what you
pay attention to, and how,
can actually change your brain and thus your behavior. This
extraordinarily practical
scientific breakthrough shows that like physical fitness,
the mental sort that sustains the
focused life can be cultivated.
For a story called
“Pearls Before Breakfast,” the Washington Post staged a clever
experiment that unwittingly illustrates how what you
habitually attend to affects your
identity. Posing as a musician playing for donations, the
violin virtuoso Joshua Bell
performed breathtaking classical works on his $3.5 million
Stradivarius during morning
rush hour at a D.C. subway stop, and the reporter Gene
Weingarten observed the public’s
response. The Post’s stated objective was an exploration of
“context, perception and
priorities—as well as an unblinking assessment of public
taste: In a banal setting at an
inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” From a different
perspective, however, the
experiment demonstrates the way attention shapes not just
your immediate experience,
41
but also your individuality.
Early speculation
about Bell’s incognito concert included fears that the handsome
young star would be mobbed, and that police would be needed
to manage the crowds. In
the event, however, sixty-three people passed by before
anyone even paused to listen.
After forty-five minutes, 1,070 people had paid no attention
at all to the glorious music,
and just seven had actually stopped to listen. Accustomed to
earning up to a thousand
dollars per minute, Bell made a total of thirty-two dollars
and said he felt “oddly grateful”
when someone threw in a bill instead of change.
Of more than a
thousand people, only two had really focused on the sublime
music. One was a classical aficionado who had once studied
the violin with a view of
becoming a professional. He gave five dollars. The other was
a concertgoer and the only
person to recognize Bell, having seen him in a more
customary venue. She gave twenty
dollars. In short, the people who paid attention to the
celebrated maestro and the Bach
chaconne weren’t run-of-the-mill commuters, but serious
music lovers whose lifelong
focus on the great works of the classical canon had become,
as the saying aptly puts it,
“part of them.”
IN ONE
MUCH-PUBLICIZED early demonstration of the adult brain’s
unsuspected malleability, fMRI studies showed that the
experience of navigating
London’s vast tangle of streets actually causes the brains
of its taxi drivers to develop an
enlarged hippocampus, which is involved in spatial processing
and memory. A similar
experiment showed that although they often can’t say why,
archaeologists on digs just get
better and better at locating artifacts; imaging studies
support their claim by
distinguishing the veterans’ neurophysiology from that of
novices. In short, it seems that
simply going about your business, whether it’s driving a
taxi or spotting pottery shards,
teaches your brain what to attend to and customizes your
nervous system to suit your
experience and modify who you are.
Using sophisticated
EEG (electroencephalography) and fMRI scanning, the
University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson is a
pioneer in showing how
experience in general and attention in particular affect
your brain and behavior. This
physiological as well as psychological shift sounds
dramatic, he says, but shouldn’t be so
surprising, because your nervous system is built to respond
to your experience: “That’s
what learning is. Anything that changes behavior changes the
brain.”
Along with conducting
basic research on how experience affects
neurophysiology, Davidson is exploring ways in which
individuals can use focus to
change problematic attentional, cognitive, and emotional
patterns. The mental-fitness
regimens that he and colleagues in a half-dozen labs around
the world are working with
are based on meditation, which boils down to an exercise in
paying rapt attention to a
target for a certain period of time. Various Eastern and
Western religions have used it
over the past 2,500 years to enhance spiritual practice, but
meditation is easily stripped of
sectarian overtones to its behavioral essence of deliberate,
targeted concentration that
42
invites a calm, steady psychophysiological state.
The point of a
secular attentional workout is not spiritual experience but the
enhancement of the ability to focus, emotional balance, or
both. In the “mindfulness
meditation” that’s the most widely used form, you sit
silently for forty-five minutes and
attend to your breath: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. When
thoughts arise, as they
inevitably do, you just shift your awareness back to
breathing, right here and now,
without distraction from the tape loops usually running in
your head. As Davidson says,
“A complete atheist can use these procedures and derive as
much benefit from them as an
ardent believer.”
Research that
reveals what’s going on in the black box shows that different types
of attentional training affect the brain and behavior in
different ways. Practices that
feature neutral, single-pointed concentration, such as
mindfulness meditation, particularly
improve your ability to focus as you go about your daily
life. “Attentional blink”
experiments suggest why. If you’re shown two letters flashed
a half-second apart in a
series of twenty numbers, for example, you’ll almost
certainly see the first letter but miss
the second one. The glitch is caused by “sticky” attention,
which keeps you glued to the
first cue, preventing you from catching it the next time.
After three months of
breath-centered meditation, however, you’re able to “let go”
of the first letter quickly and
be ready to focus on the second.
No mere psych-lab
curiosity, the blink research, which offers yet more proof that
the world you experience is much more subjective than you
assume, has important
real-life implications. Even when you think you’re focused
on what’s going on, these
data show, you miss things that occur in quick succession,
including fleeting facial and
vocal cues. As Davidson says, “Sensitive attention is a key
substrate of successful social
interactions, and the consequences of missing that kind of
information can be quite
significant.” Indeed, research done by Paul Ekman, a
psychologist at the University of
California at San Francisco, shows that slight, rapid
changes in a person’s expression are
highly meaningful, if unspoken, indications of what’s really
on his or her mind. Most
people don’t read these cues very well, he finds, but
attentional training can greatly
improve this interpretive ability.
Because the blink
phenomenon has long been regarded as relatively fixed, the fact
that it can be modified helps prove that attention is indeed
a trainable skill. That’s
particularly good news for the many people who have
difficulty focusing, including the 5
percent of American children who struggle with ADHD.
Although he doesn’t conduct
research on the problem per se, Davidson thinks that
regimens derived from one-pointed
meditation could help: “It’s worth trying, both in hopes of
reducing the children’s
medication and making a real difference in their behavior,
particularly because there are
very few if any negative side effects.”
In another area of
research, Davidson explores the way in which temperamental
features, such as an inclination toward positive or negative
emotionality, affect and even
drive attention—an interaction that is vitally important to
the quality of your experience.
As he says, “One of life’s challenges is to maintain your
focus despite the continual
distracting emotional stimuli that can capture it.” Certain
lucky individuals are born with
an affective temperament that naturally inclines them toward
an upbeat, proactive focus,
but research increasingly shows that others can move in that
direction through attentional
training.
43
Chances are that
you’ve seen some of the striking, brightly colored fMRI images
from Davidson’s investigation of the brain-activity patterns
associated with various
emotions and dispositions and of how those patterns interact
with attention.
Unfortunately, he says, these pictures are often used to
support cartoonish generalizations
about the functions of the left and right brain and the
“happy” or “unhappy,” “logical” or
“artistic” sorts of people dominated by one or the other
hemisphere.
Popular wisdom has
it that the brain is neatly divided into the analytical, verbal
left hemisphere and the intuitive, creative right
hemisphere, and that some individuals’
behavior is more influenced by one side than the other. Up
to a point, there’s some truth
to these notions, but research on so-called brain
lateralization quickly becomes more
complicated. The more difficult your task, for example, the
more both hemispheres are
likely to get involved. Moreover, advances in brain imaging
mean that it’s no longer
enough to say that a function is located in the right or
left brain. To be accurate and
meaningful, information must distinguish exactly where
within a hemisphere the activity
in question occurs.
Describing his
nuanced findings, Davidson says that although many other regions
of the brain are also involved, “people who have greater
activation in very specific left
prefrontal regions—not the whole hemisphere—report and
display more of a certain
positive emotion—not simply ‘happiness’—that’s associated
with moving toward your
goals and taking an active approach to life.”
Their rigorous
practice of rapt attention over many years has created particularly
striking differences in the neurophysiology and daily
experience of some of Davidson’s
most accomplished subjects: Tibetan Buddhist monks who have
each spent at least ten
thousand hours in meditation. Even when they are not engaged
in the practice, Davidson
suspects that the regions in their left prefrontal cortexes
that are associated with positive
emotionality are much more active than those of control
subjects or novice meditators,
and he’s currently investigating that thesis. Moreover,
average subjects who had
completed an eight-week meditation course showed
significantly increased activity in the
left prefrontal regions that are linked to this optimistic,
goal-oriented orientation.
The discovery that a
focusing regimen can have profound impacts not only on a
person’s ability to concentrate but also on his or her basic
emotional disposition is
particularly significant, because temperament has
traditionally been regarded as highly
stable and resistant to change. In Davidson’s view, however,
the genes you inherit “set
very coarse boundaries” for your identity and behavior, but
they don’t determine it. What
really counts, he says, is your epigenetics, or the way in
which your genes are expressed
in the real world; this function can be strongly modified by
your experience, which in
turn greatly depends on how you direct your attention. As
Davidson says, “That’s the
process that ultimately determines who you are and what you
do.”
Not only how you
focus, but also what you focus on can have important
neurophysiological and behavioral consequences. Just as
one-pointed concentration on a
neutral target, such as your breath, particularly
strengthens certain of the brain’s
attentional systems, meditation on a specific
emotion—unconditional love—seems to
tune up certain of its affective networks. In experiments,
when monks who are focusing
on this feeling of pure compassion are exposed to emotional
sounds, brain activity
increases in the insula, a region involved in visceral
perception and empathy, and in the
right temporo-parietal junction, an area implicated in
inferring and empathizing with
44
others’ mental states. These data complement research done
by Barbara Fredrickson and
others showing that concentration on positive emotions
improves your affect and expands
your focus. Davidson speculates that deliberately focusing
on feelings such as
compassion, joy, and gratitude may strengthen neurons in the
left prefrontal cortex and
inhibit disturbing messages from the fear-oriented amygdala.
Training your brain
to pay more attention to compassion for others and less to the
self ’s narcissistic preoccupations would be a giant step
toward a better, more enjoyable
life. When you aren’t doing anything in particular but are
just “at rest,” your brain’s
so-called default mode kicks in. This baseline mental state
often leads to inward-looking,
negative ruminations that tend to be, as Davidson puts it,
“all about my, me, and mine.”
Before long, you find yourself thinking, “I actually don’t
feel so great,” or “Maybe the
boss doesn’t really like me.” Davidson is investigating
whether the brain areas associated
with this “self-referential processing” may be much less
active in the monks, whether
they’re meditating or not; indeed, he speculates that
superadvanced practitioners may
perceive little or no difference in the two states.
Research
increasingly shows that just as regular physical exercise can transform
the proverbial 110-pound weakling into an athlete, focusing
workouts can make you
more focused, engaged with life, and perhaps even kinder.
“My strong intuition is that
attentional training is very much like the sports or musical
kinds,” says Davidson. “It’s
not something you can just do for a couple of weeks or
years, then enjoy lifelong
benefits. To maintain an optimum level of any complex skill
takes work, and like great
athletes and virtuosos, great meditators continue to drill
intensively.”
Just as a good gym
routine includes both upper- and lower-body exercises, an
ideal attentional regimen would target both cognitive and
affective fitness with a
combination of exercises that strengthen concentration and
benignity. Just as they now
gauge your body mass index or core strength, professionals
will someday be able to
assess your attentional and emotional style, says Davidson,
then help you select the right
training method. Meanwhile, “just as you have to search for
the right kind of physical
exercise program that meshes with who you are, you might
have to spend some time
finding out which of the hundreds of kinds of meditation you
really enjoy and can
commit to.”
Meditation is not
the only way in which you can use attention to change your
neurophysiology and experience, but at present, these
practices are the best understood,
most accessible, and most clearly beneficial regimens. “It
may well be that fly-fishing,
say, engages a similar kind of focus,” says Davidson, “but
you probably don’t get to do
that very often. Most people could meditate daily, and the
more you practice, the better
you get. Our data directly correlate the number of hours
spent with the magnitude of the
changes in the brain signals.”
When he tells the
monks that William James observed that a person can’t focus
steadily on an object for more than three or four seconds,
“they just laugh,” says
Davidson. “They can’t believe that someone I hold in such
high regard would say
something so stupid, so inconceivable. They think that
controlling your attention is within
the inherent capability of all human beings, and that it’s
foolish not to develop that
capacity.”
45
NOT JUST YOUR
temperament and personal experience but also your culture
affects the relationship between your attention and
identity. It increasingly seems that the
“smart baby” theorists of the past twenty years were wrong
and the Swiss developmental
psychologist Jean Piaget was right: infants are born
ignorant. Except for a few hard-wired
instincts, such as an attraction to human faces, babies have
to construct knowledge from
experience and learn what to attend to. Much depends on who
is doing the teaching, and
where.
As election-year
politics invariably make plain, even in a single country or
community, individuals from different social backgrounds
confronting the same situation
often attend to very different realities. In The Big Sort,
Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing
argue that in a polarized red-versus-blue America, you’re
likely to know only people who
share your worldview and focus on the same issues: gay
rights or right to life, greenhouse
gases or the price of gas.
In his research on
how cultural experience influences what you pay attention to,
the University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett
found that in America’s once
Wild West and South, a disproportionate number of males are
still reared in an
old-fashioned “honor culture,” which trains them to focus on
whether they’re being
treated rudely or well in any situation and to zero in on
the hint of an insult. For most
other Americans, a cheating spouse or misplaced property
fence is a legal matter to be
settled by lawyers, but for them, such occurrences are overt
manifestations of disrespect
and egregious affronts that must be personally countered or
avenged.
The choleric honor
ethos that still prevails in much of the South and West is
rooted in the old Scots-Irish and Hispanic herding cultures,
whose descendants have
settled much of those areas. (Exhibit A: the former
secretary of the navy and now
Virginia senator Jim Webb’s Born Fighting: How the
Scots-Irish Formed America.)
“Herders are tough, because they can lose their cattle or
sheep—everything—in an
instant,” says Nisbett. “So for them, it’s ‘Don’t mess with
me!’” Reared in this bellicose
tradition, “many men from these regions feel they must
respond directly with violence or
the threat of it to any insult or infraction, especially if
it concerns home and family.”
The extent to which
your cultural experience helps select what you pay attention
to and shape who you are is vividly illustrated by research
that contrasts how Westerners
perceive the world compared to East Asians—and basically,
the rest of the human race.
In one of Nisbett’s studies, some Americans and Japanese are
shown an underwater scene
for twenty seconds, and then are asked what they saw. The
Americans say something
like, “There were three big blue fish swimming off to the
left. They had pink stipples on
the belly and big back fins.” The Japanese, however, respond
this way: “It looked like a
stream. The water was green. There were rocks on the bottom,
and some plants and fish.”
In other words, the two groups looked at the same scene, but
they attended to very
different realities. The Westerners zeroed in on what seemed
like the most important
thing, but the Asians focused on the relationships between
things.
The different
attentional styles of the West and most of the world are underscored
by an experiment in which some Americans and Japanese first
looked at pictures of some
46
familiar everyday objects. Then they were shown certain of
those things in the same
context and others in a new setting. The Americans
recognized the objects when they
were presented in a different milieu, but the Japanese
didn’t. “The change in setting just
throws them,” says Nisbett. “Americans don’t attend to
context anyway, so the difference
doesn’t matter.”
After a dozen years
of investigation, Nisbett is convinced that Homo sapiens’
natural inclination is to attend to and think about the
world in a holistic way, as East
Asians do. Instead of focusing in on the environment’s most
significant feature, such as
those three bright, centrally located tropical fish, in the
Western fashion, our species
evolved to take in the big picture: the entire aquatic
context, of which the fish are just a
part. By nature, human beings are also inclined to consider
each situation on a
case-by-case basis, as Asians do, rather than to sort things
according to the laws of logic
and categorization, like Westerners. As Nisbett puts it
simply, “In most of the world,
people’s range of focus is much broader than ours.”
The human being’s
naturally expansive, relational focus on reality was radically
altered in the West when the ancient Greeks came up with a
new, artificial, analytical
way of attending to the world. Ever since, Western children
have learned to focus on
objects or subjects in an evaluative, logical way. We scan a
situation, quickly seize on
what seems most significant, label it, then apply
categorical rules to explain it or make
predictions about it, says Nisbett, “and all with a view of
controlling it.”
The attentional
habit of sizing up a situation in a way that prepares you to take
charge of it is a cornerstone of Western individualism. This
master-of-my-fate ethic and
the categorical, logical focusing style that supports it
confer many advantages. It was the
Greeks, after all, who invented science, which is all about
thinking in terms of types and
rules rather than individual circumstances. Where the
drawbacks are concerned, as
Nisbett says, “Many Westerners don’t look to the left or the
right to see what other
people might want or need. After I give a lecture, an
American will just say, ‘Swell talk!’
But a Japanese person might say, ‘You seemed nervous.’ ”
Similarly, Asians’
focus on context and relationships supports their more
collectivist ethic. Compared to individualistic Westerners,
East Asians are generally
better at picking up social cues and affective nuances and
at functioning cooperatively.
This attentiveness to their wider social and physical
context reflects their long historical
experience in densely populated, highly interdependent
societies. To function efficiently
in such circumstances, you need very clear roles and rules
about relationships. “Asians
almost never act in an autonomous Western way,” says
Nisbett. “In order to get things
done, they have to coordinate with others much more than we
do. So they look at the
world through a wide-angle lens.”
To illustrate this
vast East-West difference in attending to social cues, Nisbett
describes an experiment in which some members of the two
groups are shown drawings
of a cartoon character who looks irate, puzzled, or joyful
and is flanked by other such
figures. Then the subjects are asked, “What’s the expression
on the central guy’s face?”
The Westerners simply look at the character and reply,
“Angry” or “Happy.” Because
they also take in the surrounding faces, however, the Asians
make comments like, “He
looks happy, but the people around him don’t, so maybe he’s
not really happy.” As
Nisbett says, “Asians just aren’t capable of ignoring the
social context.”
Not infrequently,
these broad cultural differences in attention are reflected in
47
East-West clashes in world events. In the run-up to the 2008
Olympics in Beijing, the
Chinese public on the one hand and Americans and Europeans
on the other were locked
in mutual incomprehension regarding Tibetans’ violent
struggle for independence. The
former focused on the threat to collective harmony and a
unified motherland, and the
latter on the Tibetans’ right to autonomy and freedom. A few
years before, the clashing
worldviews fueled a crisis when an American spy plane was
damaged by a Chinese jet
fighter and forced to land on Chinese territory. The Chinese
refused to send the American
crew back until the United States apologized. The American
government’s response was,
“Why should we? The Chinese pilot’s carelessness caused the
accident.” But to the
Chinese, says Nisbett, “that was a bizarre explanation,
because we had been spying on
China and had invaded their airspace. Because we throw away
that kind of context, to us,
all that had happened was that their plane struck our
plane.”
Bringing his
observations about culture and attention back home to America once
more, Nisbett raises the fraught subject of race and
academic achievement. “You focus
on what your culture tells you to focus on,” he says. “Black
culture traditionally hasn’t
told you to be smart in school and to work hard, because
your effort would benefit the
slave-owner, not you.” Times have changed, and over the past
thirty years of increasing
racial justice, the average black IQ has already risen five
points. Moreover, blacks now
rank first in surveys of the importance various ethnic
groups ascribe to education.
Nevertheless, compared to other groups, blacks still do a
fraction of the homework,
which suggests that these students aren’t highly focused on
scholastics as yet. In contrast,
Asian students actually achieve much more than their IQs
would seem to predict, because
they work so hard in school. Thanks to their culture’s stress
on academic achievement
and not shaming the family, says Nisbett, “a
Chinese-American with an IQ of 100
achieves at the level of a white American with an IQ of
120.”
After much study,
Nisbett concludes that neither the systematic Western nor
holistic Eastern way of attending to reality is right or
wrong, good or bad, per se. It’s just
that, as Kaiping Peng, the Chinese graduate student who
first inspired him to look into
these cultural differences, once said to him, “You and I
think about the world completely
differently. You think it’s a line, and I think it’s a
circle.”
RESEARCH FROM FIELDS
as different as neuroscience and anthropology
shows that what you pay attention to shapes your brain and
behavior in surprising ways
that would have been hard to imagine even at the turn of
this young century. Whether
you’ve paid rapt attention to classical music, like Joshua
Bell, or compassion, like the
Tibetan monks; focused on the big picture, like a Japanese,
or the one big thing, like an
ancient Greek; perceived the world as a line, like the
American professor, or as a circle,
like his Chinese protégé—such differences have helped to
make you who you are. The
good news, however, is that attention’s ability to change
your brain and transform your
experience isn’t limited to childhood but prevails
throughout life.
CHAPTER 6
48
Relationships:
Attending to Different Worlds
Attention, from the
Latin for “reach toward,” is the most basic ingredient in any
relationship, from a casual friendship to a lifelong
marriage. Giving and receiving the
undivided sort, however briefly, is the least that one
person can do for another and
sometimes the most. In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
describes the final courtesy
that even the failed, deluded, doomed Willy Loman deserves,
because “he’s a human
being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So
attention must be paid.”
Because it’s
impossible to communicate, much less bond, with someone who
can’t or won’t focus on you, that capacity is crucial even
to exchanges between people
and the interactive robots designed to do their bidding. For
that reason, MIT’s Rodney
Brooks, founder of iRobot, is particularly proud of Mertz, a
mechanical grandchild
created by his former student Lijin Aryananda, because the
fetching machine adeptly
expresses “beingness” by paying attention to you and
engaging your attention to . . . it?
Her?
Mertz’s most
distinctive features are the big, blinking eyes, emphasized by strong
brows, that dominate its childlike, Kewpie doll head. Behind
these baby blues are camera
sensors programmed to recognize and respond to human faces.
When you interact, Mertz
locks eyes with you, signaling the robotic version of rapt
attention, then chats about what
you want it to do. This personable machine once enjoyed an
active social life on the MIT
campus, where it would tune in on and interact with
passersby whom it had learned to
identify visually as individuals. As you approached, says
Brooks fondly, “Mertz would
say to itself, ‘There’s P327,’ even if you wore different
clothes or changed your hair
style. Ideally, it would learn to recognize your voice,
too.”
In principle, Brooks
believes that robots are capable not only of paying and
receiving attention but also of “all the aspects of
humanness and beingness. Whether
today’s machines have them or whether we’re smart enough to
build them are different
questions.” He once defined artificial beingness as inherent
in a machine that could affect
us “sort of like children,” but he now says, “a robot can be
a being with a lot less than
that. After all, we regard animals as beings.”
Intrigued by the
“monkey see, monkey do” antics of his macaques, the University
of Parma neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti traced that
copycat behavior to the “mirror
neurons” that help forge the close connection between
attention and social behavior.
When animal A merely watches animal B doing a task, these
nerve cells are activated in
the same way as if A itself were doing the chore. In human
beings, mirror neurons are
thought to help us understand others’ behavior and to foster
empathy, appropriate facial
expressions, and language. Evolution seems to have designed
us to pay attention to others
not just so that we can do what they do, but also to feel
what they feel.
Because the
capacities are crucial to beingness, interactive robots are designed to
portray both attending and being attended to. Long before
Mertz, the humanoid robot
Cog used eye movements and head tilts—two major indications
of focus for machines
and people alike—to indicate that it had zeroed in on
something you had shown it. You
know such a robot is paying attention to you when it bats
its eyes and cocks its head, and
it responds to similar cues from you. “As you check his
eyes, he’s also checking yours,”
says Brooks. “Without words, you can use your gaze or
gestures to indicate your
49
attention and direct his.” Thus, if you’re showing the robot
how to do a task, “you
continually glance at his eyes to see if he’s watching and
if he ‘gets it,’ just as you would
with a person. If he’s not looking, you chastise him—‘Pay
attention!’”
Just as it suggests
beingness in general, attention conveys a capacity for emotion
in particular, which fosters a sense of bonding. For this
reason, intelligent robots are
surprisingly good at wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
Brooks recalls a sociable
machine called Kismet, which could detect approval or
disapproval in your voice, react
internally, then display the appropriate affective response
with her puppetlike face, voice,
and head movements.
The “Bicentennial
Man” of the eponymous movie is Brooks’s favorite celebrobot,
but far less sophisticated machines than R2D2 and C3PO can
engage your attention and
emotions. A prime example is Brooks’s Roomba, that cunning
little vacuum cleaner with
a mind of its own, which now has 2 million enthusiasts, some
of whom name their
gadgets and even buy special clothes for them. Young army
troops similarly name and
bond with the little tanks that iRobot designed to detect
deadly roadside IEDs in Iraq,
where they’ve significantly cut casualties. If their mechanical
protector gets damaged,
says Brooks, “the soldiers will bring it in to the repair
shop and wait for it to get fixed,
like you would for a friend in an ER, rather than just take
another machine.” This strong
attachment particularly interests him, because unlike Mertz,
Cog, Kismet, and their ilk,
these martial robots don’t have eyes or faces. On the other
hand, on behalf of their
humans, the machines pay keen attention of a lifesaving
sort.
No one could have
imagined, even twenty-five years ago, how much machines
have increased our ability to crunch information, and it’s
not far-fetched to think that they
could also improve our capacity for attention, which is,
after all, the neurological
gatekeeper of data. “The trouble about the future is that
you don’t know it,” says Brooks,
“but some things could certainly change the way attention
happens.” Right in his own
home, he’s tracking one such attentional development that
could have profound future
implications for our relationships. An electronic
communications gap has been widening
among his four children. Compared to her three older
siblings, who range in age to a ripe
old twenty-three, Brooks’s youngest child, eighteen, spends
much more time
instant-messaging multiple friends and SMS-ing on her phone.
She has also more or less
jettisoned e-mail in favor of Facebook.
The young lady’s
dad, who’s no slouch in the electronics department, is struck by
her ease at attending to many simultaneous interactions,
which he partly attributes to the
fluid switching promoted by a computer screen that separates
bits of input both
temporally and spatially. “That computer’s capacity to
time-slice allows her to focus on
many more conversations than I’d be happy with!” he says,
“but people under twenty can
adapt to that kind of technological development. That
machine is an example of an
external device that has already changed our species’
ability to attend.”
LEAVING ASIDE THE
question of whether focusing on multiple electronic
50
communications seemingly at once is a good thing, lots of
research shows that simply
paying attention to someone else—the essence of bonding—is
highly beneficial for both
parties. Indeed, having social ties is the single best
predictor of a longer, healthier, more
satisfying life.
At the very least,
paying attention to someone else confers the big psychological
benefits of structuring your experience and distracting you
from the self-referential
rumination that so often takes a negative cast. Then too,
like youths who fixate on sports
heroes or other role models, you can direct your focus to a
certain person in order to
influence the way you currently regard yourself. Research by
the Canadian psychologist
Joanne Wood shows that if you want to feel better about who
you are, you should
concentrate on someone of lower status, but if you’re trying
to get motivated, you should
fix on a person who outranks you.
Attending to others
also invites interaction and feedback, which help you feel
useful and connected to the larger world. When employees
focus on how their efforts
affect other people, rather than just on the details of
their tasks, their sense of relationship
boosts both their satisfaction and their productivity. Thus,
cafeteria line workers who can
see their satisfied customers are more contented than
employees buried back in the
kitchen, and fund-raisers who first spend ten minutes with
scholarship students drum up
twice as much money for their schools.
Paying attention is
an individual effort, but it’s also a kind of social cement that
holds groups together and helps them feel part of something
greater than themselves.
When they’re focused on either a social activity or a task,
the moods of even fragile or
stressed people, including breast-cancer patients, bulimics,
and chronic depressives, are
no different from those of average subjects in control
groups but drop precipitously when
they’re alone or have nothing to attend to.
Simple socializing
is good, but as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Jefferson and
Madison, and Butch and Sundance knew, hanging out with a
kindred spirit who focuses
not just on you but also on the same hopes and dreams is
even better. As well-matched
tennis partners, chess players, book-group members, and
spouses can attest, along with
the benefits of bonding, such relationships provide a benign
stimulus to be, as the marines
put it, “the best you can be.”
The message that
paying attention to the other guy often helps you more than him
is not one that you often hear from the therapy and
psychopharmacology industries. In
their different ways, each encourages you to look inward,
whether psychologically or
biologically, for answers to a better life. Yet at least one
author of best sellers on
happiness, who’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot, is all
about others. As the Dalai
Lama puts it, “My religion is kindness.”
IT’S NOT A
coincidence that the Dalai Lama and his worldview are rooted in the
traditions of other-directed, interdependent Asian village
life, variations of which still
obtain in much of the world. An anthropologist, linguist,
winner of the MacArthur
51
“genius” award, and director of UCLA’s Center on Everyday
Lives of Families, Elinor
Ochs has studied how children are socialized and learn
language in parts of the
developing world as well as in white middle-class America.
After defining attention as “a
focus on a point of orientation that can be at once
perceptual, conceptual, and social,” she
identifies two broad cultural variations in the way it
affects family relationships.
In
it-takes-a-village societies such as Samoa, people are encouraged from very
early life to direct their attention outward to others.
Children are cared for by friends and
relatives as well as parents and are actively taught to
notice other people and their needs.
When carried, babies are held outward on the hip or perched
so they can peep over the
caregiver’s shoulder. Even before they can talk, these tots
are primed to attend to what
others are doing and feeling. As Ochs says, “In their
culture, the priority is to be
relational and person-oriented.”
In contrast to the
outward, other-directed focus that prevails in much of the world,
people in the highly individualistic West are encouraged
early on to concentrate on their
own needs and desires. Instead of mostly being carried,
babies are held at arm’s length in
strollers, high chairs, car seats, or other devices; they
sleep in their own cribs and even
rooms, which would be unthinkable elsewhere. During the
preschool years, the child’s
social circle is often limited to parents, perhaps a
babysitter, and a few others. As if to
reinforce their highly personalized experience, Western
children are encouraged to pay
lots of attention to objects. “Even little babies have
toys,” says Ochs, “and they’re taught
to pay attention to their shapes and colors.” (Despite the
claims made for products
marketed to hopeful parents, one study showed that rather
than creating infant geniuses,
focusing babies aged eight to sixteen months on “educational”
videos actually impedes
their verbal development; each hour of viewing per day
correlated with a child’s knowing
six to eight fewer words than unwired peers.)
These big cultural
differences in what children are trained to attend to and the
consequences for relationships come across in the very
different expectations of small
children in “the West and the rest,” as it’s sometimes
baldly put. By the age of four, for
example, Samoan children contribute to society, helping to
care for younger siblings and
carrying messages for adults. That tots should work for the
commonweal sounds like
abuse to most Westerners, who assume that young children
either can’t or shouldn’t have
to respond to others’ needs.
The ways in which
American culture’s individualistic, object-oriented focus
affects its social life often surface in the UCLA center’s
research on families. To provide
in-depth information about what our fast-changing domestic
experience is really like, its
team of twenty-one scientists from different disciplines has
spent four years minutely
observing and analyzing—right down to the stress chemicals
in their saliva samples—the
lives of thirty-two families from across the socioeconomic
spectrum. In one illuminating
study, they examined a seemingly important moment in the
day—the parents’
homecoming in the evening—and found that the overriding
dynamic was the children’s
continued focus on their own little worlds, often
electronic. For that matter, spouses paid
little more attention to each other than their kids did to
them. A child might briefly tune
in on a returning mother. Over 80 percent of the time,
however, fathers were either
ignored or treated as a “secondary focus,” perhaps meriting
a wave or a high five. The
bottom line, says Ochs, is that it’s “rare” for a child to
get up and say to a returning
parent, “How are you?”
52
If there’s one
hallowed, Norman Rockwell moment in which family members are
supposed to pay attention to one another, it’s dinnertime.
Yet the UCLA team found a
stark contrast between the reverent lip service paid to the
ritual and the widespread
avoidance of the actual experience. On one hand, Ochs says,
Americans assert that
gathering the family around the table every night is very
important and that not doing so
is “the reason for drugs, delinquency, obesity—everything!”
On the other hand, the
families in the study dine together only 17 percent of the
time, even if everyone is at
home.
To put it mildly, as
Ochs says, the postmodern dinner is “no longer about ‘Let’s
all sit down and say grace together.’” Rather than focusing
family members on each other
around the groaning board, the new custom is a “staggered
meal” that occurs at different
times, in different rooms, and with different participants.
On a typical evening, two
people might eat take-out chicken in the kitchen. Someone
else wanders in and joins, then
one person leaves. Upstairs, yet another member nibbles on
pizza while working on a
computer.
Interestingly, when
asked why they don’t dine together more often, families
answer with the ubiquitous “busy-busy” lament that other
unavoidable commitments—to
jobs, meetings, lessons, sports—have forced them to cut back
on time for domestic
togetherness. Crocodile tears notwithstanding, the
researchers discovered surprisingly
little objective support for this assertion. Instead, says
Ochs, “We simply found that some
families make dinner together a priority, and most don’t.”
The UCLA team finds
that, even when they make the effort to eat together,
families often undermine the desired feeling of fellowship
by focusing on the wrong
things. Once at table, a dramatic shift occurs, and all eyes
are trained on the
hitherto-ignored paterfamilias. Suddenly, he becomes what
Ochs calls “the Supreme
Lord—or the High Executioner,” who’s in charge of evaluating
the day’s events. Mothers
tend to pick the subject—“Tell Dad what happened at
school”—and fathers provide the
judgment: “That’s a very good grade” or “You should have
practiced harder.” Fathers
almost never focus on their own daily experience, however,
and when they do, their
narrative style doesn’t encourage feedback. In contrast to
the moms’ and kids’
open-ended, participatory approach—“How should I deal with
this situation?”—the men
go for “Here’s how I’m handling it.”
As if to compound
the chilling effect of dinnertime’s judicial focus, parents also
concentrate on prying information from their suddenly mute
progeny, which of course
drives the kids to escape a.s.a.p. In a typical scenario,
Dad grills teenaged Susie about the
boy who has been hanging around lately, then criticizes him:
“Has he ever been to a
barber? He looks like he does drugs.” Susie is outraged,
even Mother gets upset, and
suddenly the table turns into what Ochs calls “a
battleground.”
In a more perfect
world, instead of acting like the Supreme Court or the FBI at
dinnertime, parents would focus everyone on
nonconfrontational conversation. They’d
encourage anyone so inclined to raise a topic and invite
feedback, and also accept “just
listening.” If Johnny brings up his dismal math grade, Dad
will stifle the urge to issue a
verdict and ask why his son thinks he did poorly on the
test. Does he need some tutoring?
Mom might wonder if it would be a good idea to do his math
homework before rather
than after dinner, when the house is quiet and Johnny’s not
so tired. Susie might recall
having the same trouble with plane geometry and getting
extra help from the teacher. By
53
focusing together on an everyday issue in a nonjudgmental
way, says Ochs, “a family can
exchange information, air different viewpoints, and test out
new strategies, which not
only solves problems but also cements relationships.”
When he watches his
UCLA team’s videotapes, the psychologist Thomas
Bradbury sometimes notices a new kind of parental
hyperattention to children’s résumés,
which makes him “feel uncomfortable, because that’s my life,
too.” As husband, father,
and professional observer of how relationships develop, he
thinks that this newly vigilant
parental focus reflects the conflict between America’s
venerable ethic of upward mobility
and its increasingly downwardly mobile socioeconomic
conditions. Higher education was
once a guarantee of prosperity, but for the first time in
the nation’s history, job stability
for a college graduate is the same as a high school
graduate’s. “We want our kids to do
better than we’ve done,” says Bradbury, “but there’s a
growing divide between the haves
and have-nots. Middle-class parents fear that for their
kids, it could go either way. The
only control we have is to make sure they get those violin
lessons and test-prep classes.
We invest more time and energy in the kids so they can make
their way, which also
means they stay dependent on us for a longer time.”
A companion study
conducted in Rome allows the UCLA project to make some
revealing cross-cultural comparisons of what American and
Italian families focus on.
“The American model is to be very hard-driving,” says
Bradbury. “We only take fourteen
holidays a year, and some Europeans take thirty-nine. So the
big question for us might be
‘Are we concentrating enough on where the kids will go to
college?’ versus ‘Are we
paying enough attention to the quality of life?’ Romans may
live in tiny apartments, but
they have a lightness and harmony about them that we don’t
have.”
IN “THE SOUL selects
her own Society,” Emily Dickinson describes the
exclusive, rapt focus that marks your closest ties:
I’ve known her—from an ample nation—Choose One—Then—close
the Valves of her
attention—Like Stone—
The relationship most associated with such intimacy, or the
intense attachment that’s rooted in each partner’s special
concentration on the other, has
traditionally been considered integral to the good life, yet
marriage seems increasingly
endangered. In sharp contrast to a dramatic increase in
cohabitation, the number of
wedded couples is falling. Because informal domestic
relationships tend to be less stable
and more conflicted, this big change poses obvious cultural
and socioeconomic risks,
particularly for the women and children who end up as
single-parent families. Yet as the
director of the UCLA family project’s “marriage lab,”
Bradbury is equally concerned
about the implications for adults’ well-being, because
“marriage seems like the last
bastion of relationships in which people are still committed
to attending to one another.”
A profound focus on
your partner is, was, and always will be the distinguishing
characteristic of an intimate bond such as marriage—at
least, that’s the theory, says
Bradbury. “Nevertheless, I’m continually impressed by the
inconsistency of sustained
attention in relationships. Partners complain about this all
the time, and kids probably
54
would, too, if they could. We’ve evolved with the capacity
to attend to each other, but it’s
not exactly dominant in our lives. Imagine a world where it
was!”
In that ideal realm,
you not only would pay particular attention to your partner but
would do so in an especially constructive way. In fact,
research shows that contented
spouses see each other through rose-colored glasses, holding
an even more favorable
view than their partners have of themselves. That’s nice,
but in her studies of these
“positive illusions,” Sandra Murray, a psychologist at the
State University of New York
at Buffalo, finds evidence of something even better: over
time, each person actually
becomes more like the mate’s benignly biased vision.
A study with the
seemingly counterintuitive title of “Will You Be There for Me
When Things Go Right?” highlights more benefits of
maintaining a positive focus on
your beloved—and vice versa. Shelly Gable, a psychologist at
the University of
California at Santa Barbara, asked partners to share a piece
of personal good fortune with
their mate, and then to evaluate his or her reaction. Rather
than addressing the positive
event in the abstract—“A raise? Nice goin’, hon!”—the
responders who got gold stars
focused on the good news as an expression or consequence of
the partner’s own best or
authentic self: “You got that raise because only someone
with your guts and ingenuity
could have won that big account!” Such affirmative reactions
aren’t just flattering, but
also let the other guy relive the experience, thus
increasing its pleasure quotient. Popular
wisdom aside, says Gable, the way in which a couple attends
to the good things that
happen in both of their lives actually correlates more
closely with their well-being than
the way they deal with the tough stuff.
Along with paying
especially solicitous attention to each other, each party in a
relationship must also try to focus on the world through the
other person’s eyes. Such
attentional flexibility is difficult, but a particularly
creative experiment conducted back in
the 1970s shows that it’s not impossible. First, half of the
subjects were told they were
“home-buyers,” and the other half that they were “burglars.”
Then, both groups were
asked to read the same description of a house. When quizzed
later, the buyers had
understandably focused on the house’s layout, rooms, and
dimensions, and the burglars
on the locations of the valuables; neither group’s members
could recall much else about
the home. Next, the researchers told their subjects to
change roles. Suddenly, the new
burglars remembered the expensive possessions and their
whereabouts, while the new
buyers recalled the floor plan, room sizes, and window
placement.
In real life,
however, even a devoted couple can find sharing another’s focus from
day to day to be a formidable challenge. Shaped by your
nature and nurture, your
particular way of paying attention contributes to your
unique perspective, which by
definition complicates seeing things from someone else’s.
Yet particularly when you live
with someone, it’s easy to assume you share the same
reality. By way of illustration,
Bradbury recalls counseling a young man and woman who were
contemplating wedlock
during one mad-hot Midwestern summer. Finally, he says, the
woman grew very upset
and said, “‘I really don’t think we should marry. Things
have changed. In fact, we barely
make love anymore.’ The guy looked at her and said, ‘I
thought we weren’t having sex
because the air conditioner is broken.’”
As this illuminating
anecdote suggests, attention’s selective nature guarantees that
even in a close relationship, two partners often focus on
different realities. In what
Bradbury calls “a watershed study,” spouses were given a
long checklist of events and
55
activities and asked to tick off the ones that had occurred
over the course of a week:
candlelit dinners, fights, lovemaking, problems with a
child—marriage’s whole nine
yards. When the data were analyzed, the percentage of
agreement between husbands and
wives was at the level of mere chance. “It’s not just that
we have different feelings and
experiences,” Bradbury says. “My wife is attending to a
totally different world than I am.
She has to try to share her world with me, because I don’t
have access to it. That’s why
communication matters so much.”
Something of the
importance of the ability to share a focus and communicate
comes across in a UCLA study of housework. Videotapes of how
couples divide up
chores revealed two basic approaches. Partners in one camp
concentrate together on a list
of routine tasks, figure out a scheme for handling them—he
washes the dishes, she cooks,
or vice versa—then mostly stick to the plan and mind their
own business. Couples in the
other group have a very different way of focusing on even
regularly occurring chores,
such as taking out the trash and doing the laundry. They
treat each occasion as if it were
the first time, which means they continually negotiate who’s
responsible. If Joey has to
get to his piano lesson every Wednesday, a simple errand
that could have easily been
scheduled for a whole year becomes a weekly wrangle that
drains both partners’ finite
supplies of attention and good humor. In a healthy
relationship, says Bradbury, “you
work out a lot of things so that you don’t have to keep
attending to and talking about
them.”
According to
conventional wisdom, gender is a major reason why spouses attend
to two different worlds—Mars and Venus, for example—and have
trouble bridging the
gap. Women are generally thought to be “better” at
relationships because they focus on
others more than men typically do. In one exercise conducted
by Bradbury and his
colleague Benjamin Karney, partners are asked to identify
something about themselves
that they’d like to change—to become better organized, say,
or to exercise more. Then
their spouses are asked to be supportive of that goal. In
the UCLA lab, men and women
are equally enthusiastic about the idea of cheerleading, but
the diaries they keep at home
show that the wives are likelier to follow through. Rather
than attributing this greater
attentiveness to female nature, however, Bradbury looks to a
dynamic that’s more
complicated than gender per se: the balance of power.
In any relationship,
from student and teacher to boss and worker, the person of
lower status benefits by paying careful attention to the
person with more clout. In modern
marriages, some wives now have equal or higher socioeconomic
standing than their
husbands, but many still don’t. Thus, says Bradbury, “For
the time being, women are
likelier than men to say, ‘Honey, how was your day?’”
When there’s trouble
in a relationship, men and women exercise equal rights
regarding the conviction that it’s the other person’s fault.
The resulting clash of divergent
realities invariably animates the first three hours of
marriage counseling. “It’s all about
finger-pointing,” says Bradbury. “‘He’s the problem,’ and
‘She’s the problem.’” The risk
is that as time passes, the rift between those parallel
universes can grow: “That’s why you
have to make the effort to come together and process your
experiences jointly, so you
really are paying attention to the same world.”
Often, the
all-too-natural tendency to see things only from your own point of view
and to blame the other guy first can be traced to a
“fundamental attribution error,” which
undermines the common focus required to solve problems. Once
you’re in the thrall of
56
such a self-protective distortion, you see your mate’s
behavior in terms of what kind of
person he or she is. When you think of your own behavior,
however, you see it in a
larger, explicatory context. If you have a car accident, you
rationalize: “I was caught in a
terrible downpour,” or “My coffee cup started leaking.” If
your partner has a crash,
however, you think, or even say, “A maniac behind the wheel!
Always tailgating!” As
Bradbury puts it, “For you, the problem resulted from a
situation that anyone would have
responded to in that same way. But the other driver has no
business being on the road.”
Domestic life offers
numerous opportunites to succumb to fundamental attribution
errors. When your mate acts grouchy after dinner, you might
silently or vociferously
react thus: “Moody again! That’s just who you are. How did I
ever end up with you?” A
better plan, suggests Bradbury, would be to take a deep
breath, then ask him about his
day. He gets to vent about colleagues who haven’t been doing
their fair share of the work,
and you get to focus on the situation from his perspective,
grasp the circumstances that
constrain his behavior, and respond in a way that benefits
you both.
Then too, even in
strong couples, partners are sometimes in different moods,
which manifest as clashing views of what would seem to be
the same world. Because
thoughts and feelings go hand in glove, you process
information in a way that jibes with
your current emotional state. If you’re feeling fried
because you just lost your wallet, that
edginess casts a pall over your focus on a neutral or even
positive situation. Bradbury
imagines an evening when you hear your partner return from a
business trip. “If you’re
feeling lousy, you might think, ‘He slammed that door just
to bug me!’” he says. “If
you’re in a good frame of mind, you say, ‘Gee, it must be
really windy.’ ”
“Happy families are
all alike,” wrote Tolstoy, “but every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way.” Despite his assertion, research
highlights certain commonalities
in the lives of troubled as well as contented couples,
including some big differences in
how they deploy attention. The most important such
distinction is the happy pairs’
resolute focus on the positive. In a good relationship, says
Bradbury, “when your partner
brings home flowers, you say, ‘How thoughtful! A symbol of
our love! We’ll enjoy them
all during dinner!’ In a poor relationship, you say, ‘Did
you do something wrong? Were
flowers on sale? Daisies make me sneeze.’ ”
In a maladaptive
version of the Punch-and-Judy dynamic called the
“demand-withdraw pattern,” some unhappy partners forgo a
shared reality to focus on
their own stale, gripe-based, finger-pointing scripts. One
partner, often female,
chronically complains about the emotional detachment of the
other, usually male: “You
don’t care.” He responds by becoming even colder and more
remote: “Nothing I do
satisfies you anyway.” Once this vicious circle gets
established, refocusing on other
views of life and ways of communicating takes real effort.
Differences in
self-esteem also influence how couples attend to and interpret their
romantic partners and relationships. Sandra Murray finds
that people who have a strong
sense of their own worth trust that their mates also respect
and admire them; they don’t
brood about being overly dependent or getting rejected. When
their partners compliment
their strengths, the positive attention is pleasant enough
but doesn’t change their feeling
of commitment and security within the relationship one way
or the other. In contrast,
people who have low self-esteem assume that their mates
share their own poor opinion,
so being praised does ease anxiety about rejection. However,
because they also fear that
their partners are “out of their league,” they don’t return
the compliments; instead, hoping
57
to make themselves feel more secure, they harp on their
mates’ flaws. By paying more
attention to guarding against possible pain than to building
the pleasures of intimacy, they
end up undermining the very bond they’re afraid of losing.
No matter what
problem might arise in a relationship, the first step toward solving
it generally involves redirecting your attention—usually
outward to the other person.
“That’s part of the deal,” says Bradbury, “but it’s not
always easy.” One reason is that
focusing on an emotional issue can be painful and involves
being vulnerable. Once you
realize that that’s true for both of you, however, it
becomes easier to accept that you have
to pick up on certain cues that your partner throws off,
because they signal a situation that
requires your attention. Once again, says Bradbury, practice
makes perfect: “The more I
know that my partner’s interests run with my own, the less I
feel threatened by
differences, even in arguments, and the more we can forge a
common view of reality and
focus on each other.”
By way of
illustration, let’s say it’s Saturday morning, and instead of sharing your
focus on the usual walk followed by brunch, your mate acts
withdrawn and refuses to go.
This behavior is neither perverse nor accidental, says
Bradbury, but a reflection of
something that your partner may not feel able to express or
even be aware of. Your initial
reaction might be to say, “Wow, you’re so crabby! We all had
a tough week at the office.
What makes you so special?” However, he suggests a wiser
response: “You do seem a
little tired. You relax, and I’ll bring back some fresh
muffins.” Every time you respond
thus unselfishly to your partner, he says, “your generosity
of spirit makes the fabric of
your relationship one stitch stronger.”
Finally, it’s
important for both partners in a relationship to stay focused on the
kind of behavior that brought them together in the first
place and to keep it alive. This is
hardly news to anyone who has ever glanced at a breakfast
show or a women’s magazine,
yet the incidence of candlelit dinners, bouquets, and romantic
poems drops steeply after
the first year or two of marriage, just when such niceties
are really needed. Once your
relationship stabilizes, the positives—his looks, her charm,
their shared sense of
humor—become less positive, says Bradbury, “but the
negatives don’t necessarily
become less negative.” Avoiding this pitfall requires paying
attention to the little things
and imposing strategies, like the good old Friday-night
date, especially one that features a
fresh, highly engaging activity. “Seeing a movie is okay,”
says Bradbury, “but square
dancing is better, because that kind of situation, like
travel, means you really have to
interact. A relationship takes work, and you have to focus
on its maintenance.”
ATTENTION FEELS SO
internal and personal that it’s easy to overlook its
tremendous role in social life. Nevertheless, the first step
toward any relationship is
focusing on someone who returns the favor. If the bond is to
become intimate, both
parties must commit not only to paying rapt attention to the
other, but also to the effort of
seeing that person’s often very different world, which
entails lots of communication.
The home would seem
to be the one place where people focus on each other and
58
share the same reality. Yet some sobering research shows
that, pulled into their own little
worlds by an individualistic me-first culture and
accelerating demands on their attention,
American couples and families often fall short in this
regard.
Particularly in
times of social and economic turmoil, we’re reminded that not only
as individuals but also as members of a society we choose to
focus on certain targets and
suppress others: risky profits or steady savings; McMansions
or “green” homes;
multilateralism or unilateralism; SUVs or mass transit;
celebrity or character. As the
nation faces crises in the economy, the environment,
international affairs, and other vital
areas, we can no longer afford to indulge in the kind of
collective ADHD that’s
symbolized by President Ronald Reagan’s removal of the solar
panels that President
Jimmy Carter had installed in the White House during an
energy crisis thirty years ago. In
short, it has perhaps never been more important for
Americans to join together in
choosing our goals wisely and staying focused on them over
time.
CHAPTER 7
Productivity: Work
Zone
As Freud said, “Love
and work . . . work and love, that’s all there is,” and
attention is as essential to productivity as it is to
relationships. By actively choosing
endeavors that demand your total focus and skillfully using
attention to make even
inevitable rote chores more engaging, you can blur the
distinction between work and
play—a hallmark of the focused life.
Over the past
hundred years, psychologists have tried to deconstruct what makes
something interesting enough to attract and hold your focus,
and their various formulas
have much in common. To William James, rapt attention
requires a target that offers just
the right combination of novelty and familiarity. Imagine,
for example, that after a long,
grey winter, your bleary eye lights on the red breast of the
year’s first robin. Then, your
attentional system kicks in with a memory to add meaning to
the new feathered stimulus:
robins come in the spring, which has always been your
favorite season. Suddenly, you’re
not just glancing at some humdrum bird but focused on a
winged Mercury come to herald
good times.
The most important
dimension of this equation for drawing and retaining your
interest is that neither the familiar nor the novel is
captivating in itself. Like a robin in
July, writes James, “the absolutely old is insipid.”
Similarly, because you’d have no
associations with some drab little bird you’ve never noticed
before, “the absolutely new
makes no appeal at all.” It’s the convergence of the robin’s
unexpected appearance and
its cognitive and affective resonance that makes its debut
the stuff of poetry.
Tracey Burke’s
professional life, which centers on ranching, developed from this
powerful alchemy of the familiar and the fresh. Her graduate
school was a remote
Wyoming cattle spread, whose cowboy owner hired the young
Eastern greenhorn, who’d
recently given up teaching for the ski slopes of Jackson
Hole, to help out during the
summer, when he hosted guests. With a laugh, Burke recalls,
“He said, ‘You can cook,
ride a horse, and do all that stuff, right?’ I couldn’t, but
I was young, so I said okay!”
Born and raised in
mild Maryland, Burke was no cowgirl, so ranching offered
plenty of novelty. On the other hand, she had a math
teacher’s problem-solving mind and
a strong, athletic body developed over years of competitive
swimming and gymnastics, so
59
she felt comfortable with work that called for ingenuity and
physical skill. “How to bake
from scratch, handle the horses, get along without
electricity . . . I just had to figure
things out,” she says. “Those three years of learning were
great.”
With her
employer-turned-husband, Renny Burke, Tracey now runs the
eight-thousand-acre EA Ranch. After you turn off the main
road, you still have a
rough-and-tumble ten-minute drive to the house and
out-buildings, set spectacularly
between a trout stream and the blood-red foothills of the
Absaroka Range. Cattle and
horses graze in the meadows, and you might catch sight of a
moose, elk, bear, osprey, or
even a grey wolf.
Particularly in the
summer, when outdoor chores abound and guests must be
cosseted and fed three homegrown gourmet meals a day, her
share of running the EA
would be a full-time job for most people, but not for Burke.
She also raises sheep for
meat and hides, trains prizewinning herding dogs, gardens,
competes in dressage riding,
cooks professionally, and teaches yoga. Until recently, when
she took up legal mediation,
she was also a ski instructor in Jackson Hole, where she
founded the resort’s twice-yearly
women-only program. In short, this tall, slender,
mild-mannered middle-aged woman
who lives and works way off the bicoastal power grids makes
Jack Welch and Carly
Fiorina look like one-trick ponies.
The American dream
is no longer just to get rich quick, but also to enjoy doing it,
and new captains of industry offer various best-selling
decalogues for achieving this goal.
Their tips range from the philosophical (learn from your
failures) to the practical (never
handle the same piece of paper twice). There’s one insight
into both productivity and
satisfaction that they inevitably share, however: the
importance of laserlike attention to
your goal, be it building a better mousetrap or raising
cattle.
Unless you can
concentrate on what you want to do and suppress distractions, it’s
hard to accomplish anything, period. Whether she’s herding
sheep in the high alpine
desert or negotiating a settlement in a law office, Burke is
right there, as attentive as a
bird dog. According to the underappreciated
mid-twentieth-century psychologist
Nicholas Hobbs, the way to ensure this calm but heightened
attention to the matter at
hand is to choose activities that push you so close to the
edge of your competence that
they demand your absolute focus. In a variation on James’s
recipe for interesting
experience—the familiar leavened by the novel—Hobbs’s “art
of choosing difficulties”
requires selecting projects that are “just manageable.” If
an activity is too easy, you lose
focus and get bored. If it’s too hard, you become anxious,
overwhelmed, and unable to
concentrate. Tellingly, one group is distinguished by its
zeal for the kind of work that
requires you to give it all you’ve got: high achievers
particularly relish taking on risky
projects that have only a 50/50 chance of success.
Considering the
daunting range of skills that have devolved from her embrace of
challenges, it’s comforting to learn that it took Burke,
like many of us, quite a while to
find her vocation. After college and a stint of teaching
that she found “mentally and
emotionally draining,” she went through a “transitional
period,” joining the gang of
young ski bums, cowboys, and mountaineers in the Tetons who
paid for their food,
shelter, and lift tickets by wearing many hats. This
immersion in outdoors thrills and
chills and catch-as-catch-can employment provided Burke with
a valuable crash course in
the rancher’s hardscrabble, just-manageable way of life to
come.
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THE INSIGHTS INTO
rapt attention’s role in human behavior in general and
productivity in particular first contributed by James,
Hobbs, and Abraham Maslow, who
studied “peak experience,” have been greatly expanded by the
more recent research on
“flow” conducted by the Claremont psychologist Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi. This state of
“optimal human experience” kicks in when you’re completely
focused on doing
something that’s both enjoyable and challenging enough to be
just manageable. Either
attention or motivation—the drive that impels you toward a
goal—can jump-start flow,
but both of these major psychological processes must
converge to sustain it.
Like James,
Csíkszentmihályi has taken the study of daily life to a new level and
occupies a place in the pantheon of American psychology. He
also shares his
predecessor’s strong feelings about the importance of
attention, which he regards as
nothing less than “psychology’s bottom line. Any complex
behavioral issue has attention
at its core.” (His attitude is no accident, considering that
he spent most of his career at the
University of Chicago, where the psychology department was
long presided over by the
philosophically minded Carl Rogers and Heinz Kohut, who,
like James, regarded reality
as an intentional, first-person experience that you
construct from the material of
attention.) He stresses that like other kinds of power, this
“psychic energy” is both
necessary to make things happen and finite in supply. In
fact, according to his
calculations, you can only attend to about 110 bits of
information per second (listening to
someone speak, for example, requires processing about 40
bits per second), or about 173
billion bits over an average life span, which underscores
the fact that this resource is as
valuable as it is limited.
Gleaning accurate
information about daily life as it’s actually lived isn’t easy.
Historically, such research has been retrospective and based
on getting subjects to fill out
questionnaires: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how much do you enjoy
your work? How important
is your family?” To investigate the individual’s intentional
and attentional reality with
new rigor, Csíkszentmihályi developed a technique, called
the Experience Sampling
Method, that’s a major innovation in psychological research.
Instead of filling out the
traditional questionnaires, subjects in ESM studies wear
pagers or watches that beep
randomly during two-hour intervals over a period of several
weeks as they go about daily
life. When signaled, they record the most important details
of their situation: location,
activity, thoughts, feelings, presence or absence of others.
This information paints a much
more detailed picture of how a person or a group, such as teenagers
or single parents,
actually experiences real life, compared to what they say
about it later.
Over the past thirty
years, ESM studies conducted with tens of thousands of
people have yielded some stunning insights into what makes
for a high-quality
experience, including its parameters in the workplace, which
is one of Csíkszentmihályi’s
recent particular interests. Whether you’re selling real
estate or training a horse, removing
an appendix or cutting hair, you’re in flow if you’re so
focused on your work that time
flies, your ego drops away, and you act intuitively. You
think along the lines of “I was
born for this” or “This is what it’s all about.” You know
you’re in the right business if
61
you feel that you’d work “for the sheer pleasure”: an
intrinsic reward that’s far more
satisfying than extrinsic ones such as a big salary and
professional recognition, which
depend on comparisons with others.
When asked what kind
of work most engages her focus and produces rewarding
experience, Burke gives an answer unlikely to be heard in
Wall Street or Silicon Valley:
“Something that combines physical activity and
problem-solving!” As she discusses her
varied career, this theme surfaces again and again, whether
she’s talking about irrigating
a hay field, preparing elk steaks for guests, or teaching
yoga. In class, if need be, Burke
can pick up an aspiring yogi like one of her sheep and just
plain put the person in the
right pose, which occasions much mirth. However, what really
engrosses her and sends
her into flow is figuring out how to help a particular
student conquer a demanding asana a
quarter-inch at a time. “I really like the process of
breaking down a skill,” she says, “so
that a person can concentrate on getting it in manageable
steps.”
THE MOST SURPRISING
discovery about the kind of focused, fulfilling
experience that Burke enjoys when teaching yoga or rounding
up cattle is that most
people enjoy so little of it. About 20 percent of people
flow once or more each day; about
15 percent, never; the great majority, only occasionally.
Sadly, many of us spend much of
our time oscillating between states of stress and boredom:
different but equally
unfocused, unproductive, unsatisfying conditions.
We assume that
artists such as Julie Taymor, Elmore Leonard, and Bob Dylan are
lucky enough to delight in and be absorbed by their work,
but surprisingly, so are high
achievers in the business world. Citing his research with
Yvon Chouinard, founder of
Patagonia, Jack Greenberg, CEO of McDonald’s, and their ilk,
Csíkszentmihályi stresses
the tremendous pleasure they derive from what they do. “They
all report that it’s not
enough to be good at the job,” he says. “If you want to be
really effective, they say, you
also have to enjoy your work.”
The specifics of
flowing at work differ for the scientist and the poet, but no matter
what their field, exceptional achievers are characterized as
much by their intense focus as
their ability. In his research on the subject,
Csíkszentmihályi found that in youth, the
Nobel physicist John Bardeen, the writer Denise Levertov,
and the jazz musician Oscar
Peterson were not necessarily more intelligent than other
students, but they already
exercised more “concentrated attention” on the subjects that
interested them. In addition,
such paragons of inventiveness also maintain a wide-angle
perspective on life that
ensures that they will, as Csíkszentmihályi puts it, “be
surprised by something every
day.”
One major reason for
the poor quality of much daily experience is that many
people simply don’t know which activities both provide
enjoyment and require total
focus. Research conducted by the University of Michigan
psychologist Oliver Schultheiss
shows that even when taking the important step of choosing a
career, individuals often
fail to recognize the kind of work that will engage and also
satisfy them. A naturally
62
sociable person brought up to value wealth and status, for
example, might not realize that
she’d be happiest in a “helping” profession such as teaching
and therefore end up as a
rich yet dissatisfied stockbroker. To avoid such frustrating
scenarios, Schultheiss suggests
doing visualization exercises in which you “pre-experience”
a career or other important
goal by imagining yourself pursuing and attaining it, then
judge how emotionally
satisfying that process would be.
In a stunning example
of the kind of mind-set that undermines good daily
experience, most people reflexively say that they prefer
being at home to being at work.
However, flow research shows that on the job, they’re much
likelier to focus on activities
that demand their attention, challenge their abilities, have
a clear objective, and elicit
timely feedback—conditions that favor optimal experience.
Support for these
underremarked workplace gratifications is implied by an
interesting finding from Arlie
Hochschild’s study of employees at a Fortune 500 company:
despite their grumbling and
self-sacrificing talk of improving the family finances, most
parents who opted to work
overtime did so less for the extra money than because life
was just more satisfying at the
office.
Interestingly, to
say that you’re likelier to experience the intensely focused flow
state when you’re on the job isn’t necessarily the same
thing as saying that you feel
“happier” there. Indeed, during a long conversation about a
varied career that she greatly
enjoys, Burke never mentions happiness per se.
Csíkszentmihályi allows that people may
not be whistling while they work, but his research shows
that they do report feeling more
creative, active, concentrated, and involved than they do in
domestic life.
Then too, once
you’re intently focused on what you’re doing, it’s hard to think
about something extraneous, like whether you’re having fun
or not. It’s often only when
you look back on a challenging experience—starting a
company, trekking in a developing
country, competing in a contest—that you can say, “That was
one of the best times in my
life, and I want to do something like that again.” As
Csíkszentmihályi puts it, “If you ask
me while I’m playing tennis if I’m happy, I’ll say, ‘Heck!
Wait a minute . . .’ Happiness
is a later reflection of the flow, rather than the result of
the experience at the time.”
Where the subject of
happiness is concerned, Csíkszentmihályi is among the
scientists who are wary of psychology’s recent loose talk
and generalizations about this
poorly defined condition and its purported prevalence. Based
on his studies of daily
experience conducted over long periods with thousands of
subjects, he says, a benign,
pleasant state “doesn’t seem natural to most people and has
to be worked on and
developed. Those who learn to control their inner experience
will be able to determine
the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us
can come to being happy.”
Regarding the common
assumption that your well-being depends on what
happens to you, Csíkszentmihályi observes that this
destructive notion permeates culture
and language. “German has the same word— gluck—for happiness
and luck,” he says,
“and in Old English, ‘hap,’ which is the root of happiness,
also meant good luck. It’s best
to forget that those two things are supposedly intimately
related.”
63
ON OCCASION, EVEN
the most productive person is hard-pressed to
concentrate on the job, much less enjoy it. Burke offers an
example of her strategy for
coping with such moments: “Draining the flooded driveway
doesn’t sound so interesting,
but it becomes fun if you try to make the water go here or
there.” Her way of turning
chores into play is a good illustration of an important and
under-remarked finding from
research on the workplace. With some thought, effort, and
attention, says
Csíkszentmihályi, you can make even an apparently dreary
job, such as assembling
toasters or packaging tools, much more satisfying. “The
trick,” he says, “is to turn the
work into a kind of game, in which you focus closely on each
aspect”—screwing widget
A to widget B or the positions of your tools and
materials—“and try to figure out how to
make it better. That way, you turn a rote activity into an
engaging one.”
Ironically, some of
the most famously productive people face a particular obstacle
to flow on the job: having totally mastered a difficult
skill, they no longer feel challenged
and lose focus. According to the psychologist Gilbert Brim,
who’s a strong advocate of
just-manageable difficulty, high achievers who win the
Oscar, MVP award, or corner
office can avoid burnout, depression, and even
self-destructiveness by “going wide,” or
focusing on a new vocation or avocation along with their
business as usual. When not
busy with the demands of the Revolution or the presidency,
for example, the highly
cerebral Thomas Jefferson delighted in making and designing
simple, useful things, such
as keys and a plow. By learning to fly-fish or play the
violin, the jaded CEO or celebrity
becomes a beginner in pursuit of an enjoyable new goal that
demands total attention—the
ticket to joie de vivre and renewed energy back on the
job.
WE’RE ACCUSTOMED TO
thinking of productivity in terms of career, but if
you’re living the focused life, your free time should be
just as generative or even more
so—particularly if you don’t especially enjoy your work.
Despite the lip service we pay
to our treasured leisure, however, it’s often unsatisfying,
largely because we don’t devote
it to activities that demand focus and skill.
Recollecting that
flow requires the convergence of your attention and motivation,
consider this common leisure-time scenario: after a hard day
at the office, you kick off
your shoes and ponder the activities afforded by your living
room. You determine that
you could either play the piano or watch TV. Compared to the
instant gratification of
flopping on the couch and focusing on the screen, practicing
that Duke Ellington you’ve
been working on will require some mental muscle. Its
just-manageable difficulty will
demand that you concentrate on your sheet music, struggle
with those tricky passages,
and make quite an effort before the rewards of flow kick in.
In the end, the payoff will be
greater, but if you don’t summon the motivation to get over
the hump of your initial
inertia and focus, you’ll settle for the temporal equivalent
of junk food.
Part of the blame
for our lost evenings and weekends lies with evolution, which
has primed us to focus on the thrills of life on the
savannah but has yet to adapt us to
64
sedentary metropolitan existence. You probably don’t have to
track predators or gather
roots on Saturdays, but you’d derive real satisfaction from
a challenging pursuit—playing
jazz with friends, say, or tackling a do-it-yourself
project. Unless you focus on making it
happen, however, it’s all too easy to drift into the aimless
puttering, chatting, or channel
surfing that ultimately leaves you feeling vaguely
discontented, annoyed at having wasted
free time, and even secretly longing for Monday morning.
Leisure is one of
Csíkszentmihályi’s special interests, and he has the facts and
figures that show how often we lose focus and end up
misusing our limited supply. In one
illustrative study, his subjects flowed for 44 percent of
the time when playing sports and
games and 34 percent when doing a hobby, but only 13 percent
when watching
television. In fact, TV generally provides the lowest
quality of experience you can have: a
state of entropy that’s often neither functional nor really
fun. Nevertheless, the subjects
spent four times longer parked in front of the tube than on
the demonstrably superior
activities. Summing up, Csíkszentmihályi says, “If left to
their own devices and genetic
programming, and without a salient external stimulus to
attract them, most people go into
a mode of low-level information processing in which they worry
about things or watch
television.”
The antidote to
leisure-time ennui is to pay as much attention to scheduling a
productive evening or weekend as you do to your workday.
This can seem
counterintuitive, says Csíkszentmihályi, “because you assume
that it will be pleasant to
decide spontaneously what to do. But that’s much more
complicated than you think.”
Saturday may be okay, because you’ll do some chores and
errands, then go out or see
friends at night. However, by Sunday noon—not coincidentally,
the unhappiest hour in
America—you may have run through your options and wind up
slumped on a couch,
suffering from the Sabbath existential crisis. It’s at just
such unfocused, unproductive
times, says Csíkszentmihályi, that “people start ruminating
and feeling that their lives are
wasted and so forth.”
If you need some
inspiration for avoiding the unfocused sloth-angst syndrome,
history offers stirring role models. Before the age of
professionalism, the amateur
enthusiasts Baruch Spinoza, whose day job was making
spectacles, and William Blake,
who was a printer by trade, used their free time to advance
philosophy and the arts.
Countless weekend naturalists have greatly enriched botany,
ornithology, and the other
life sciences. Csíkszentmihályi sees no reason that you
shouldn’t plan your leisure time
with equally high expectations and care. The idea, he says,
is to set goals that are, like
redesigning the garden, cooking a new recipe, or painting a
watercolor, “fun but also
stretch you in some way.”
IN THE SHORT term,
whether it’s writing an epic or building a bird-house ,
choosing work and play that call for rapt focus and all of
your skill provides satisfying,
productive experience. Whenever you squander attention on
something that doesn’t put
your brain through its paces and stimulate change, your mind
stagnates a little and life
65
feels dull.
To appreciate the
long-term wisdom of making tough choices about what to
attend to, you need only look back on your own youth. Let’s
say that as a poor
defenseless child, you were forced by your evil parents to
take piano lessons and listen to
classical music. You hated it, says Csíkszentmihályi, until
one day, “some wonderful
Mozart piece intruded itself on your attention, and you
said, ‘This is kind of great!’”
Perhaps that experience even motivated you to listen on your
own and to practice more
often. Eventually, music became an optimal experience that
you’ll enjoy for a lifetime.
Similarly, if you’re
now in the parental shoes, you know how important it is to
focus your child on what’s important, such as schoolwork,
sports, and that piano, and
what an often thankless, brutally difficult task that can be,
especially with adolescents. By
way of illustration, Csíkszentmihályi describes a father who
tells his son that on vacation,
they’re going to go scuba diving in the Caribbean. The
parent knows that the boy will
ultimately enjoy the wonderful new world of the coral reef.
However, the son doesn’t
seem at all interested—perhaps he’s bored or scared by the
prospect—and only
grudgingly indulges his old man, who supplies the initial
motivation. After some dives,
however, the boy gets hooked on aquatic flow, and when he
heads off to college, he
studies marine biology.
Not all children
have parents who help them focus on the right pursuits, and when
the young are left to their own devices, the consequences
for their futures can be dire. In
one ESM study, 866 teenagers rated whatever they were doing
at various times
throughout the day as “more like work, more like play, like
both, like neither,” then
reported how they felt about it. The older the kids were,
the less they enjoyed worklike
activities, so sixth-graders rated them far more positively
than twelfth-graders. Worse, 30
percent of the teens spent significant time on purposeless
activities that were “like neither
work nor play”—even though they didn’t find it enjoyable.
Research shows that
the quality and quantity of the time and attention that many
people devote to the families they purport to value more
than anything leave much to be
desired. Csíkszentmihályi particularly decries the
widespread belief that domestic life is
effortlessly, spontaneously rewarding as a dangerous
“cultural myth.” Lulled by the nice,
traditional ring of “home sweet home,” he says, “we assume
that everyone will just love
each other and be fun to be with. But it’s not like that. If
you want it to be meaningful and
enjoyable, you have to take your family time as seriously as
you take your job. What you
pay attention to is not just an individual issue, but a
social one.”
Conventional wisdom
has it that most of the children who lack constructive
parental attention are poor, but research questions that
assumption. Coming down
squarely in favor of both quality and quantity of family
time, Csíkszentmihályi cites a
large study of one thousand teens that shows that the
well-off suburban children of two
busy upscale professionals are likely to be significantly
unhappier than less-affluent
middle-class peers who see more of their parents—and no
happier than low-income kids
in urban ghettoes.
Regardless of
income, teens who spend far more time with their peers than their
families end up focusing on significantly fewer of the
challenging activities, from
studying to sports, that really develop their abilities. In
wealthy, hard-driving
professionals’ families, parental attention often has less
to do with the children’s needs
than with whether they meet their elders’ expectations, says
Csíkszentmihályi: “The
66
children learn that they don’t count unless they have good
résumés. In families in which
children develop well, parents distribute their attention
well.”
Over time, a
commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not
only better daily experience, but also a more complex,
interesting person: the long-range
benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs puts it, the secret of
fulfillment is “to choose trouble
for oneself in the direction of what one would like to
become.” While many other baby
boomers are planning their retirement, Burke is tackling the
new field of mediation, not
just because she likes the work but also because she likes
developing a new side of
herself in midlife. When she opted for this just-manageable
challenge, she had in one way
or another mostly worked outdoors or with her hands. But,
she says, “As I looked at the
big picture of my life, I knew that I could and should move
on. I had to carry over some
of the confidence I’ve gained in other sorts of work to this
new kind.”
Looking back at the
evolution of her diverse, satisfying career, Burke says, “The
biggest hit on the head for me is to see how, when I start
something new, I focus on the
big picture, then work towards the smaller, finer details as
needed. That’s what I sense
has held things together for me.” Her courageous commitment
to keep upping the ante on
her expectations of herself is what Hobbs called “the
fine-tuning of a life,” which brings
“zest and joy and deep fulfillment.”
HAVING THOUGHT ABOUT
attention with great depth, rigor, and ingenuity
over decades, Csíkszentmihályi has some particularly
well-informed ideas about how it
can improve daily life. Stay focused on the moment, he says,
even when you’re engaged
in routine tasks or social encounters. Practice directing
and mastering your attention by
any enjoyable means. You don’t have to go off to a cave to
meditate if you find
tap-dancing or crewel embroidery a more amiable way to
concentrate your mind, he says:
“What matters is the control.” Because you actually might
not know what activities truly
engage your attention and satisfy you, he says, it can be
helpful to keep a diary of what
you do all day and how you feel while doing it. Then, try to
do more of what’s rewarding,
even if it takes an effort, and less of what isn’t. Where
optimal experience is concerned,
he says, “‘I just don’t have the time’ often means ‘I just
don’t have the self-discipline.’”
In The Evolving
Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, Csíkszentmihályi
makes the case for using attention to transform experience
not only for the individual, but
also for the species. Problems ranging from America’s
obesity epidemic to chronic
conflict in the Middle East show that our innate focus on
instant gratification and
negative emotions such as anger and fear, which once helped
us survive, have now
become serious menaces. Our future depends on directing our
attention to new goals,
such as the cooperation that’s required to clean up the
environment and avoid wars.
Not coincidentally,
an important recent discovery in flow research has a social as
well as a personal dimension. Once you focus on an
activity—ranching or marketing,
haiku or horticulture—and start to develop the skills
required, you need to take on
progressively greater challenges to keep on experiencing
flow. In this way, writes
67
Csíkszentmihályi, optimal human experience is a Darwinian
dynamic that can slowly
transform society and even affect evolution by encouraging
activities of ever-greater
complexity, countering business-as-usual mind-sets, and offering
alternatives to obsolete,
destructive behavior.
As to the theory
that what you focus on creates your experience and that choosing
those targets wisely is the key to the good life,
Csíkszentmihályi simply says, “Yes,
absolutely.”
THERE ARE DIFFERENT
formulas for the fulfilling experience variously
described as “interesting,” “peak,” or “optimal,” but rapt
focus is central to all of them.
Whether the equation’s other integers are the novel balanced
with the familiar or the
challenging with the enjoyable, they add up to the same
thing: engagement in activities
that arrest your attention and satisfy your soul. If most of
the time you’re not particularly
concerned about whether what you’re doing is work or play,
or even whether you’re
happy or not, you know you’re living the focused life.
CHAPTER 8
Decisions: Focusing
Illusions
Sometimes, really
bright people make really foolish choices, from relocating to a
beautiful place that will bore them stiff to involving a
nation in a needless war. Research
in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics shows that
such disasters, large and
small, are often rooted in an all-too-human tendency to pay
attention to the wrong things
during the decision-making process.
Looking back,
Shannon Howell sees that her transfer from the University of
Michigan to Brown University, long her dream destination,
was based on her
single-minded focus on Ivy League prestige rather than on
what kind of college
experience would best meet her needs. “My first year in Ann
Arbor, I was obsessed with
the thought that I wasn’t at the school I wanted to be at,”
she says. “So much so that I
refused to see that Michigan actually suited me very well.”
Once she got to
Brown, Howell found that she attended to the wonder of the
hallowed halls of ivy much less than she had imagined. She
also belatedly realized how
many things she had really liked about Michigan, including
friends, festive Big Ten
football games, and the fine psychology department. “But I
didn’t focus on those things
when I was there,” she says, “because I was so fixated on my
initial judgment that
Michigan was not the school I wanted to go to.”
As Howell’s story
shows, attention orders but also limits your experience, which
can be tricky where big decisions are concerned. Considering
the number of fine colleges
to choose from, students have to narrow their selection
somehow or go mad. On the other
hand, by zeroing in on certain criteria—a school’s status,
say, or geographical
location—and ignoring others, they can end up focused on one
dimension of an important
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experience that might not prove to be as vital as they
thought.
Early in his long
and varied career, the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman
wrote a book about attention, and the subject figures
prominently in his more recent work
on the decision-making process. In 2002, this research
brought him the Nobel Prize in
economics, yet Kahneman remains every inch a psychologist.
His demeanor is that of a
certain kind of therapist: not the warm, fuzzy sort but the
penetrating, hard-hat type who
doesn’t miss a thing. Unlike some venerable figures, he
doesn’t treat an interview as a
monologue, but attends closely to his interlocutor’s
remarks. When a comment questions
or differs from his research findings, he says,
“Interesting.”
As a twenty-year-old
psychologist in the Israeli army, Kahneman was already
focused on an elegant research technique that would shape
his life’s work: the art of the
question. His military colleagues devised many for the
elaborate personality tests they
gave to soldiers, yet these extensive queries failed to meet
the objective of identifying
who would do well or poorly in battle. Looking to the
opposite extreme, Kahneman
discovered the work of the Columbia University psychologist
Walter Mischel, who
gained a lot of very useful information about a child’s
nature with just one brilliantly
conceived question: Do you want this small lollipop right
now or this big one tomorrow?
When asked if he had
ever come up with such a simple, focused question for
assessing personality, Kahneman nods: “How many kids would
you like to have in your
tent when you’re camping?” The answer gave some insight into
a child’s sociability, he
says, “but it didn’t work as wonderfully as Mischel’s.”
Next, he listens to a visitor’s
attempt to put a temperament in a nutshell: “Do you want to
spend more time today by
yourself or with other people?” He considers this, then
says, “That’s a good one.
Although the answer would depend very much on your immediate
context—on how
much time you’re spending with other people now. You’d have
to refine the question.”
In their work on
decision-making, Kahneman and his late partner Amos Tversky
made the art of the refined query into a science. “Our
research method was to write one
question at a time, formulated to make a specific point,” he
says. “Then we published our
questions, answers, and predictions. That is what we did.”
Of the Nobel, he says, “I got
the prize because some economists became convinced that you
could do economics in a
slightly different way—by being more realistic about
psychology.”
According to the principle
of “bounded rationality,” which Kahneman first
applied to economic decisions and more recently to choices
concerning quality of life, we
are reasonable-enough beings but sometimes liable to focus
on the wrong things. Our
thinking gets befuddled not so much by our emotions as by
our “cognitive illusions,” or
mistaken intuitions, and other flawed, fragmented mental
constructs.
Facing a choice, for
example, you might focus on the quickest, most accessible
solution, rather than taking time to think things through.
When making a decision that
affects your long-term future, you might mistakenly
concentrate on very short-term
concerns. “That’s why following every detail of your
financial situation is a problem,
unless you get pleasure from it,” says Kahneman. “If you
focus too much on each issue
separately, considering each loss and gain in isolation, you
make mistakes.”
If you’re pondering
a choice that involves risk, you might focus too much on the
threat of possible loss, thereby obscuring an even likelier
potential benefit. Where this
common scenario is concerned, research shows that we aren’t
so much risk-averse as
loss-averse, in that we’re generally much more sensitive to
what we might have to give
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up than to what we might gain. Let’s say that you’re invited
to toss a coin. The terms are
that if it’s tails, you lose twenty dollars; heads, you win
a certain amount. If you’re then
asked how much your winnings would have to be to make you
take the chance, you’re
likely to suggest between forty and fifty dollars. In other
words, because we put more
weight on the loss than the reward, before taking a 50/50
gamble, most people want to
know that they’d win at least twice as much as they’d
forfeit.
Economics is concerned
with making better decisions about money, but much of
Kahneman’s current research focuses on making wiser choices
about the even more
valuable resource of your experience. When you stop to
consider your own life, you
probably do much the same thing as traditional psychologists
do with their
questionnaires, asking yourself, “How are things going in my
home, job, relationship,
commute? Great, good, fair, or awful?” The problem is that
this type of abstract
evaluation “isn’t looking at how people actually experience
their lives,” says Kahneman,
“but how they think about their lives. That distinction has
been my entry into well-being
research.”
To get closer to
what life in the trenches is really like, behavioral scientists
increasingly eschew the traditional questionnaires for newer
techniques, such as Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi’s Experience Sampling Method, that provide
more-immediate
information about everyday experience. For a large study
published in the prestigious
journal Science, Kahneman asked 909 working women to record
in a diary everything
they had done and how they felt about it on the previous
day. He found that presumably
major issues, like job security and marital status, had
surprisingly little effect on the
women’s sense of daily satisfaction compared to their
choices—and the lack of
same—regarding the use of time: the experiential equivalent
of money. Most subjects
spent most of their waking hours—11.5 on average—doing the
things that they least
enjoy, such as commuting and housework, as opposed to
favored activities, particularly
social interactions with friends (rather than family,
because the former engage your
attention more fully). Although your degree of contentment
with life partly depends on
genes and early environment, which you can’t control, it’s
also affected by how many
hours you spend enjoyably or not, which you can often do
something about. As
Kahneman says, “You can choose to put yourself in better
rather than worse contexts and
try to spend more time in the good situations.”
How you decide to
spend your time and make other choices that affect your
quality of life is closely bound up with attention, which
“governs how people think about
well-being,” Kahneman says, “and also governs the
experience.” To illustrate, he points
out two ways in which focusing on the wrong thing can skew
your choices about how
best to live.
First, there’s a gap
between your real life and the stories you tell yourself about it,
and you’re apt to fixate on the latter. Stressing the
importance of this divide, Kahneman
says, “Attention both to what you choose to experience and
what you choose to think
about it is at the very core of how I approach questions of
well-being.” He traces this
disconnect between reality and your thoughts about it to two
different selves that pay
attention to different kinds of things.
Your hands-on
“experiencing self,” which concentrates on just plain being in the
here and now, is absorbed in whatever is going on and how
you feel about it without
doing much analysis. Your evaluative “remembering self,”
however, looks back on an
70
experience, focuses on its emotional high points and
outcomes, then formulates thoughts
about it, not always accurately. Much research
incontrovertibly shows that memory is
biased and unpredictable—more like a patchwork quilt than
the seamless tapestry of
reality we like to imagine. Indeed, you don’t so much recall
something that happened as
reconstruct a facsimile of it. Moreover, this mental
artifact is likely to be either more
positive or negative in tone than was the actual event.
The differences in
what your experiencing and remembering selves pay attention
to may account for some seeming paradoxes in your life, as
they do in Kahneman’s
research. For example, most mothers say that having children
is one of life’s greatest
satisfactions. Yet his subjects’ diaries show that actual
roll-up-your-sleeves parenting was
among the women’s least enjoyable activities. This apparent
contradiction and others like
it are explained by the divergent focuses of a person’s two
selves. The experiencing self
of a tired woman who’s contemplating the wreckage of her
slovenly adolescent’s room
might well give mothering a poor rating at that moment. If
parenthood comes up later at a
party, however, her remembering self zeroes in on its
emotional highs and long-term
results—that sweet poem on Mother’s Day, the soccer trophy,
the acceptance letter from
Harvard—rather than on momentary vexations like dirty socks
and old pizza crusts
sprouting life-forms. It’s just as well for their progeny
that when adults make choices
about how to live, they pay more attention to the
remembering self ’s judgmental voice
than to the experiencing self ’s whispers, which say more
about their own daily
satisfactions.
The key to
understanding why you pay more attention to your thoughts about
living than to life itself is neatly summed up by what
Kahneman proudly calls his
“fortune cookie maxim” (a.k.a. the focusing illusion):
“Nothing in life is as important as
you think it is while you are thinking about it.” Why?
“Because you’re thinking about it!”
In one much-cited
illustration of the focusing illusion, Kahneman asked some
people if they would be happier if they lived in California.
Because the climate is often
delightful there, most subjects thought so. For the same
reason, even Californians assume
they’re happier than people who live elsewhere. When Kahneman
actually measured their
well-being, however, Michiganders and others are just as
contented as Californians. The
reason is that 99 percent of the stuff of
life—relationships, work, home, recreation—is
the same no matter where you are, and once you settle in a
place, no matter how
salubrious, you don’t think about its climate very much. If
you’re prompted to evaluate it,
however, the weather immediately looms large, simply because
you’re paying attention
to it. This illusion inclines you to accentuate the
difference between Place A and Place B,
making it seem to matter much more than it really does,
which is marginal.
To test the fortune
cookie rule, you have only to ask yourself how happy you are.
The question automatically summons your remembering self,
which will focus on any
recent change in your life—marriage or divorce, new job or
home. You’ll then think
about this novel event, which in turn will increase its
import and influence your answer.
If you’re pleased that you’ve just left the suburbs for the
city, say, you’ll decide that life
is pretty good. If you regret the move, you’ll be
dissatisfied in general. Fifteen years on,
however, the change that looms so large now will pale next
to a more recent event—a
career change, perhaps, or becoming a grandparent—which will
draw your focus and,
simply because you’re thinking about it, bias your
evaluation of your general well-being.
Because your
remembering self pays attention to your thoughts about your life,
71
rather than to the thing itself, it can be difficult to
evaluate the quality of your own
experience accurately. By way of illustration, Kahneman
describes an experiment done
by the University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert
Schwarz, in which he asked
one group of subjects a question: “How much pleasure do you
get from your car?” Not
surprisingly, there was a significant correlation between an
auto’s value and its owner’s
enjoyment, so that the remembering selves of BMW and Lexus
drivers were more
satisfied than those of people who drove Escorts and Camrys.
Next, Schwarz probed the
immediate reality of the experiencing self by asking another
group of subjects a different
question: “How much pleasure did you get from using your car
today?” Abruptly, the
correlation between the owners’ satisfaction and their cars’
worth vanished. What
determined their answers was not the quality of their
vehicles but of their actual commute
that very day: whether it was marked by good or bad weather,
traffic conditions, or even
personal ruminations—in short, the experiencing self ’s
quotidian ups and downs.
The experiencing and
remembering selves’ different attentional perspectives
make for what Kahneman understatedly calls “a complicated
story.” If you’re asked how
much pleasure you get from your car, the question summons up
your evaluative
remembering self, because “when you get pleasure from your
car is when you think about
your car.” When queried, you don’t stop to consider your
most recent driving experience,
but flash to “imagining yourself thinking about your car.”
That complex relationship
between your experience and your thoughts about it takes on
far more significance when
the matter at hand isn’t just your ride, but your career,
family, friends, or home. The
point, says Kahneman, is that “we shouldn’t measure our
lives on the quality of our
memories alone.”
Unless you’re a Zen
sage like Yoda, however, shifting your attention from
thinking to being is harder than it might seem at first. For
one thing, as soon as you try,
you’re apt to revert to your remembering self. “That’s very
complicated,” says
Kahneman. “When you think about your life, your only natural
perspective is
retrospective—looking back. So to make a decision because it
will affect your
experience, even if it’s unlikely to have a big effect on
your memory, is a deliberate
stance that you could take. You might do that when you think
about the balance of your
life and decide to spend most of your time doing this or
doing that.”
LIKE FOCUSING TOO
much on the opinions of your remembering self,
overlooking the effects of adaptation—the process of
becoming used to a situation—can
obstruct wise decisions about how to live. As Kahneman says,
“when planning for the
future, we don’t consider that we will stop paying attention
to a thing.”
The tendency to stop
focusing on a particular event or experience over time, no
matter how wonderful or awful, helps explain why the
differences in well-being between
groups of people in very different circumstances tend to be
surprisingly
small—sometimes astoundingly so. The classic examples are
paraplegics and lottery
winners, who respectively aren’t nearly as miserable or
happy as you’d think. “That’s
72
where attention comes in,” says Kahneman. “People think that
if they win the lottery,
they’ll be happy forever. Of course, they will not. For a
while, they are happy because of
the novelty, and because they think about winning all the
time. Then they adapt and stop
paying attention to it.” Similarly, he says, “Everyone is
surprised by how happy
paraplegics can be, but they are not paraplegic full-time.
They do other things. They
enjoy their meals, their friends, the newspaper. It has to
do with the allocation of
attention.”
Like couples who’ve
just fallen in love, professionals starting a career, or children
who go to camp for the first time, paraplegics and lottery
winners initially pay a lot of
attention to their new situation. Then, like everybody else,
they get used to it and shift
their focus to the next big thing. Their seemingly blasé
attitude surprises us, because
when we imagine ourselves in their place, we focus on how
we’d feel at the moment of
becoming paralyzed or wildly rich, when such an event
utterly monopolizes one’s focus.
We forget that we, too, would get used to wealth, a
wheelchair, and most other things
under the sun, then turn our attention elsewhere.
This attentional
myopia is especially problematic when you’re trying to make
important decisions about the future. Overlooking the fact
that a romance’s honeymoon
novelty must fade, an older man leaves a seemingly
comfortable union of many years for
a young “trophy wife,” only to find that he still faces the
demands of marriage and misses
the easy family life he shared with his first spouse. An
urban couple decides that because
they enjoy their country weekends so much, they should move
to their rural hamlet for
good, then later realize that on a full-time basis, they had
rapidly adapted to and
outgrown its limited resources. Offering a dizzying
reconfiguration of the way we usually
think, Kahneman says, “When you anticipate something, what you
anticipate is memory
more than experience.”
Forgetting that
you’ll eventually stop paying attention to a new thing can skew
not just big decisions about the future, but also the small
ones that quietly but profoundly
affect your present well-being. These “comforts,” as
distinguished from “pleasures” by
the late Stanford economist Tibor Scitovsky, are in fact
“pleasures that you’ve stopped
paying attention to,” says Kahneman. “The difference between
them is clearly one of
attention.”
Attention’s
relationship to comforts and pleasures often affects your decisions
about consumer goods. The focusing illusion predicts that
you’ll exaggerate the
importance of a thing just by thinking about it, as when you
ponder a big purchase. Soon
after you buy it, however, you stop noticing the costly
pleasure—perhaps a
top-of-the-line Sub-Zero fridge or Viking stove—which gets
downgraded to a comfort.
“That’s a very interesting distinction—goods that you attend
to when you use them and
those that you don’t,” says Kahneman. “There’s probably much
less focusing illusion
with pleasures like fresh flowers or a glass of wine.”
Because it gives you more fun and
bang for your buck, spending five hundred dollars a year on
bouquets or Burgundy is a
better investment in your well-being than upgrading a major
appliance.
Despite your initial
excitement and a high price tag, adaptation guarantees that
your focus will soon stray from the wondrous pleasures of
your new computer or larger
apartment, consigning them to mere comfort status. Rather
than bingeing on such big,
costly amenities, a better—and cheaper—strategy for boosting
your daily satisfaction
quotient would be to add many more simple, inexpensive ones:
a fine piece of chocolate,
73
an interesting magazine, a great DVD. After all, on any
given Monday morning, your
comfortable bank balance pales beside a good cup of coffee.
These little things in life,
which afford what Kahneman calls “experiences that you think
about when you’re having
them,” provide a great deal of everyday enjoyment. Because
you’re apt to pay more
attention to your remembering than your experiencing self,
however, it’s all too easy to
forget to indulge yourself in these small but important
pleasures on a daily basis, thus
depriving yourself of much joy.
BASED ON RECENT
research on well-being, Kahneman says, “I can imagine a
future in which, just as many of us exercise physically,
we’ll also exercise mentally for
twenty or thirty minutes a day. That’s the kind of world
‘positive psychology’ is looking
for. Whether its principles will work or not in the long
run, I don’t know. All the data
aren’t in yet. But it’s clear that getting people to pay
attention to what’s good in their
lives is a good thing. There’s no question about that.”
As to the idea that
the ability to focus on this rather than on that gives you control
over your experience and well-being, Kahneman says that both
the Dalai Lama and the
Penn positive psychologist Martin Seligman would agree about
the importance of paying
attention: “Being able to control it gives you a lot of
power, because you know that you
don’t have to focus on a negative emotion that comes up.”
At the end of a
discussion of attention and decision-making, Kahneman remarks
on research that suggests older people connect more with the
experiencing self, which is
inclined to pay rapt attention to little everyday delights,
like sunbeams dancing on water
or music drifting through a window. “That sounds like a
survivor’s experience,” he says.
“A survivor appreciates life more. I think that’s true of
old age, too. There are many
small pleasures that I enjoy more now.” FEW THINGS ARE as
important to your quality
of life as your choices about how to spend the precious
resource of your free time, but the
different focuses of your experiencing and remembering
selves can seriously perturb your
decision-making in this regard. Contemplating the prospect
of a free evening, your
high-minded remembering self directs your attention to that
uplifting concert, art exhibit,
or play you’ve been meaning to go to. Or why don’t you pick
up the phone and arrange to
get together with X, Y, or Z, whom you really like and never
see? Before you proceed,
however, your experiencing self chimes in, whining that
you’re too stressed and/or tired
to do anything more than sprawl on the couch and watch HBO
reruns.
Perhaps you’ve
experienced this attentional conflict between the two modes of me
on a Sunday morning, when you settle down with the newspaper
and subject your
remembering self to the temptations of the travel and arts
sections. As you consider the
possible mind-expanding vacations and worthwhile cultural
events, you envision a time
in a few weeks or months when life won’t be as hectic as it
is right now. You go ahead
and book the airline tickets or the opera series. Then, as
the big day approaches, lofty
thoughts of expanding your horizons evaporate as your
experiencing self fixates on how
busy you are, as usual, and how much better off you’d be
just staying home.
74
On the other hand,
history has taught you that unless you want to spend all of
your free time reading about things that you might but don’t
do, you must occasionally
attend to your remembering self ’s urging and commit to that
ballet subscription or bike
trip in the west of Ireland. You know that on the day of the
performance or departure,
you’ll smite your brow and say, “Was I crazy? I can’t do
this right now!” But you’ve
plunked down your money, so you go, and you’re always glad
afterward. Once you get to
the concert hall or Galway, your experiencing self kicks in
to enjoy the moment, and your
evaluating self gets a juicy good-life memory to chew over
later.
This common type of
attentional conflict reminds the Swarthmore psychologist
Barry Schwartz of a decision-making dilemma, explored by the
New York University
psychologist Yaacov Trope, that’s peculiar to academics: Why
does Professor X agree to
contribute a chapter to a colleague’s textbook when he knows
that when he sits down to
write, it’s going to be a nightmare? To Schwartz, the answer
is that when you first think
about a long-term project, you focus on the goal—the
finished chapter, cleverly written
and beautifully annotated—and barely consider the matter of
how you’ll get to that point.
As the deadline
looms, however, your focus shifts from the rewarding goal to the
grueling means. “That’s when you realize that you’re already
overextended,” says
Schwartz, “and that you don’t feel like doing the extra work
to bone up on the latest
developments in your subject.” Personal experience has
taught him the wisdom of sitting
down to consider what a new commitment will mean before he
accepts it. Nevertheless,
he says, “our natural inclination is to attend to the end
product. As a result, we have a lot
of regret over our decisions.”
Making tough choices
about how to spend your time in a busy, busy world is not
the only major decision-making quandary that’s endemic to
life in the twenty-first
century. In our age of endlessly proliferating consumer
goods, when entire TV shows are
devoted to culling jammed closets, drawers, and garages,
deciding what sound system or
computer to buy can turn into a major research project.
After he wrote The Paradox of
Choice, Schwartz got fervent amens from European governments
as well as individual
readers for insisting that the management of your focus has
become one of decision-laden
modernity’s major challenges. Many behavioral economists and
social psychologists also
share his concern about what he calls “the consequences of
mis-attention.”
In supermarkets and
malls, the ever-accelerating explosion of products and
services that clamor for your focus can turn once easy
decisions—black or brown, Ford
or Chevy—into white-knuckled traumas. The focusing illusion
is one major culprit in
these scenarios. If you have to decide between air
conditioner or compact car A and
B—to say nothing of W, X, Y, and Z—it seems only reasonable
to winnow your list of
options by ignoring the products’ similarities and zeroing
in on the differences. The
problem is that by focusing on those often minor variations,
you dramatically inflate their
real importance. Even trivial distinctions soon loom large
enough to obscure the fact that
for all practical purposes, the gizmos are nearly identical.
Depending on the number
under consideration, this process can be a major waste of
your time and energy. Doing
his bit for the public’s well-being, Schwartz has advised
the editors of Consumer Reports
that rating fifty-five washing machines, fifty-three of
which are basically fine, is
counterproductive. “They make distinctions that really don’t
matter,” he says, “but
because there are distinctions, you think they must matter.
So you attend to them and
torture yourself over which washer to buy.”
75
Some research
suggests that the “sweet spot” for the ideal number of consumer
options is between eight and ten—enough to offer variety
without being overwhelming.
That moderate range suits the mellow folks whom Schwartz
calls “satisficers,” who are
contented with an item that’s, well, pretty good. Finicky
“maximizers” who have to have
“the best,” however, are apt to agonize over too many
choices.
Even consumers who
are determined to protect their finite attentional resources
find it’s not always easy to fend off unwanted choices.
Schwartz describes a colleague
who, when buying electronics, always asks for “the second
cheapest Sony.” Nevertheless,
salespeople often insist on dragging him through the other
products anyway. They do so
because when given a choice between a sound system that has
seven features and one that
has twenty-one, you’re apt to pick the latter, and more
expensive, model, even though
you won’t be able to figure out how most of the features
work once you’re at home.
When you must choose
between a product’s usability and capability, you tend to
focus on the latter, because you think, “Who knows what I’ll
want to do with it
someday?” If consumers are able to test both sound systems
or other products before
deciding, however, most will pick the simpler device. Yet as
Schwartz says, “This is a
very hard lesson to learn. We all have a gadget sitting in a
box in a closet somewhere, but
we think it’s going to be different next time.”
Institutions as well
as individuals get seduced by too many choices and the
focusing illusion into squandering their attention. As a
professor, Schwartz’s particular
peeve is the admissions process at top colleges. Confronted
by an embarrassment of
riches, the Ivies and other prestigious schools end up
fixating on incredibly fine
distinctions between many essentially equal applicants. This
procedure not only drains
their own administrative resources but worse, puts a
terrible strain on the kids. Instead of
paying attention to important developmental questions—What
subjects do I really care
about? How am I getting along with others?—many high school
students take on
activities that they’re not even interested in because they
look good on their applications.
If Schwartz had his way, elite colleges would divide their
applicants into those who are
good enough to admit and those who aren’t, then put the
former’s names into a hat and
pick at random. Instead, he says, “the demand, both for
colleges and kids, is that
everything matters and has to be focused on. That’s a recipe
for misery and a model of
the attention problems that we face all over.”
Even certain places
can befuddle us by offering too many potential choices to
attend to. Observing that New York City recently appeared at
the very bottom of a list of
America’s happiest cities, Schwartz says that one reason is
that its infinite number of
options for dining, entertainment, the arts, shopping, and
everything else drives people
crazy. To the argument that New Yorkers live there because
of the options, Schwartz
patiently responds, “But a lot of research shows that people
don’t know themselves very
well and are characteristically their own worst enemies.”
In an age of
constant assaults on your attention, sanity requires that you tune out
many of them, beginning with those from your own
communications devices. However,
it’s not easy to resist the enticing call of these machines
or to protect your experience and
relationships from the businesslike expectations they
impose. “There’s something about
the pace of life now that makes you just want the executive
summary,” says Schwartz,
“and an e-mail or voice mail does that, compared to an
actual conversation, which is
‘messier.’ It’s as though every one of our interactions has
to be instrumental. But when
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the point of them isn’t getting together, but achieving some
goal, that’s a dramatic
diminishment of the quality of life.”
Information
technology also threatens your limited store of attention with the
decidedly mixed blessing of the potentially 24/7 workweek.
As Schwartz says, “You now
have the opportunity to choose whether to work every minute
of every day, no matter
where you are. Even if you turn all your machines off, you
think about them! The
pressure is always on.” On recently receiving an auto e-mail
that said, “I’ll be out of the
office for two hours,” his initial reaction was, “She must
be kidding!” Then he realized
that if you’re expected to be available all the time, yet
decide not to be disturbed at
certain times, as many professional women have done, “you
may have to pay a price.”
Summarizing a major
behavioral predicament of the information age, Schwartz
says, “On the one hand, you’ve got to defend your limited
cognitive resources so you can
attend to what really matters. On the other, you can’t just
tune out. You need to find a
way to be part of society as it is without being weighed
down by all the claims on your
attention it imposes.”
Even maximizers and
New Yorkers can husband their finite attention by applying
a few of Schwartz’s simple principles to decision-making.
The next time you face a
choice, he says, rely on habit. Instead of fretting over
which is the supremo suitcase or
cordless drill, buy the same one that you bought last time.
When in doubt, let a more
knowledgeable friend choose for you. “Don’t think about your
cell phone or
long-distance plan,” he says. “Just call the right person
and do what he or she says. A
group of friends could have a designated expert in
investments, restaurants, electronics,
and so on.”
Finally, don’t worry
if the choice you made wasn’t the absolute best, as long as it
meets your needs. Offering the single most important lesson
from his research, Schwartz
says, “Good enough is almost always good enough. If you have
that attitude, many
problems about decisions and much paralysis melt away.”
FROM “BUYER’S
REGRET” to a “crime of passion,” many poor decisions
spring from focusing on the wrong things. The human
condition seems to include
tendencies to avoid loss even at the expense of considerable
potential gain and to
exaggerate something’s importance merely because we’re
thinking about it. We’re apt to
base choices on our evaluations rather than on our actual
experience and to forget that no
matter how great or terrible the thing we’re focused on
today, chances are that we’ll soon
get used to it. In addition to these age-old problems, our
capacity for rapt attention is
increasingly under assault from a barrage of goods and
services and our own beeping,
blinking, ringing electronics. Now as never before, some of
our most important decisions
concern where to direct our limited supply of attention.
Remembering that your life is the
sum of what you focus on helps to bring clarity to choices
about where to spend that
valuable mental money.
CHAPTER 9
77
Creativity: An Eye
for Detail
Looking at Mary
Ellen Honsaker’s small sketch of a field mouse, portrayed with
every whisker and digit just so, brings to mind William
James’s simple experiment on
how to improve your ability to pay attention. First, he
says, make a dot on a piece of
paper or a wall, then try to stay focused on it. In short
order, your mind will wander.
Next, start asking yourself questions about the dot: its
size, shape, color, and so on. Make
associations with it: its existential pathos, perhaps, or
the dot as yang to the paper’s yin.
Once you’re engaged in such elaboration, you’ll find that
you can focus on the negligible
mark for quite a while. Observing that this ability to
attend to and develop even the
humblest subject is a cornerstone of creativity, James says,
“This is what the genius does,
in whose hands a given topic coruscates and grows.”
Not least because
she specializes in portraying wildlife, and a field mouse, much
less a moose, grizzly, or wolf in nearby Yellowstone is not
about to hold a pose,
Honsaker uses attention in very particular ways to organize,
enhance, and limit aspects of
her experience at each step of the creative process. When
she sets out to “grow” a picture,
she first focuses on the animal in its proper habitat, even
if that means a trip to Africa. “I
have to see and hear the creature,” she says, “really feel
it, so I can tell its story.” While
in the field, she concentrates on her subject’s most
important features, rapidly recording
them in quick sketches, photographs, and notes. Back in the
studio, she blends these fresh
observations with a lifetime’s experience with animals and
art and focuses on the best
way to interpret her subject, often in pastel, an unusual
medium of paint pigments formed
into crayonlike sticks.
Since the muses of
ancient Greece and accounts of Jehovah’s invention of the
world, creativity has been linked to divinity, and even in
modern secular circles, it’s often
romanticized as mostly talent. Many other qualities are important
to it, however,
beginning with the capacity for both highly targeted,
knowledge-based “convergent”
thinking that searches for logical solutions to a problem
and especially the freewheeling
“divergent” type that ranges far off the grid to find new
options. Along with knowledge,
motivation, discipline, intelligence, confidence, and
risk-taking, creativity calls for
attention, from the almost subliminal awareness of a
gestating idea to the conscious
top-down “Eureka” on its realization.
When we imagine
Einstein coming up with E=MC
2
or Michelangelo
sketching
the design for the Sistine ceiling, we envision these
protean creators lost in rapt attention
to their great breakthroughs. Such Ahas!, however, are
invariably preceded by long
periods of steady concentration on a subject, whether in art
or science, business or
politics, punctuated by spells of “incubation,” when the
mind’s searchlight seemingly
shifts elsewhere. After spending years thinking about the
individual’s rights and studying
the views of the English philosopher John Locke as well as
his own august peers, Thomas
Jefferson could “dash off ” the revolutionary Declaration of
Independence in a matter of
days.
On the more
immediate level, creativity also involves focusing on your target in a
way that turns a spark of inspiration into a burst of
fire-works. Serious composers
including Brahms, Ravel, and Bartók based major orchestral
works on phrases from folk
or popular music, for example, and like a melody or James’s
dot, a thought must be
78
developed and embroidered on if it is to achieve its full
potential. In a fortuitous circular
dynamic, whenever you engage in a creative activity, you
boost your level of positive
emotion, which in turn literally widens your attentional
range, giving you more material
to work with. As James says, the generative mind is “full of
copious and original
associations,” so that attending to the germ of an idea soon
leads to “all sorts of
fascinating consequences.”
CONSIDERING HER
ANIMATE subject matter, it’s not surprising that
Honsaker’s cozy, agreeably cluttered home, shared with three
dogs and a cat, is less like
the predictable minimalist artist’s loft than a rustic
lodge. Even her clock tweets rather
than chimes. Seated between a crackling woodstove and a
bronze sculpture of two hares,
she talks about attention’s role in her creative life and
inadvertently also describes its
effects on experience and well-being.
No one knows exactly
what happens inside your head during the creative process.
If she’s working well, however, Honsaker is aware of paying
rapt attention that’s “really
different” from her everyday experience: “When the art is
coming, everything else just
disappears. All of my other responsibilities fall away.
There’s no pressure. I can forget
about mealtimes and find that although it’s two a.m., I’m
not tired. There’s a lot of
freedom in that kind of concentration.”
This association of focusing
and freedom recalls an imaginative experiment that
suggests that at such moments, the brain releases its
brakes, allowing the mind to let
loose. The Johns Hopkins Hospital ear, nose, and throat
specialist Charles Limb, who’s
also an amateur jazz saxophonist, asked six pianists to play
a keyboard while undergoing
fMRI scanning. When they improvised on their own—the
keystone of all kinds of
creativity—the musicians’ brains went into a “dissociated
frontal activity state,” a.k.a.
“being in the zone.” Neurological activity associated with
self-monitoring and inhibition
decreased, which increased their ability to process new
stimuli and ideas. When they
played a standard tune, however, the musicians’ brains
didn’t respond in this way. Limb
suspects that other forms of improvisation, even
conversation, involve the same type of
brain activity as playing jazz and plans to investigate that
possibility with subjects who
aren’t artists.
The presumably
special nature of brains such as Einstein’s, Bach’s,
Shakespeare’s, and those of other protean creators has
inspired much speculation. Along
with their other unparalleled gifts, the sheer muchness of
their works bespeaks a
prodigious capacity for attention. Listening to the sublime
trio in the first act of Mozart’s
Così Fan Tutte, called “Soave sia il vento,” the density of
stimuli—the layers and layers
of beauty—makes you wonder that any one mind could attend to
so many intricate things
at the same time.
In attentional
terms, the super-rich, thickety networks of Mozart’s brain enabled
him to focus on and absorb information effortlessly and to
process very complex things
that most of us would have to work on sequentially as if
they were a single unit. His focal
79
spotlight shone forth in an especially expansive radius,
illuminating more “winners” in
the competition for his awareness. Because such a brain can
simultaneously represent
many more things than the average model, it has many more
sources of inspiration to
elaborate on and can create a bigger, deeper reality for us
lesser mortals to wonder at.
CREATIVITY IS MOST
commonly associated with the arts, but for more than
thirty years, the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has
applied hers primarily to the
study of human behavior. In fact, her inventive approach to
research inspired Jennifer
Aniston to coproduce and star in an upcoming movie based on
an elaborate experiment
Langer conducted back in 1979. First, she created a complete
environment from the year
1959, right down to its magazines, newspapers, and music.
Then she told her subjects,
elderly men who had volunteered to live in the setting for
seven days, to start thinking,
talking, and otherwise acting as they had twenty years
before. In a stunning
demonstration of the power of mind over matter, after a week
of focusing on their salad
days, the old men grew visibly younger—not just in their
frisky attitude, but even in their
physiology. Medical examinations showed that they stood
straighter and were more
flexible. Even their fingers, which shorten with age, grew
longer.
Not many
psychologists could envision such an imaginative research project,
much less execute it in detail, but Langer is not your
average scientist. Long before she
started painting a few years ago, she was bringing an
artist’s fresh perspective to the
study of the effects of “mindfulness,” or purposeful
attention, on learning, health, work,
and, most recently, creativity. Like James, she believes
that this active, searching way of
focusing lies at the very heart of inventiveness.
The term mindfulness
wouldn’t be necessary, says Langer, if most people didn’t
have such an impoverished, static understanding of what
“paying attention” means. Over
many years, she has asked children and instructors in very
different kinds of schools a
simple but telling question: “What does it mean when a
teacher asks students to pay
attention, focus, concentrate on something?” Invariably, the
answer is something like “To
hold that thing still.” In other words, most people think of
attention as a kind of mental
camera that you keep rigidly, narrowly focused on a
particular subject or object. This
realization led Langer to two important conclusions: “When
students have trouble paying
attention, they’re doing what their teachers say they should
do. The problem is that it’s
the wrong instruction.”
In contrast to this
fixed, tunnel-vision mode of focusing, the creative, mindful
attention described in James’s dot exercise or deployed by
Honsaker when she conjures
up a wild animal on paper is an active, probing exploration
of a target that becomes more
interesting as you search for new facets to consider. “Stare
at your finger,” says Langer.
“The more things you notice about it—a hangnail, a little
bit of dirt, whatever—the easier
it is to stay attentive.”
As the great
architect Mies van der Rohe famously said, “God is in the details.”
That principle keeps Honsaker both absorbed in her work, she
says, and able to “bring an
80
animal to life.” Because it’s the little things that make a
creature seem individual and
engaging, she says, “I try to get down everything I can. I
want to be as familiar with that
animal as I am with my dog. And when I pet his head, I
recognize every bump!”
Mindful attention
helps you work more efficiently and creatively, but it also
makes life more fun. When she thinks about the pleasures of
intently focusing on a
picture, “the word wholeness comes to mind,” says Honsaker.
“I know my art is a gift,
and that I’m using something that I’m meant to use. One
reason why I sometimes forget
to eat when I’m in the studio is because I’m being fed in a
different way.” Because this
kind of positive emotion expands your actual focus, your
increased élan vital deepens
your concentration on your subject. Underscoring this
two-way connection between
attention and pleasure, Langer says, “Whatever we engage
with becomes engaging. If
you say to someone who knows nothing about birds, ‘Just
listen to that brown thrush,’
your words may fall on deaf ears. But an ornithologist will
notice many things when she
attends to that sound and have a richer experience.”
Illustrating the
connections among attention, engagement, and affection, Langer
says, “Imagine that you’ve had the same spouse for many
years. If you look for a way in
which he’s different today, you’ll find something. That
makes him more interesting and,
probably, more likable.” Similarly, whether or not you care
for football, the more you
notice various things about a game—“even if it’s just the
players’ rear ends,” says
Langer—the more you’ll like it and be able to focus on it
without strain. “If something is
enjoyable, you don’t need other reasons to do it.
Mindfulness feels good, so this way of
paying attention reinforces itself.”
An early painting of
Langer’s dog Sparky embodies the links between focus and
fun. Although it’s executed in a quirky style that’s very
different from Honsaker’s
realism, Sparky’s picture is engaging, not least because it
radiates much of its subject’s
energy and enthusiasm. The work’s originality and immediacy
support Langer’s assertion
that “the footprint of mindfulness is left in whatever you
do.” Her Sparky may not be
conventionally accurate, she says, “but it’s lovable and
brings a smile to my face. I
painted it without any idea of what I was doing, so it
reminds me to not hesitate to try
new things. That I and others enjoy it reminds me that
perfection is silly and doesn’t
really exist.”
The same symbiotic
relationships among attention, engagement, and enjoyment
come across when Honsaker discusses the evolution of a very
different canine portrait.
When she began working from photos of Sheena, a local
family’s beloved dog, she
honored the owners’ desire to capture their late pet’s
soulful eyes. As she got more
involved with her subject, however, Honsaker added some insights
of her own. Sheena’s
noble carriage was inspired by photographs of a wolf.
Because Sheena loved to be
outdoors, she decided to portray the dog in a grassy
setting. “I pay a lot of attention to an
animal’s personality—gregarious, fierce, mellow—and to the
best way to convey it,” she
says. “With dogs, one should be shown curled up on the
couch, another with a herd of
sheep or cattle, and another ready to play with a toy.”
Her evolution as a
self-taught artist convinces Langer that taking on a creative
challenge—learn to build a bookshelf, cook Sicilian cuisine,
sail to the Caribbean—is a
great way to catapult yourself into a new world of mindful
attention. “God knows why I
even tried to paint,” she says. “There was no reason to
think I’d enjoy it, but I just began
anyway. Now it’s something I do all the time.” After all,
she says, for most of us, the real
81
reward of deciding to focus on writing poetry, playing
classical guitar, or engaging in
some other creative activity is not to achieve some official
standard of proficiency but to
embark on a “personal renaissance.”
FROM OUR FIRST years
in the educational system, society has ways of
discouraging the expansive, questing mode of attention
that’s essential to creativity and
personal rebirth. In one poignant indication of what happens
when young children learn
to switch off active focusing and just go through the
motions, second-graders from
different schools were given a problem to solve: “There are
twenty-six sheep and ten
goats on a ship. How old is the captain?” Nearly 90 percent
of students from traditional
classrooms answered “Thirty-six.” Not one pointed out that
the problem didn’t make
sense, compared to almost a third of the kids from less
conventional, more mindful
classrooms. As a teacher, Langer tries not to let academe’s
conventional wisdom stifle
her own Harvard students’ innovative thinking: “When grading
papers, I look for what
they’re trying to say, rather than what they should say.”
A clever little
study suggests the consequences of mindful and mindless attention
where adult creativity is concerned. First, Langer showed
her subjects an unfamiliar
object. Then, she encouraged one group to accept her
definition of it: “This is a dog’s
chew toy.” She prompted a second group to consider the thing
on their own as well:
“This could be a dog’s chew toy.” Next, by Langer’s design,
the need for an eraser arose.
Only the participants in the second group responded by using
the “chew toy” for a new
purpose. Inventive cooks, for whom a recipe is just a
starting point, exemplify this
“sideways” learning, which encourages variation on the
rules. In contrast, mindlessly
following a cookbook’s highly specific instructions causes
your mind to “snap shut like a
clam on ice,” says Langer, freezing out inspiration and
innovation.
After studying how
our capacity for paying active, mindful attention gets stifled
by institutions and conventions, Langer has identified
several damaging “myths.” The
first is the notion that there are certain basic laws
governing the status quo—the way it
is—which you must accept without question until they become
second nature. Offering
an everyday example of this mindless attitude, she points
out that although most people
are right-handed, the fork is always put to the left of the
plate. In far more important
matters, right up to the meaning of life, acquiescence to a
single way of understanding
something means that you stop attending to reality, go on
autopilot, and squelch any fresh
ideas about how to do things better, or at least in your own
way.
Whether your
personal renaissance involves taking up drawing or playing the
ukulele, you’re bound to confront the stultifying myth that
only talented experts know the
one right way to do the thing. When she felt frustrated over
not being able to paint a
conventionally correct horse, Langer did some research in
art history and found countless
variations on the equine theme. As she says, in painting,
gardening, or any other
endeavor, “everything is the same until it’s not. Either you
can do a thing or don’t yet
know if you can. The question isn’t ‘Can I?’ but ‘How to?’ ”
82
The tyranny of
evaluation is another major roadblock on the intertwined paths of
mindful attention and creativity. Instead of focusing on the
process of playing the flute or
designing your own holiday cards, you can get sandbagged by
fears that the result might
not be perfect. To Langer, flaws and mistakes are neither
bad nor good, but “just things
you do.” Because it also focuses on assessment rather than
experience, she says, “praise
is as bad as blame.”
Several other
mindless wet blankets threaten to smother your creativity. You
might assume that forgetting is always a lapse or problem,
for example, when in fact it
often lets you experience something anew. (Indeed, Paul
MacLean, the NIMH’s late
pioneer of behavioral neuroscience, thought that part of
orgasm’s charm derives from the
fact that for neuroanatomical reasons, the experience can’t
be fully stored in memory, so
that each is something of a pleasant surprise.) Then too,
you might accept that
single-pointed concentration is always best and distractions
are always bad, even though
going off on a tangent can lead you to exciting new
discoveries. Indeed, becoming
exasperated with a project and doing something else for a
while allows creativity’s
non-conscious incubaton phase to advance the process. When
her work isn’t going so
well and she gets frustrated, Honsaker says, “that can be
good, too. The next morning, I
can usually see what the problem was and try something new.”
After forty years,
Honsaker has learned to keep focusing on her art and navigating
past the obstacles to creativity, but it has been a long
process. Although she has always
been drawn to wild creatures, while studying art at UCLA,
she felt pushed to paint in the
era’s fashionable abstract style. It was only after
graduation that she found her perfect
medium in pastel, taught a course in animal art at the San
Diego Zoo, and took a job with
the Audubon Society, which eventually brought her to the
Rockies and the life of the kind
of artist she wanted to be. “Picasso and I could both paint
a mouse, but we’d focus on
capturing different things,” she says. “Those mice would
look very different!”
THE SEARCHING,
ACTIVE ATTENTIVENESS that’s second nature to
Honsaker in her studio carries over into certain of her
other pursuits. Majestic in stature
and mien, she’s one of those quietly remarkable silverhaired
women who are the
backbones of America’s small towns and rural hamlets. Until
recently, she was the
children’s librarian, renowned for her storytelling and
artistic projects. At her log-cabin
community church, she started a garden to supplement a food
bank for the disadvantaged
and inaugurated a green market where local folk can sell
their produce. Of the
two-hundred-mile round trip each week that stocking the
market requires, she says,
“That’s a creative, focused activity too, and a very
important one for someone who
spends a lot of time alone in the studio.”
In an ideal world,
the state of intense focus that obtains when you’re painting,
dancing, or concocting a new dessert would be your baseline
condition: the way you are
all the time, not just when you’re being “creative.” As
Langer says, “You’d do whatever
you’re doing and stay mindful all day.” In her view, it’s
not necessary to take time out to
83
sit and meditate, which is after all a practice that’s
designed to provoke postmeditative
mindfulness. Instead, you can cut to the chase and just
practice mindful attention. “This
way of ‘meditating’ is fun, easy, and pleasant,” she says,
“and its consequence is the
essence of being happy, effective, and healthy—no small
thing.”
Symptoms such as
locking the keys in the car, forgetting whether you turned off
the oven, or becoming judgmental indicate you’ve left the
attentive, creative state and
reverted to autopilot. “Part of the problem is that when
you’re mindless, you don’t realize
it,” says Langer. “You’re not ‘here’ to know you’re not
here.” To her, mindlessness
would make sense only in situations in which it’s productive
or in which circumstances
don’t change. Because you can’t know either of those things
in advance, she says, “it’s
always better to be mindful. Once you realize that this is
the way you should feel all of
the time, the moment you don’t, a bell goes off that
something’s not right. You feel the
transition to mindlessness, and the more you see it, the
more you see it.”
Psychologists used
to speak of “well-being” rather than “happiness,” but no
matter what it’s called, says Langer, “the way to achieve it
is being mindful. So many
studies of different kinds now measure its positive changes
on affect. I try to resist
thinking of mindfulness as a panacea, but I really do believe
it’s the essence of
authenticity, creativity, spirituality, and charisma.”
OF CREATIVITY’S MANY
integers, attention is one of the most important.
Whether your form of expression involves concocting a sauce,
decorating a room, or
writing a poem, you need both an active, exploratory focus
on the matter at hand and the
long-term concentration required to gain the knowledge and
skills that support true
mastery.
The best weapon
against the ideas and attitudes—from “the one right way” to
“experts know best”—that stifle creativity yet abound in our
schools and other
institutions is a vigorous, searching, questioning,
elaborative style of focusing. When you
pay rapt attention, your spirits lift, expanding your
cognitive range and creative potential,
and perhaps even poising you for that personal renaissance.
CHAPTER 10
Focus Interruptus
All day long, you
depend on attention to help you make sense of your external
and internal worlds, support your identity, and enable you
to love and work. Yet if you’ve
ever assembled a shopping list while driving home from the
office, listening to the news,
and feeling guilty that you haven’t called your aged mother,
you know that your focus
sometimes seems more like a rickety mental machine designed
by Rube Goldberg than a
seamless laser beam of concentration. That more people claim
to have this distracted
experience more of the time reflects a sudden major cultural
change, whose effects
scientists are still trying to assess, and the anxiety it
arouses.
84
In little more than
a decade, computers and the Internet, cell phones and
BlackBerries have become surrogate body parts that enable
nonstop attention to myriad
sources of information and entertainment as well as great
numbers of other people. This
technological bonanza creates a major expansion of the
targets for your focus and a
potential drain on its finite resources. Despite the
widespread lamentations that our
machines are driving us crazy in general and ruining our
concentration in particular, the
truth is more complicated. A short review of attention’s
interaction with memory, or the
storage and retrieval of information, and learning, which is
the acquisition of knowledge
and skills, helps put things in the right perspective.
Few people have a
better gut-level understanding of this mental ecosystem than
Scott Hagwood. For four years running, from his debut in
2001, he won the USA
Memory Championship, which involves feats such as memorizing
exhaustive lists of
names, digits, and even a fifty-line poem. The training
regimen for this cognitive
Kentucky Derby is based on a simple, stunning fact. By and
large, if you want to learn
and remember something—a new neighbor’s name or the
directions to the
restaurant—you really have to pay attention to it. If you
don’t, the information probably
won’t make it to your short-term much less long-term memory,
where what you’ve
learned is stored. As a result, you end up waving a wordless
hello and asking again at the
next gas station.
Sometimes, paying
attention is a process that Hagwood charitably describes as
“occurring on lots of levels. For instance, right now, I see
the light and hear the soft hum
of the computer. I just tasted a little bit of coffee.” When
he describes his rapt focus when
he settles down to work, however, his language becomes
literally and figuratively
muscular: “I take my powers of attention, move aside all the
extraneous stuff, and focus
completely on the material. When you become great with
memory, you become naturally
superfocused. At work, I often become so engrossed that I
have to set the alarm clock, so
that I remember to stop and do whatever else I have planned
that day.”
A memory champ’s
pièce de résistance—locking down the order of an entire deck
of shuffled cards in less than one minute—is a textbook
illustration of attention’s basic
mechanism of selecting and enhancing your target and
suppressing the competition. To
pull it off, says Hagwood, “you can’t be distracted,” and
he’s not just talking about
turning off your cell phone. Because the world tournaments
take place in a room holding
some sixty people, the contestants wear earplugs to minimize
any sound. To eliminate
visual distractions, he says, “the Germans wear these little
eyeglasses that have sides on
them. Some of them will actually face the wall, so they
can’t see anything at all other
than their own movements. That’s how important staying
focused is.”
The Olympian mental
effort that this level of attending, remembering, and
learning requires comes across in Hagwood’s account of
trying to memorize the names of
all 106 people in a television show’s audience. His tactic
was to create a powerful link
with the new information by shaking a person’s hand while
listening to the name, then
associating it with someone he already knew. “The thing is,”
he says, “it got so intense
that after a little while, the audience became really quiet.
I said to them, ‘The silence is
palpable. You should see the focus, the attention, you’re
giving to me. It’s kind of
frightening.’ A woman said, ‘Well, you should see the
attention you’re giving us. It’s
quite frightening.’ They were mirroring what I was doing.”
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IF SCOTT HAGWOOD is
at one end of the attention-learning-memory spectrum,
many Americans feel that they’re sliding way down toward the
other. Their concern
notwithstanding, new research increasingly shows that
usually, glitches and lapses in
attention are not signs of incipient ADHD or Alzheimer’s
disease, but normal, even
sometimes beneficial, mental phenomena.
Everyone who has an
intact brain can focus, but some people are much better at it
than others. Like every human trait or ability, attention
can be plotted on a bell-shaped
curve, with many individuals clustered toward the middle and
fewer toward each tail.
Those at one end are champion focusers, and those at the
other are said to suffer from
“attention deficit.” As Northwestern neurologist Marsel
Mesulam observes, we don’t
know what causes these variations in the capacity to attend,
“in the same way that we
don’t know what makes people math or chess or violin
geniuses—or not. The entire issue
of human talents and normal variations is very poorly
understood. To say that someone
has an attention deficit may not be so different from saying
he has a musical or poetry
deficit. We talk about ADHD because attention is important
in Western society. Nobody
tests us for singing or hunting ability, but those talents
would also be distributed unevenly
in the population, with some of us performing very poorly.”
When writing about
two common attentional styles, William James pictures the
mind as an archer’s target. Some people, he says, naturally
focus on the bull’s-eye, “sink
into a subject of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted,
are ‘lost’ for a moment before
they come back to the outer world.” For others, however, the
target’s outer rings are
“filled with something like meteoric showers of images” that
flare at random, distracting
attention from the bull’s-eye and carrying thoughts in
various directions. Such persons
“find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring
it back by a voluntary pull.”
It’s often assumed
that really smart people find it easy to focus, but attention
researchers, beginning with James, question that notion.
Perhaps thinking of some of his
Harvard colleagues, he took pains to make clear that neither
the “bull’s-eye” nor
“meteoric” mode of paying attention is necessarily good or
bad per se: “Some of the most
efficient workers I know are of the ultra-scatterbrained
type.” The reason, he says, is that
a person’s total “mental efficiency” derives from the
combination of all his faculties, the
most important of which is not attention, but “the strength
of his desire and passion.”
Compared to a more naturally focused but less motivated
person, the individual who
really cares for a subject “will return to it incessantly
from his incessant wanderings, and
first and last do more with it, and get more results from
it.”
Just as there are
normal variations in the ability to attend, there are “normal”
attentional problems. That proverbial professor is not the
only person to suffer from
so-called absentmindedness. When you drive past your own
freeway exit, it’s far less
likely to be a symptom of a disorder than an indication that
you were too distracted by
musing on some juicy gossip or singing along with your
favorite golden oldie on the
radio to attend properly to your space-time coordinates. If
you can’t remember where you
put your cell phone, the probable reason is that you were
focusing on something else
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when you put it down, so that information either didn’t get
properly encoded in your
memory or can’t be retrieved at will. Interestingly, as that
professor’s erudition suggests,
absentmindedness has little or nothing to do with a person’s
general capacity for memory.
More consolation can
be found in research that shows that you often attend to and
learn things without even trying. Notwithstanding the
importance of “explicit” learning,
which requires effortful attention, as when you memorize
verb conjugations, you also
benefit from plenty of the “implicit” sort, which you seem
to pick up by osmosis, as when
you “just know” something. If you’re given a list of flowers
and asked to identify the red
ones, later on, you very well might recall as many or even
more of the whole list than
someone who had been told to memorize it—an explicit task.
Implicit learning doesn’t
mean that you didn’t pay attention to the information, but
that you processed it without
intending to. Indeed, this process underlies the acquisition
of many complicated real-life
skills, from grammatical speech to playing a sport to
pinch-of-this, dab-of-that cooking,
as well as exciting “Eureka!” moments.
At first glance,
recent research that indicates your brain probably spends even
more time wandering than you fear seems like bad news.
Studies by Jonathan Schooler, a
psychologist at the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver, show that even when
you’re supposedly reading, you’re daydreaming about 15 to 20
percent of the time, often
without realizing it. Surveys of high school and college
students suggest that their minds
wander from schoolwork up to about half and a third of the
time, respectively.
Common wisdom
notwithstanding, there’s growing evidence that
mind-wandering is a basic mental function that can boost
your efficiency, creativity, and
well-being. When you’re not paying attention to anything in
particular, your brain is
busily maintaining its still-mysterious “default” state. In
this baseline mode, large areas
that are relatively quiet when you perform tasks become
activated. When you’re
daydreaming, your baseline network is activated, which
supports the educated guess that
its function is to accommodate such poorly understood mental
processes.
Not focusing on what
you’re allegedly doing sounds like a big problem, but
sometimes it actually makes you more productive. After all,
if you’re walking, driving,
sweeping the floor, or doing anything else that doesn’t
require your full attention, your
thoughts might as well stray to your weekend plans, dinner
menu, or that roman à clef
you could write about your dysfunctional family. A certain
amount of daydreaming at
school or the office can even help you solve problems. In
contrast to maintaining an
unblinking, rigid focus on a dilemma, allowing your thoughts
to stray opens you up to
fresh perspectives and useful information from seemingly
unrelated areas.
Where big
breakthroughs are concerned, getting to “That’s it!” requires not only
the intense focus and explicit learning associated with the
furrowed brow of a Thomas
Edison or Marie Curie, but also plenty of incubation,
mind-wandering, and implicit
learning. In a typical scenario, your brain’s executive
cortex first bears down on the
problem du jour with all of its double-barreled top-down
concentration, advancing things
as far as cognitive processes can. Then you get tired or fed
up, shove back your chair, and
say to yourself, “Enough of that!”
When you head to the
cafeteria or gym and start paying attention to something
else, nonconscious parts of your mind slow-cook your earlier
insights into the problem
and supply associations; the brain’s right hemisphere, which
has long been associated
with so-called holistic reasoning, intuition, and artistry,
seems especially involved in this
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incubation process. Then, walking back to work, you see the
solution whole.
This special alchemy
of attention and distraction, information and inspiration
enabled Einstein, after many years of work, “suddenly” to
see the theory of relativity not
while bent over his desk, but in a dream: “Like a giant die
making an indelible impress, a
huge map of the universe outlined itself in one clear
vision.” On a more quotidian plane
of experience, the same combination of cerebration and
woolgathering, and even
counting sheep, allows you to wrestle with a question all
day—should you take the better
job in the less desirable city or paint the living room
fire-engine red?—then “sleep on it,”
and awake with the solution.
Finally, not paying
attention to anything in particular sometimes just plain feels
good. Research conducted by the University of Michigan
psychologists Rachel and
Stephen Kaplan shows that when you gaze dreamily at drifting
clouds, twinkling stars,
rippling water, or other natural stimuli, you drift into a
soft-focused state of “fascination”
that allows your mind to relax and unwind, reduces the
incidence of dumb “human
errors,” and even lowers physiological measures of stress.
SOME SEEMING
PROBLEMS, such as reasonable amounts of daydreaming,
spacing out, and distraction, are adaptive variations on
attention, but others are not.
Perhaps you’ve tried to be more productive by making calls while
emptying your in-box
or dishwasher, only to forget whom you phoned when she picks
up. Yakking away while
keeping one eye on your computer, maybe you’ve hit “Reply”
instead of “Forward,” thus
sending your snarky e-mail comment to the very person you
least wanted to receive it. If
so, you’ve experienced multitasking’s major effect on your
attention.
Thanks to the
electronics revolution, the possibility of doing several things at
once, which formerly mostly concerned pilots and other
techies, has become a major
cultural preoccupation. People in the trenches may still be
debating its benefits and
drawbacks, but science has determined that multitasking is
for most practical purposes a
myth, and that heeding its siren call leads to inefficiency
and even danger.
There are certain
situations in which you easily perform two rote functions at
once, as when you walk and chew gum at the same time. You
also readily combine
different forms of perception. At the movies, for example,
you seamlessly process the
audio and visuals, which “go together” and merge into a
single multidimensional entity.
When they don’t, as in a badly dubbed foreign film, you’re
soon addled by attending to
the conflict between the soundtrack and the actors’ faces.
Multitasking’s real
trouble sets in when you try to focus on two demanding
activities simultaneously. The Cornell psychologist Ulric
Neisser proved that after an
enormous amount of practice, his subjects could learn to
take dictation and read at the
same time. However, acquiring the skill takes months of
drilling and is confined to those
particular tasks. For most people most of the time, attempts
to combine such “higher
order” chores fail or are flawed.
Multitasking’s most
obvious drawback is inefficiency. In many cases, your ability
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to do two things simultaneously is impaired because both
tasks draw on one or more of
the same information-processing systems in the brain. For
activities that involve
language, such as conversing, watching TV, or simply
thinking, for example, there’s just
one major channel through which you send input and receive
output. There are occasional
exceptions to the rule, says David Meyer, a cognitive
scientist at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor, but generally, “if you’re, say,
trying to listen to someone on the
phone while typing an e-mail, something has to give.”
You may think you’re
multitasking when you’re listening to your boss’s report
while texting your lunch date, but what you’re really doing
is switching back and forth
between activities. Despite your fond hopes, the extra
effort involved actually makes you
less rather than more productive; your overall performance
will be inefficient,
error-prone, and more time-consuming than if you had done
one thing at a time. As one
attention expert ruefully observed after writing a book, “if
your train of thought is
interrupted even for a second, you have to go back and say,
‘Where was I?’ There are
start-up costs each time as you reload everything into
memory. Multitasking exacts a
price, and people aren’t as good at it as they think they
are.”
Multitasking not
only is inefficient but can also be dangerous, even lethal.
Illustrating the risk of operating machinery while engaged
in another activity, one
scientist recalls that while he was listening to a football
game and driving, his car started
swerving all over the road; seeing the match in his head
conflicted with his visual
attention to the reality in front of him. If the traffic
worsens or a car swerves into your
lane while you’re driving, you can turn off the radio or
stop chatting with a passenger, but
the situation is more difficult if you’re talking on the phone—especially
if seconds count
and you’re going 60 miles per hour. Hundreds of thousands of
cell-related traffic
accidents each year make plain that the car-phone
combination is unsafe, potentially
deadly, and should be completely illegal.
Anyone who has ever
had to read the same paragraph twice understands why the
connections among attention, memory, and learning are
especially important for
students—the very people most attracted to multitasking.
Using fMRI imaging, UCLA
psychologists found that when you focus on a demanding task,
your brain’s
hippocampus, which is important to memory, is in charge.
However, if you try to work
while distracted by instant messaging or the like, the
striatum, which is involved in rote
activities, takes over. As a result, even if you get the job
done, your recollection of it will
be more fragmented, less adaptable, and harder to retrieve
than it would be if you had
given it your undivided attention.
American youths
spend an average of 6.5 hours per day focused on the electronic
world, and many put in much more time there. Stunningly, up
to a third say they’re
involved with more than one medium most of the time. The
young seem to enjoy
switching their attention from target to target more than
older people, but scientists don’t
yet know what long-range impact this huge new cultural
change will have on growing
brains and minds.
Of the possible ways
in which multitasking can interfere with education, the most
obvious is the fact that you can’t process information very
well if you’re attending to
something else at the same time. Ideally, children, whose
brains are in the most active
stages of development, would focus on acquiring the basic
knowledge and abilities that
will be most important to them later. If they don’t get the
necessary training and
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experience at the appropriate stages of growth, their
potential mastery is reduced.
Offering a personal
example, Meyer says, “I know that learning tennis is best
done between the ages of eight and fifteen. The longer you
delay, the harder it will be,
and your ability to play will suffer—as mine did. This
principle applies to all sorts of
skills, both physical and mental, including the ability to
concentrate, direct your focus at
will, and manage your time.” Kids also need to work at
developing the capacity for the
concentrated, sustained attention required to succeed in
many endeavors, not just the skill
of flitting among them, he says: “Einstein didn’t invent the
theory of relativity while he
was multitasking at the Swiss patent office.”
Multitasking also
raises serious concerns about the shallow focus on the world
that it encourages, reinforced by the flip, casual,
rapid-fire style of electronic
communications. Eloquent testimony comes from five of
Japan’s ten best-selling novels
in 2007, which were composed on cell phones. Not
surprisingly, these romances, which
were written by young women in the truncated, text-messaging
style, fail to approach the
depth of Anna Karenina or even Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Intellectuals lament this dubious
new art form and blame manga, Japan’s ubiquitous comic
books, but there have been no
complaints from the huge cell-phone industry.
Rather than alienate
the young Western and Eastern consumers who drive the
market, powerful communications companies increasingly cater
to kids’ preference for
qwik-n-ez information that can be grasped in smaller and
smaller bits, encouraging a
superficial mentality that’s only lightly disguised by
keyboard athletics. The young can
get away with IM-ING while playing a computer game or the
like, but there’s a risk: if
you grow up assuming that you can pay attention to several
things at once, you may not
realize that the way in which you process such information
is superficial at best. When
you’re finally forced to confront intellectually demanding
situations in high school or
college, you may find that you’ve traded depth of knowledge
for breadth and stunted
your capacity for serious thought.
Along with the costs
to strong learning and deep thinking, hours spent in the thrall
of alluring machines exact a toll from your attention to
actual human beings. At the very
least, time online is subtracted from real-world
interactions, such as conversation, sharing
a meal, or even having sex. (Indeed, in one Italian study,
couples who had a TV in the
bedroom had intercourse only half as often as those who
didn’t.) Accustomed to triaging
your electronic contacts, you might also find yourself
wondering if actually talking to
someone just because she’s your neighbor or he’s your uncle
is the best use of your
valuable time. The young in particular might fail to
consider how many people in their
electronic address book really know them and would be there
for them if they needed
help, as a friend or relative does and would.
ONE NATURAL REACTION
to anxiety about feeling distracted and unfocused
is to look for a way to improve your capacity to pay
attention. Considering the need, there
are surprisingly few simple, effective strategies to date,
but encouraging research is under
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way.
Some of the easiest
tricks to improve your focus have been employed by great
teachers since students first wriggled at their desks. As a
lifelong professor of philosophy
and psychology, William James knew all too well that some
things are just plain more
interesting than others. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote
in a sonnet, “How do I love
thee? Let me count the ways.” Yet he argued that even a
tedious topic can take on a
certain fascination if you make an effort to look at it
afresh: “The subject must be made
to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a
word, to change. From an
unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.”
Tapping his own
store of pedagogical know-how, James urges you to enliven dull
work with “frequent recapitulations, illustrations,
examples, novelty of order, and
ruptures of routine.” When you write a report or the like,
he says, “If the topic be
inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be
difficult, couple its acquisition with
some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure
that it shall run through
certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can
possibly hold the mental field for
long.”
Along with
benefiting from liberal dollops of novelty and variation, James’s
students probably spiked their ability to focus with a
venerable psychoactive substance.
In 1600, long after the Muslim world discovered coffee’s
lively effect on attention, Pope
Clement VIII authorized Christians to partake of what had
hitherto been “Satan’s drink.”
Studies of “sustained attention” show that coffee and other
stimulants, as well as
changing conditions, companionship, and music, help you to
stay alert if you’re, say,
driving across Nebraska on I-80. In one study, subjects were
shown a series of capital
letters, then asked whether they were the same ones they had
seen two sequences before.
Those who had previously drunk some coffee were
significantly better at recalling the
letters than those who hadn’t. Because caffeine not only
activates brain regions
responsible for attentiveness but also seems to increase
short-term memory, it’s popular
with students as well as long-haul truckers.
Newer chemical
attention-boosters such as Ritalin and other stimulants can prove
more problematic than espressos and lattes. The best seller
Listening to Prozac first
examined the question of whether behavioral drugs designed
to treat illnesses, such as
depression, should also be used to help healthy people feel
better, too. Long before
Prozac, however, military personnel and certain high
achievers, including William F.
Buckley, Jr., had enhanced their ability to focus with drugs
that are officially prescribed
for people who suffer from ADHD.
In some schools, the
use of attention drugs is so widespread that some parents feel
pressured into medicating any child who isn’t performing
well. Significant numbers of
normally attentive students already take these agents to
write term papers and to study for
and take exams. For that matter, as one researcher says, “I
have plenty of highly esteemed
colleagues who take Ritalin before a speech or when
reviewing a grant to improve their
ability to concentrate at a very high level.” As the
quality, variety, and use of
psychopharmacological agents increase, it’s easy to imagine
scenarios in which healthy
people working in competitive schools or offices would take
an attention-enhancing drug,
such as the newer agent modafinil, in order to function at
110 percent, thereby putting
unmedicated peers at a disadvantage.
Considering the drawbacks
of behavioral drugs, notably their side effects and
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often uncertain consequences over the long term, the idea of
improving attention through
some sort of training has a lot of appeal. According to
David Meyer, such regimens can
work, at least within particular environments: “Air traffic
controllers are very good at
managing their attentional and multitasking skills in their
work setting. But to what extent
are they also able to use those same skills in the home or
classroom?”
Some new attentional
workouts use computer screens as gyms. In their work with
young children, University of Oregon psychologists Michael
Posner and Mary Rothbart
have shown that such exercises can markedly increase the
capacity for executive
attention, thus improving memory, self-regulation, and the
ability to plan and reason. In a
study of adults, subjects were presented with from one to
five columns of numbers on a
screen, then later asked whether the digits had already been
displayed. In the first trial,
they were much faster with the one-column version. After
about seven sessions, however,
they could perform as quickly with four columns as with one.
In other words, through
practice, they had expanded their capacity to focus.
One commercially
available computerized mental workout, the Brain Fitness
program, uses attention drills to tune up elders’ cognitive
functioning. Designed by
Michael Merzenich, a UCSF neuroscientist who helped develop
the cochlear implant for
the treatment of deafness, this four-hundred-dollar software
operates on the principle that,
like your muscles and joints, your brain is subject to the
“use it or lose it” rule. For an
hour a day over eight weeks, seniors log on to a computer
and perform a series of
repetitive, progressively demanding exercises. Judging
whether tones are rising or falling,
say, or distinguishing between “bo” and “do” or “shee” and
“chee,” requires close
attention and puts the brain through its paces. The idea is
that the effort builds and
strengthens neural pathways, which improves both the brain’s
ability to crunch
information and the user’s mood. The scientific jury is
still out on the effectiveness of
such regimens, but some users report improvement on their
performance on the drills and
in daily functioning.
Particularly
considering the lack of other well-developed, safe, and readily
accessible tools to improve attention, some type of
meditation, or practice derived from
it, looks like the best way to enhance your ability to focus
and perhaps enjoy other
benefits too, such as improved well-being.
HER INVESTIGATION OF
training attention to improve daily experience began
with what the Penn cognitive neuroscientist Amishi Jha calls
a “defining moment” in her
own life, albeit one common to a legion of exhausted,
harried professional women with
families. Juggling the demands of the tenure track,
research, teaching, and a husband and
small child had jacked up her stress level so high that just
before giving an important
lecture, she was clenching her jaw and grinding her teeth so
much that she lost all feeling
in them. “I knew I had to make a choice,” she says. “It was
change my life or change my
mind.”
Because its
stress-relieving potential is backed by a lot of research, Jha bought a
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couple of manuals and began to do daily, nonsectarian,
breath-focused mindfulness
meditation. In attentional parlance, she selected the
present moment and made it salient,
while suppressing the mind’s usual jumble of reactive
thoughts and feelings. A month
later, Jha felt more relaxed and able to cope. To her
surprise, like many of Richard
Davidson’s subjects, she also felt more focused.
Just as she
concentrated on her breath during meditation, Jha found that she could
concentrate on her work at the lab or on her family at home,
undistracted by her other
responsibilities. This increased feeling of control over a
demanding life combined with
her sophisticated scientific background to produce an
epiphany. “I thought, ‘I could
actually study this!’” she says. “And that’s what I’m trying
to do in my work. To learn
how to harness attention—to transform and improve it through
training.”
To explore the
effectiveness of various attentional regimens, different groups of
Jha’s subjects learn different types of meditation, which
they practice daily. Periodically,
they report to her lab, where they’re tested on objective
focusing tasks. Like other
research, her results show that practices that require you
to concentrate on a target, such
as your breath, strengthen attention’s selective orienting
system, which increases your
ability to focus in real-life situations; she also finds
improvement in short-term memory.
Recently, Jha has
been investigating another mode of focusing and the type of
training that seems to enhance it. Science mostly talks
about attention as a restriction and
filtering of information, but Jha is interested in the
process of actively broadening, rather
than narrowing, your focus: a different kind of selection.
To illustrate the difference in
the single-pointed and expansive ways of attending, she
describes an experiment in which
she gives her subjects three words—bull, shoe, car—then asks
for a fourth term that
relates to all of them.
There are two
distinct ways of working out answers to such a “compound remote
associate” problem, each of which seems to spring from a
different way of paying
attention. Some people take an analytic approach and
actively zero in on the various
possibilities in a methodical, winnowing fashion—does this
word fit, or that one—until
they arrive at horn. However, others seem to rely on
intuition; they relax and allow their
focus to expand. “They explain that they don’t have anything
in particular in mind,” says
Jha, “then Boom! The word just comes to them. They simply
let it emerge.”
Just as there seems
to be an open, expansive way of attending, there’s a type of
meditation that’s broader and more receptive than the
familiar restrictive, breath-focused
sort. In this practice, you simply throw up the windows of
your awareness and let the
moment, or some sensory dimension of it, flood in. You might
focus on the clouds
drifting across the sky or the sound of waves or a rushing
stream. (This wide-open style
of practice brings to mind research on how positive emotions
broaden attention, and Jha
is investigating that connection with Barbara Fredrickson.)
Compared with subjects who
use the more selective mindfulness technique and improve
their real-life orienting ability,
Jha finds that those who practice attending in a broadly
receptive state enhance their
alerting system, which helps smooth the transitions from one
target to another in daily
life.
As she continues her
research, Jha finds that her definition of attention keeps
evolving and expanding. “It’s a tool that can be used in
many ways, and not just for
selecting between relevant and irrelevant information. Where
I’d like to go is to regard
attention as ‘the ability to frame your field of awareness
in the way that will be most
93
useful to the task at hand.’ You could restrict or broaden
your focus according to your
cognitive, affective, even somatic context.”
As to the power of
focus to create experience and generate well-being, Jha says,
“You hear it all the time now—‘Energy flows where attention
goes.’ If you can harness
your own ability to focus and build that skill into the way
you operate, that’s going to
affect how you handle the stress in your life.”
WHETHER YOU’RE A
child trying to grasp the rudiments of language or a poet
perfecting a sonnet, attention has shaped your identity and
experience by enabling you to
learn and remember. When distractions interfere with that
process, your ability to store
information and acquire knowledge and skills suffers. That
said, as suggested by the
hyperactive title of a recent book—CrazyBusy: Overstretched,
Overbooked, and About to
Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD—it has
become almost routine to
profess that you’re overwhelmed by the demands on your
attention and dread an incipient
deficit disorder.
Where fears about
the ability to focus in the early twenty-first century are
concerned, the truth is more complicated than most headlines
and sound bites suggest.
Many attentional lapses are not only normal but even beneficial.
All minds wander
sometimes, and they often stray in productive directions. On
the other hand, embracing
the vogue for multitasking, fueled by seductive electronics,
can make you inefficient and
even endangered. Inordinate amounts of time spent fixated on
various screens and
keyboards pose particular risks for young people who should
be focused on learning and
exact a cost in terms of real-life experience, particularly
with other living, breathing
people. One crucial fact often gets overlooked in laments
about the electronic assault on
your ability to focus: your machines are not in charge of
what you attend to—you are.
When they prove distracting, you have only to turn them off.
Considering
attention’s importance, it’s surprising that coffee and Ritalin are still
the most popular if imperfect ways to improve it. After a
long lag, however, science has
new tools in the pipeline, including not just
more-sophisticated drugs but also computer
programs, and focusing workouts derived from meditation.
These regimens exercise
attention as if it were a muscle and show that like other
skills, it can be improved with
old-fashioned training.
CHAPTER 11
Disordered Attention
If you’ve ever had
trouble sitting patiently in a waiting room or grasping the
instructions for a new appliance, you’ve experienced a tiny
taste of the frustration
endured day after day, year after year by children
struggling with
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Unlike normal
hitches such as daydreaming and
absentmindedness, ADHD is considered to be a psychiatric
problem—the commonest
94
one among the young—that affects as many as 5 percent of
American kids and three
times more boys than girls.
Particularly in the
post-industrial West, a child who has a hard time focusing on
schoolwork faces serious short- and long-term disadvantages.
By and large, if you don’t
pay attention to information, you don’t learn or remember
it, at least not well. Moreover,
many such children are also more restless, impulsive, and
distractible than is usual for
their ages, which makes them prone to behavioral as well as
academic troubles.
Despite the
prevalence of ADHD and the seriousness of its consequences, there’s
a stunning lack of basic knowledge about it. Scientists
still don’t understand exactly what
it is, what causes it, or how to test for it objectively, as
with a brain scan or blood sample.
Doctors and other professionals can treat the disorder’s
symptoms, but their success
varies considerably; guesstimates range from 40 to 80
percent. In fact, to say that
someone has ADHD is very much like saying he has a fever: a
problem that could have
many origins and may or may not respond to an “aspirin” such
as Ritalin.
The chasm that has
separated attention researchers from clinicians is one obvious
obstacle to progress in understanding ADHD. The gap dates to
the 1980s, when big
advances in neuroscience and psychopharmacology led to
increased treatment of
behavioral problems in general. Eager to formalize some
diagnostic criteria, child
psychiatrists devised a set of questions to help parents and
teachers evaluate a child’s
ability to focus and control his or her behavior. While a
laudable step toward clarifying
the symptoms of a common problem, such information doesn’t
constitute scientific
evidence comparable to professionals’ in-depth interviews
and observations of children,
much less physiological measures, yet the questionnaire
remains the basis for a diagnosis
of ADHD.
Attention
researchers tend to describe the dearth of basic knowledge about ADHD
in terms like “astounding” and “appalling.” “You would not
believe how little work of
this kind has been done,” says the NIMH’s Leslie
Ungerleider, “and most of that
concerns the hyperactivity aspect of control. There’s almost
nothing about how children
filter distractions. Beginning with primates, we’ve
developed good ways to test that, but
none of them has ever been used for clinical assessment.”
Offering the clinicians’
perspective, however, Javier Castellanos, a pediatric
neuroscientist and child and
adolescent psychiatrist at the New York University Child
Study Center, says that “it’s
only recently, under duress from the NIMH, that many
attention scientists have been
willing to deign to talk to plebeian clinical investigators,
which is what’s required for
them to appreciate the complexity of the situation, from the
children’s failures to the
parents’ desperation.”
Outside the groves
of academe, the fact that an awful lot of little fellows who
were once said to “have ants in their pants” or were labeled
“fidgety” or even “typical
boys” suddenly seem to have an illness that’s treated with
powerful psychoactive drugs
pushes a lot of cultural buttons. Many parents are
understandably uneasy about giving a
child daily doses of Ritalin or other agents that affect
behavior, resemble abused
substances, and have side effects such as moodiness and loss
of appetite, as well as
possible long-term health risks.
The experience of
Jack S. and his parents illustrates some of the ups and downs of
life with ADHD and its treatment. After a lot of “snakes and
snails and puppy dogs’ tails”
equivocation and waiting for him to “grow up,” Mr. and Mrs.
S. finally consulted an
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educational psychologist about their ten-year-old son’s
lackluster academic performance.
Compared to his friends and siblings, Jack found school a
struggle, particularly math and
foreign languages, and spent much time cooling his heels in
the principal’s office. After
much testing, the psychologist said that Jack had a florid
case of ADHD and referred
them to a child psychiatrist who understood the problem and
could prescribe an
appropriate drug.
Jack’s parents were
of two minds about the idea of medication. Mrs. S. was
hopeful that maybe the pills would help their son settle
down and finally achieve his
academic potential, but Mr. S. didn’t like the idea of
“resorting” to medication. Summing
up this common family predicament, Ungerleider describes the
two views of treating
ADHD with drugs: “One way is that whatever helps kids focus
on their work is a good
thing, because then they won’t be constantly frustrated. The
other way is that we don’t
want to give drugs to children if we don’t know the
long-term effects.” However, as she
observes, what you attend to largely determines your experience,
which in turn influences
who you are. Thus, when children aren’t paying attention to
schoolwork and other
important activities, “their brains aren’t being remodeled
by experience in the ways they
should be,” she says. “It’s a very tricky issue.”
After much
wrangling, his parents decided that Jack would try medication. A few
weeks later, the teachers and his mom thought it had helped
him calm down and focus at
school and on homework. His dad continued to dislike the
idea. Jack said that the pills
“made it easier to look at the blackboard,” but took away
his appetite and made him feel
“weird” and, when they wore off, “grouchy.”
Toward the end of
high school, after years of an anxious, labor-intensive, and
expensive combination of private school, math tutors,
counselors, and drugs, Jack told his
mother, “I don’t think I really have ADHD anymore. I only
have to take the pills to study
for big exams.” He still has some trouble with math and
foreign languages, but he has just
finished his first year of college, got a 3.2 average, and
made the hockey team. His
parents are thrilled that Jack has come so far and feels so
much more in control of his
experience. They also regret that he had to struggle long
and hard to get where he is today
and feel for the tens of thousands of kids and parents who
lack the necessary resources
for the battle.
NO ONE IS more aware
of the discontent over the current state of knowledge
about ADHD than Javier Castellanos. First, he squarely
addresses the major problem,
observing that “we don’t have an objective way, like a blood
test or genetic marker, of
definitively saying ‘This person has it or does not,’ partly
because we don’t really
understand what it is.” Then he moves on to what he and his
colleagues are doing to
improve the situation, with increasingly encouraging
results.
One major
discovery—that ADHD isn’t a single problem that springs from a
single cause—is itself an important, hard-won advance. For
ten years while at the NIMH,
Castellanos and a multidisciplinary team intensively studied
150 children with attention
96
problems who were enrolled in a special school set up just
for them. “We really, really
knew those kids,” he says, “from the results of their spinal
taps and blood tests to their
psychological profiles.” After searching the young subjects’
data for some common
denominators, he says, “the big thing I learned was that
almost none of the kids were like
any others. It was almost as if there were a hundred and
fifty types of ADHD.”
Just as “epilepsy”
turns out to be perhaps two hundred different seizure disorders,
ADHD is an umbrella term for a variety of problems that have
some symptoms in
common. As they did for epilepsy, new tools such as fMRI are
helping to identify certain
broad categories of attention difficulties, which is the
first step toward developing
appropriate treatments for each—a big step up from the
fever-aspirin approach.
Children may attend
poorly for many reasons, from lack of motivation to
excessive anxiety, but like most behavior, the unfocused,
fidgety sort associated with
ADHD usually involves a collaboration between nature and
nurture. That it’s six times
likelier to affect children who have been sexually abused
offers tragic proof that
experience can cause the disorder. Schools as well as
troubled homes can fuel attention
problems. According to the “perceptual load” theory, you’ll
experience more distractions
when your task is not very engaging—a circumstance that may
often obtain even in an
average, much less subpar classroom. Then too, says
Castellanos, “As long as a child has
the full attention of an adult, he has no attention issues.
But our schools are based on the
Ford assembly-line model, which means serious trouble if
you’re not the ‘typical kid,’
especially in adolescence.”
Biology is also
involved in many if not most cases of ADHD. (Recalling a
medical exam of a pair of identical twins, only one of whom
had the disorder, Castellanos
says that the affected child had actually had a previously
undetected stroke.) According to
one theory, the problem may often be rooted more in delayed
but normal brain
development than in some neurological deficit—a notion
supported by the fact that three
out of four kids outgrow it. In affected children, the brain
in general and the cerebellum
in particular tend to be smaller than those of kids who
don’t have the disorder; the
possibility that drugs such as Ritalin are responsible has
been ruled out.
That genes often
play a role in ADHD is clear from the fact that one obvious risk
factor is maleness. (Girls who have the disorder are not
only far fewer in number but also
rarely as hyperactive and disruptive as the boys; their poor
concentration at school is
often overlooked or ascribed to daydreaming or “not trying
hard enough.”) Attention
problems also run in some families. About 25 percent of the
biological parents of
diagnosed kids are affected, compared with 4 percent of
adoptive parents. Then too,
genes that influence not just attention but also a child’s
activity level, impulsiveness, and
other traits may contribute to ADHD. Thus, a certain student
may have trouble focusing
on math or Spanish less because of some cognitive deficit
than from a thrill-seeking
temperamental inclination to tune out what bores him and
look for some real action.
Although Castellanos
regards the role of genes in ADHD as “incontrovertible,”
the specifics identified so far are “modest in the extreme.”
According to one leading
theory, the disorder arises from the combined influence of
different genes, many of which
affect the neurotransmitter dopamine. This chemical
messenger, which is boosted by
Ritalin, is important not only to attention and cognition,
but also to the control of
movement, emotion, and the ability to anticipate pleasure
and reward as well as pain. If
dopamine acts as a kind of chemical carrot that raises your
hopes of being rewarded for
97
doing a task—say, algebra homework—and if your brain has
trouble storing or deploying
the transmitter, you can probably still do the math.
However, you won’t do it as easily or
as well as someone well stoked with dopamine. For this
reason, Castellanos calls ADHD
a “disorder of efficiency—or inefficiency.”
Dopamine’s
involvement in the brain’s reward circuitry may explain why
individuals who’ve been diagnosed with ADHD are also
likelier than others to smoke,
drink, and use drugs. Combined with an attention problem,
this tendency toward
substance abuse suggests that they’re perhaps motivated less
by the desire to “get high”
in a recreational sense than by the wish to feel and
function better—to feel “okay” or
“normal,” if only temporarily.
Recently, the search
for what he calls “the splinters that make up different
attention problems” has taken Castellanos in a new
direction. First, he explains that your
brain is far less concerned with your brilliant ideas or
searing emotions than with its own
internal “gyroscopic busyness,” which consumes 65 percent of
its total energy. Every
fifty seconds, its activity fluctuates, causing what he
calls a “brownout.” No one knows
the purpose of these neurological events, but Castellanos
has a thesis: the clockwork
pulses enable the brain’s circuits to stay “logged on” and
available to communicate with
one another, even when they’re not being used. “Imagine
you’re a cabdriver on your day
off,” Castellanos says. “You don’t need to use your workday
circuits on a Sunday, but to
keep those channels open, your brain sends a ping through
them every minute or so. The
fluctuations are the brain’s investment in maintaining its
circuits online.”
Whatever their
neurological raison d’être, Castellanos hopes that the brain’s
brownouts will advance the understanding of ADHD. He’s
looking for correlations
between those pings, which are easily measured, and lapses
in attention, which can be
gauged by how fast his research subjects press a button when
a cue appears. Those who
have the disorder take longer than normal to push the
button. If such lags turn out to be
connected to irregularities in the brain’s periodic
fluctuations, they could serve as red
flags for other differences, too, perhaps in working memory,
motivation, or other
functions involved in paying attention.
Waving a book called
Attention, Memory, and Executive Function, Castellanos
summarizes its gist: “All three things are intricately
related. Is light a particle or a wave?
Or a wavicle? It all depends on what you’re using the
definition for, what your purpose
is. Paying attention probably involves a lot of large-scale
reconfiguration of different
brain systems.”
Despite some
breakthroughs, when scientists look at a group of people who have
ADHD and try to figure out what they have in common,
Castellanos says, “The truth is,
we don’t know. If there are, say, five broad types of
causes, some people will have
genetic issues and others cerebellum involvement, thyroid
problems, head injury, or
something else.” Complexity notwithstanding, research at
least clearly shows that ADHD
“isn’t a ‘spiritual’ problem, but a physical, biochemical
one, elements of which we can
measure. We’re just scratching the surface now.”
98
THAT THERE HAS been
increased progress in basic research on ADHD is cold
comfort if your child suffers from it right now, or if
you’re one of the minority of
individuals who continue to have trouble concentrating into
adulthood. As Castellanos
says, “I tell parents and kids that if they can get through
adolescence without making
irreversible mistakes, or at least minimizing their number,
brain maturation is a
wonderful thing.” That neurological development takes time,
however, and kids
struggling with ADHD must perform well enough in school and
the rest of life, from
recreation to relationships, to have desirable options when
the time comes to apply to
college, look for a job, or form lasting bonds. If they
don’t stay engaged in the classroom,
academic failure can start a sad, well-documented downward
spiral, particularly for
impulsive young males, into disciplinary problems, and even
delinquency, dropping out
of school, and crime.
Medications such as
Ritalin, Concerta, and Adderall help many kids stay on the
right track. Scientists have learned that the drugs enhance
the activity of dopamine but
still don’t know exactly how these stimulants produce their
paradoxically calming effect
on certain brains. Interestingly, like many psychiatric
medications, they were discovered
by accident. Looking for a headache remedy back in 1937, Dr.
Charles Bradley tested
one such drug on some children who had been
institutionalized for being uncontrollable,
only to be shocked when their teachers reported that the
kids suddenly could sit still and
learn. Some serious fears about the medications have been
ruled out, notably that they
somehow shrink the brain. No one disputes that they have
short-term side effects and
may pose long-term risks, but, says Castellanos, the drugs
have been used for a long time
now, and, when taken as directed, they appear to be safe.
After weighing the
possible costs against the potential benefits, Castellanos favors
at least trying medication. If he had a child who had ADHD,
he’d do so, but first he’d
make sure of the diagnosis and would delay medication until
it seemed really necessary.
“If treatment is done well,” he says, “a child shouldn’t
notice the drug, but just think the
teacher has gotten better. It’s like glasses—if they’re
good, you forget about them.”
Bringing a
neuroscientist’s perspective to evolutionary psychology, Castellanos
notes that many kids who have trouble paying attention in
school, such as Jack S., peform
well on athletic fields or when hunkered over a computer
game. This seeming
inconsistency reflects the fact that Homo sapiens has
evolved both the genetic variation
that’s associated with ADHD and the variation that protects
against it. In our sedentary,
school-and-office culture, the tendency to shift focus
rapidly and to act first and ask
questions later is regarded as a problem. Yet that behavior
has persisted in the population
because it’s a real advantage in certain situations, from
NASCAR races to war zones to
the floor of the Stock Exchange. Indeed, on the savannah
where we evolved, someone
who focused too long and hard on a particular bird, flower,
or thought could end up as a
predator’s dinner.
Such grisly
prehistoric entrées were likelier to have been girls and women than
boys and men. In general, females focus more on social
interaction and self-expression,
which is better suited to the classroom than the wilds.
Males typically focus more readily
on action, which serves them better outdoors than in the
library. These relationships
among gender, environment, and attention help explain not
only why more boys have
ADHD but also why, so soon after millennia of severe
inequity, more women than men
99
already attend college.
Ideally, a child who
struggles with ADHD doesn’t just take medication but also
receives counseling on how best to live with the disorder,
including identifying
opportunities to enjoy intervals of rapt attention away from
the classroom. Whenever you
put yourself in circumstances that really suit who you are,
whether on a mountaintop or in
a museum, your brain releases dopamine: the neurochemical
that’s affected by
stimulants, and is so important to attention, cognition, the
ability to anticipate pleasure
and reward, and much else. Thus, a child who has a hard time
coping in the classroom
can derive much satisfaction and encouragement from
excelling outdoors or on the
basketball court. “A big part of dealing with ADHD is
understanding yourself,” says
Castellanos. “Everyone has problems. The trick is knowing
which situations make yours
worse and which ones ameliorate them.”
For that matter,
everyone can learn to attend better. If you really want to focus on
something, says Castellanos, the optimum amount of time to
spend on it is ninety
minutes. “Then change tasks. And watch out for interruptions
once you’re really
concentrating, because it will take you twenty minutes to
recover.”
Summing up the
state-of-the-art knowledge about ADHD, Castellanos says,
“We’re part of the way into the problem. We know a great
deal more than ten years ago
but are just starting to step on solid ground in terms of
understanding the underlying
mechanisms. There will be new, very different drugs and
treatments. I’m hugely
optimistic, but we have to hurry up, because people are
waiting.”
CHAPTER 12
Motivation: Eyes on
the Prize
If you’ve ever tried
to lose five pounds, you’ve experienced the interaction
between attention and motivation. From the Latin movere,
meaning “to move,” this
psychic energy impels you toward the goal you’re focused on.
Several times a day, for
example, you zero in on the feeling of hunger; like thirst,
sex, and fatigue, it’s a powerful
drive, or urgent, instinctual need. If you were an animal,
you’d simply gobble whatever
you could find. You’re a human being, however, so you’re
able to choose your response
to those pangs. Depending on your motivation, you may decide
to wolf down a piece of
pie or stick to your new low-carb diet.
Once you choose your
goal, your focus narrows, so that that pie à la mode or
fitting into your jeans again dominates your mental
landscape. The most dramatic
example is addiction, in which the motivation to get high
restricts attention to the point
that the drug seems like the most important thing in the
world.
An inventive experiment
using food illustrates the neurological foundations of the
close tie between attention and motivation. After his
subjects had fasted for eight hours,
Northwestern University neuroscientist Marsel Mesulam
scanned their brains while they
looked at images of tools and edibles. Then, after feasting
on their favorite goodies until
full, they went back under the scanner to inspect the same
pictures again. When the two
sets of scans were compared, it was clear that the amygdala,
a brain structure whose
functions include gauging whether something is desirable or
not, reacted more strongly to
the images of foods when the subjects were hungry, but not
to those of the tools. In other
words, depending on your motivation, certain parts of your
brain can respond to the same
100
visual experience in drastically different ways. Thus, says
Mesulam, “an item in a pastry
shop window that’s easily ignored when you’re full becomes
irresistible when you’re
hungry.”
America’s obesity
epidemic offers stunning illustrations of what can happen when
motivation and attention become disconnected from daily
behavior in general and each
other in particular. Most reasonable people would say that
their nutritional goal is to stay
healthy and eat right, yet many simply don’t focus on their
food and how much they
actually consume. In Mindless Eating, the Cornell marketing
and nutritional scientist
Brian Wansink offers numerous examples of how this lack of
focusing helps pile on the
pounds. As if still motivated by childhood’s Clean Plate
Award, moviegoers will gobble
53 percent more nasty, stale popcorn if it’s presented in a
big bucket than they would if
given a small one. A third of diners can’t remember how much
bread they just ate. People
who stack up their chicken-wing bones at the table will eat
28 percent fewer than those
who clear the evidence away. We’ll snack on many more
M&Ms if they’re arrayed in ten
colors rather than seven. We consume 35 percent more food
when dining with a
friend—and 50 percent more with a big group—than when alone.
Considering such
statistics, it’s not surprising that simply by paying
attention to your food and eating it
slowly, you can cut 67 calories from each dinner and seven
pounds in a year.
To help clients who
are among the half of overweight Americans to reinforce the
link between motivation and attention, the registered
dietitian Gail Posner suggests that
they practice “mindful eating.” She describes the strategy
as “focusing on your food—on
its smell, taste, and feel—which lets your brain know that
you will soon feel full and
satisfied.” Once this sense of satiation registers upstairs,
the urge to keep on munching
decreases, which makes it easier to stay motivated. “The
goal of a healthy diet is to stop
eating when you’re no longer hungry,” says Posner. “If you
don’t pay attention to what
you eat, however, that sense of fullness won’t kick in. Some
people pick that up, and
some never do.”
When clients insist
that they’re motivated to lose weight and don’t know why
they keep gaining, Posner makes some educated guesses that
all center on inattention to
what they actually eat. Perhaps they let an empty plate
rather than a sense of satiety be
the cue to push away from the table. Maybe they haven’t
noticed that many restaurants
now serve double-size portions. They might forget to count
the calories from those
samples of coffee cake at the supermarket or the mindless
nibbling while watching TV,
standing in front of the fridge, or traipsing through the
kitchen. To help dieters focus on
such problematic behavior, Posner offers a low-tech
motivational tool: a small notebook.
“If they write down what they eat and drink,” she says,
“they soon realize they’re
consuming far more than they thought. People who keep a
record usually eat up to a third
less food than people who don’t.”
The toughest dieting
problem is the overeating that’s motivated by using food to
fill an emotional hole caused by frustration, anger, or
sadness. To focus on what’s really
driving your desire to eat, Posner suggests placing your
hands where you’re hungry. If
you put them on your head, she says, you’re upset about
something; on your mouth, you
just want to taste something; on your stomach, you’re
actually running on empty.
As the term
workaholic suggests, the rapt attention and motivation inspired by a
goal can resemble an addiction. Offering a benign example,
Evan G., who lost
seventy-five pounds during five months of high school,
describes his experience: “I feel
101
that constantly weighing yourself—being overly compulsive
about it—is the key to
staying motivated and losing more. When I first started
dieting, I would weigh myself six
or seven times a day. If the scale says 250, and later it
says 248, it makes you feel a lot
better. It makes you want to go out there and see a change
in yourself. It forces you to do
better.”
Whatever your
motivation—to lose weight, get a graduate degree, learn to
ski—attention is the link between your goal and the
resources you bring to it. Sometimes
your objective is immediate and practical: “I need a snack.”
Other times it’s enduring and
abstract: “I will stay fit for life.” Yet a still-mysterious
interaction between your
neurophysiology and your goal obtains on the immediate plane
of “I want food now” and
the long-term level of “I want a long, healthy life.”
Attention’s selective nature will
enhance the value of things that are relevant to your
objective, from a doughnut right this
minute to maintaining lifetime fitness. The challenge often
lies in balancing your focus
between your present goal (a snack) and your far-reaching
one (fitness) so that you
choose an apple.
YOUR MOTIVATIONS—GET
THAT promotion, throw the best parties, run for
public office—aren’t impersonal abstractions but powerfully
reflect and affect who you
are and what you focus on. An individual’s goals figure
prominently in the theories of
personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist
Henry Murray. According to his
successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called
“the will to power,” which
he considered the major driving force behind human behavior,
is one of the three basic
motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that
differentiate us as individuals.
A simple experiment
shows how these broad emotional motivations can affect
what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels.
When they examine images of
faces that express different kinds of emotion,
power-oriented subjects are drawn to
nonconfrontational visages, such as “surprise faces,” rather
than to those that suggest
dominance, as “anger faces” do. In contrast, people spurred
by affiliation gravitate
toward friendly or joyful faces. Despite motivation’s impact
on behavior, however, some
individuals fail to recognize and focus it on the right
objective. Thus, a person who has a
strong drive toward dominance might be far happier in the
military but end up in the
ministry, and someone impelled toward achievement could
prosper as a CEO yet
languish as a homemaker.
Like all behavior,
your motivations arise from your heredity and experience.
Where genes are concerned, for example, individuals who were
born with naturally
outgoing, sociable temperaments are apt to be motivated by
and focus on affiliation,
while those who have naturally aggressive dispositions are
likely to be driven by and
concentrate on the need to dominate. Temperamentally anxious
people can have a hard
time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus
on their worries distracts them
from their goals.
Where nurture’s
impact is concerned, like your focus, your primary motivation
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can be influenced by your culture. When University of
Michigan psychologist Oliver
Schultheiss compared American college students and their
German peers, he found that
the former are markedly more oriented to achievement than to
power, as the latter are.
Thus, he concludes, Americans tend to focus more on the
goals of innovation and
success, and Germans on dominance and status.
Interestingly, much
of the conventional wisdom about what to focus on in order to
strengthen motivation turns out to be wrong. Since the
peace-and-love 1960s, the
assumption has been that boosting kids’ self-esteem is the
best way to inspire them and
spur them on to achievement. Recent research, however, shows
that telling children
they’re geniuses has very little effect on their
performance, especially compared to the
motivation they derive from focusing on their own concrete
accomplishments and
self-control. To be effective, praise, like criticism,
should be precisely targeted: not
“You’re so great!” but “You did a great job on that report!”
Where motivation is
concerned, even lauding children for their intelligence,
which 85 percent of parents consider important, is
counterproductive. Such generic praise
actually inclines kids to focus too much on whether others
perceive them as “smart” or
“dumb” and to avoid risking failure. In a study of more than
four hundred fifth-graders,
students honored for their effort were likelier to take on a
challenging task than those
celebrated for their brains. In another experiment, children
designated as “smart” also
performed less well than those identified as “hard workers,”
apparently because the
pressure to seem intelligent caused them to clutch.
Locker-room pep
talks and bonuses notwithstanding, extrinsic focusing on
trouncing the competition or monetary reward can actually
decrease your intrinsic
motivation to pursue a goal. In one study, for example,
college students who were paid to
do a puzzle were significantly less motivated than those who
worked for free. In another
experiment, individuals were asked to work on puzzles side
by side. Those told to beat
their opponents stopped playing after the researchers left
the room; those who were
simply asked to complete the puzzle continued to work.
Moreover, the people who lost
the competition but got positive feedback on their effort
proved to be significantly more
self-motivated afterward than losers who didn’t get such
affirmation.
SOME VERY FOCUSED
individuals have lots of the stick-to-itiveness,
epitomized by heroes from Clint Eastwood to The Little
Engine That Could, that the Penn
psychologist Angela Duckworth simply calls “grit.” When it
comes to understanding
achievement, she believes that our cultural bias toward the
idea of innate talent and
ability causes us to undervalue this tenacious trait. Grit
clearly involves motivation and
perseverance in the pursuit of a goal despite setbacks, but
its less obvious component is
closely bound up with attention: maintaining consistent
interest in a project or idea over
time.
Given a hard problem
to figure out—the nature of gravity, perhaps—most people
might think about it for a while, then get tired and forget
about it. A genius such as Isaac
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Newton, however, has enough “mental energy” to pay rapt
attention to the same thing for
a long time without wavering: “I keep the subject constantly
before me and wait until the
first dawnings open little by little before me into the full
light.” His modern successor,
Richard Feynman, had a similarly protean absorption in his
subject. Upon presenting
their presumably new, hard-won theories, his colleagues
often found that the legendary
physicist had done the math many years before and not even
bothered to publish the
results. As one peer put it, “Feynman had signed the guest
book and already left.” Lesser
mortals can be very talented and stay enthusiastic for a
little while, says Duckworth, “but
they can’t sustain that kind of interest.”
The historical
record of the likes of Newton and Feynman in particular first
interested Duckworth in taking a serious look at grit’s role
in accomplishment in general.
Biographical analyses showed that with some exceptions, such
superachievers have
certain things in common. They often find their focus early
in life, as did many of the
three hundred “Termites,” as the brilliant children studied
by Stanford’s Lewis Terman,
the pioneer of IQ testing and the longitudinal study of
lives, are called. After homing in
on their special interest in youth, most pursued it with
tenacious effort and long-term,
consistent attention.
Some people are
“gritty” and others aren’t, but tenacity could be either a heritable
trait or a habit established by early experience. People who
make a living by doing
something that deeply interests them are grittier than those
who don’t, which suggests
that the quality could have developed from their liking what
they do. On the other hand,
says Duckworth, a gritty person might look harder to find a
good vocational fit.
“Sometimes a person doesn’t seem gritty till he or she finds
the right focus.”
Respect for the
power of perseverance and sustained attention came early to
Duckworth, who absorbed it from her parents’ Chinese
culture. Even when they’re
transplanted to America, Asian traditions focus on
determination and consistent effort
more than those of many other groups. When the Penn team
studied children who
compete in spelling bees, they found that grittier kids do
better, study harder, and come
back to try again the next year—no big surprise there.
However, all the children who
placed first, second, and third in the national finals in
2005 were of Indian ancestry.
“Believing that it’s all about a person’s effort and very
little about his fixed ability may
be a misguided notion,” says Duckworth, “but many Asian
parents tend to think that any
child can go to Harvard if he works hard enough, which tells
you something.”
Where the larger
society is concerned, grit may help explain why the average IQ
has climbed a half-point annually for the past fifty years.
(Heredity, which accounts for
more than half of a population’s IQ differences, can’t be
the reason, because genes can’t
alter in such a short time period.) With the spread of
democracy, big increases in levels of
education, the use of computers and the Internet, and other
positive social changes have
enabled many more people to find positive motivation and
focus and to express their
tenacity. As Duckworth says, “We’ve enriched our world in
ways that make us smarter,
which in turn inclines us to enhance our environment even
more.”
Society places great faith in standardized
tests as gauges of future
accomplishment, but the SAT isn’t a reliable predictor of a
student’s success after
graduation. In fact, even your grade point average
correlates very weakly with your
salary after college. When it comes to getting things done
in the real world, grit may be a
better augury of achievement. As long ago as the 1950s, the
demographer Paul Glick
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found that high school dropouts were more likely than
graduates to be divorced, leading
to speculation that people who give up on some hard things,
like finishing school, are
also unlikely to persevere in other matters, such as working
on a marriage. Nevertheless,
American culture remains strongly swayed by high IQ and GRE
scores and favors “fast
learners.” As a result, says Duckworth, “we don’t give
enough attention to the ‘effort’
and ‘duration’ pieces of accomplishment that mean going the
distance.” A writer who has
a certain level of natural ability might need five years to
complete a book and another
person just a year, she says, but with grit, the former
still gets to the finish line: “I believe
in the story of the tortoise and the hare.”
It remains to be
seen if either turtles or rabbits can be tutored in grittiness, because
that experiment has yet to be run. Nevertheless, says
Duckworth, research has made one
thing very clear: “Life is relatively short, so don’t labor
under the delusion that you can
keep switching your focus from goal to goal and get
anywhere.”
It’s often said that
the age of thirty is the “new twenty,” but the trend for young
people to change jobs every year or two in search of the
perfect career has costs as well
as benefits. “That’s how you become a superficial
dilettante,” says Duckworth. “Do you
want to go to a surgeon who has done lots of different
interesting operations or the one
who specializes in the procedure you need?” She allows that
it may be helpful for
adolescents to flit from dream to dream as they try to
figure out what really interests
them. “But if you’re forty-five and still haven’t found your
sweet spot, maybe your
expectations about a good fit between you and a job are too
high. Perhaps you should
settle down with the best thing you’ve found and focus on
it.”
DESCRIBING A
MOTIVATIONAL dilemma that’s endemic to the human
condition, St. Paul writes in his oft-quoted letter to the
Romans, “For that which I work, I
understand not. For I do not that good which I will: but the
evil which I hate, that I do.”
As we might express this sentiment, “Why do I act this way!
Instead of doing what I want
to do”—eat sensibly, stay sober, pay off the credit card—“I
end up doing the opposite!”
Scripture also illustrates the oldest strategy for dealing
with this problem: shift your focus
away from temptation. As Jesus famously told the devil: “Get
thee behind me, Satan!”
Behavioral
scientists have long brooded over the question of why our control over
our impulses is so often erratic. Conventional wisdom has it
that if you really wanted to,
you could save instead of squander, be kind to your
impossible in-laws, and run a
marathon, yet as Paul plaintively observes, desire alone
isn’t always enough.
Identifying one
reason for seemingly inexplicable behavior, Freud observed that
you may be subconsciously attending to a subliminal cue that
sparks a hidden motivation.
When Truman Capote was a little boy, his mother desperately
wanted to be a Park
Avenue matron, and she killed herself when her husband
thwarted her dream by going
bankrupt. Many years later, despite his wealth, success, and
celebrity, the author
essentially drank himself to death when he was abandoned by
his own beloved Park
Avenue ladies, whom he had, in astounding opposition to his
conscious self-interest,
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cruelly caricatured in prose. In a less dramatic
illustration of a hidden motivation’s
power, imagine that although you have every intention of living
it up with the gang on
Friday night, when you arrive at the bar, you feel and act
oddly glum and grouchy. Little
do you know that a seemingly trivial exchange with a
manipulative colleague earlier in
the day had subconsciously reminded you of your interactions
with a bossy parent and
stuck you with a sullen teenager’s motivation and manners.
In an ingenious
experimental illustration of the consequences of attending to
unconscious motivations, the Duke psychologist Tanya
Chartrand covertly primed 122
subjects to form impressions of various people based on a
short list of characteristics.
Then she manipulated whether they would succeed or fail at
meeting this subliminal goal
by throwing some contradictory traits into the mix. By
describing one such target as both
“clumsy” and “graceful,” for example, she subtly frustrated
participants’ attempts to
come up with a coherent portrait. Afterward, tests showed
that her subjects’ spirits were
lower than those of a control group, although they didn’t
know why. Because the
participants felt the emotional downshift but weren’t aware
of the reason, Chartrand calls
these states “mystery moods.”
By definition, a
mystery mood’s effects on your behavior are hard to deal with,
but some pragmatic research suggests that it’s easier to
shift your focus from that rich
dessert to your goal of losing those five pounds if you
practice ahead of time. When you
rehearse in your head how you’ll react to the lure of the
all-you-can-eat buffet or the
neighborhood watering hole before you’re standing in front
of it, you’re much likelier to
resist temptation than if you trust in your spontaneous
response.
Deciding beforehand
what you’ll focus on when sticking to your goal becomes
difficult can even be a better strategy than trying to rev
up your motivation. In an
experiment on how best to deal with social anxiety, or
shyness, Thomas Webb and
Paschal Sheeran, psychologists at the University of
Sheffield, England, told volunteers to
prepare to give a speech, which gives most people the
jitters. Then they gave their
subjects a list of words and measured how quickly they
directed their attention both to
anxiety-producing terms, such as blushing and sweating, and
to neutral ones. The
volunteers who had been previously told to focus on bland
words paid far less attention to
the worrisome ones than those who hadn’t been prepped. “We
know that motivation is a
slow, effortful process that has only small effects on
behavior, whereas attention is a fast
and effortless one,” says Sheeran. Therefore, when you’re
facing a stressful situation,
whether you have to give a speech or attend a banquet when
you’re dieting, “you should
plan how you’ll act in advance,” he says. “Use the format
‘if that happens, then I do
this!’”
One old-fashioned
but effective way to use attention to strengthen motivation
calls for a group effort. Concerned about the high incidence
of serious infections
contracted by intensive-care patients, 1 in 10 of whom died
as a result, the Johns Hopkins
Hospital anesthesiologist Peter Pronovost designed a simple
checklist for doctors and
nurses. He found that by performing five easy steps such as
hand-washing and donning
sterile gowns under a colleague’s watchful eyes, an ICU
staff can cut the infection rate to
nearly zero. All the measures were supposedly standard and
utterly familiar, yet medical
professionals often succumbed to the temptation to skip them
until Pronovost developed a
way for team members to enforce one another’s motivation.
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SOME INTRIGUING NEW
RESEARCH on the old-fashioned quality of
willpower, conducted by the research psychiatrist George
Ainslie, who studies behavioral
economics at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in
Coatesville, Pennsylvania,
highlights an important reason why we act impulsively or
inexplicably and also points to
a strategy for staying focused on the right motivation. From
his perspective, your life is
run not by the highly structured, unified Cranial Central
Command that you like to
imagine but by a group of bickering agents with different
motives. Depending on whose
voice captures your attention, you may find yourself
engaging in mysterious or seemingly
contradictory behavior, from gross overindulgence to acts of
surprising heroism. Where
sticking to a goal is concerned, you can reduce the conflict
by focusing on the most
supportive voice and suppressing the distracting,
counterproductive ones.
When a little
whisper tempts you to stray from your goal of hitting the gym three
times a week or staying on your diet, Ainslie finds that
you’re temporarily but strongly
inclined to pay attention to and choose the behavior that
brings the quickest rewards.
Thus, you’re powerfully but briefly tempted to watch the
tube or eat the pie rather than to
persevere in hopes of better but delayed payoffs, such as
abs of steel or lower cholesterol.
In experiments, for example, subjects will choose a shorter,
earlier break from noxious
noise instead of longer but later relief only if the shorter
reprieve is immediate.
Offering a
do-it-yourself experiment, Ainslie says that if you ask a group of
friends to choose between an imaginary certified check for
$100 that they can cash
immediately and a postdated certified check for $200 that
they can’t cash for three years,
more than half of them will opt for the $100 now. However,
if you ask them to decide
between getting $100 in six years and $200 in nine years—the
same choice, but with a
much greater delay in reward—they’ll all choose the $200.
Putting this motivational
dynamic in mathematical terms, Ainslie says that we
“spontaneously discount the value
of expected events in a curve where value is divided
approximately by expected delay.”
Even pigeons
sometimes seem to struggle against this passing preference for
making quick if often ultimately unwise choices where
rewards are concerned. Like us,
the birds will opt for a smaller, earlier payoff (grain, in
their case) over a later, larger one
when the smaller one is immediate, but not when the food is
delayed. Moreover, says
Ainslie, some will actually peck a colored key in advance to
prevent a later offer from a
differently colored key that produces the smaller reward. As
these experiments show, he
says, “temptation isn’t just some human cultural product but
a basic behavioral pattern
that must have appeared early in evolution.”
Heeding the voice
that tells the dieter to go ahead and have that slice of fudge
cake may not seem important in the grand scheme of things,
but that impulsive choice
can have serious consequences in terms of what Ainslie
unabashedly calls your
“willpower.” After much investigation of its nature, he
defines it “not as an organ of
some kind, but as a bargaining situation with your expected
future selves, in which the
present choice is a test case for a whole category of
probable choices in the future. Why
not eat the cake? After all, one piece won’t show! What you
lose isn’t that little bit of
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slimness, however, but your expectation that you’ll be able
to stick to your diet.”
The idea of
cultivating willpower—the capacity to choose and follow a course of
action despite obstacles—would not have surprised Epictetus,
Augustine, Nietzsche, and
other philosophers who have embraced what William James
called “the art of replacing
one habit for another.” Through most of history, gluttony,
concupiscence, drunkenness,
and sloth were regarded as vices rather than sicknesses, and
replacing them with
temperance, chastity, sobriety, and enterprise required an
act of the will. The sages of old
would be amazed to hear modern Americans blame their
expanding middles on the genes
or habits they inherited from their parents, rather than on
their own lack of
“self-control”—another anachronistic term. In a culture that
increasingly can’t just say
no, overweight individuals may resort to stomach-stapling
surgery, and groups lobby for
statutes to make trans fats illegal and tax junk foods.
Offering a
historical perspective on the cultural decline of what he regards as an
important human faculty, Claremont psychologist Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi says that
when mid-twentieth-century scientists decided that the
stimulus/response dynamic was
the foundation of most behavior, will became the baby that
got thrown out with the
bathwater. If what induces you to act this way or that
depends on either positive or
negative reinforcement, will is no longer influential in
explaining why you do what you
do. “It still crops up in a deus ex machina way, he says,
“as in ‘It’s my will to do this,’ or
in the subtler voice of a Skinnerian reinforcement or a
drive that you’re not even aware
of, but the term was essentially obliterated from
psychology’s lexicon.” Nevertheless, the
venerable concept sometimes shines through modern research,
he says, as when
psychologists speak about “‘effective motivation,’ because
there are people who feel
motivated to do something but never get around to doing it.”
From a
neuroscientist’s different perspective, Johns Hopkins attention researcher
Steve Yantis thinks about will in terms of the ongoing
biased competition for your focus.
He envisions the huge collection of goals, each of which has
value, that’s stored in both
your long-term and short-term, or “working,” memory. They
range from lofty aims, such
as having a happy family life or a successful career, to
quotidian objectives, such as
making breakfast or finishing that report. Some goals, such
as balancing your checkbook,
demand your clear, immediate focus, but you attend to
others—say, the Golden Rule—in
a diffused way, almost without realizing it.
Will comes into play
when a competition arises between two or more conflicting
goals and motivations. Driven by your growling stomach, you
want to eat something an
hour before dinner, but motivated by Weight Watchers, you
also want to wait. Many such
battles take place below the level of your awareness, but on
other occasions, you consider
the values you’ve assigned to the warring goals and
willfully bias the competition
between them. You may decide that you want a cookie, and you
want it now. Or you may
figure that yes, you’re hungry and would like a cookie or
two, but that another
objective—zipping up your jeans again—has a higher priority.
The science of
genetics has led some academics to discount the very idea of free
will, but Yantis calls this “a very pessimistic view that
assumes that your choices are
hard-wired.” Whether it’s a microdecision about how to grasp
the handle of a teacup or a
macrodecision about whether to accept a job offer, he says,
“the selection of a course of
action is a mechanistic result of an unimaginably complex
interaction among biological,
genetic, and behavioral factors. At the very lowest level of
quantum mechanics,
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randomness plays a role. But as a human being, I am
perfectly comfortable with the idea
of being in control of my choices and making rational
decisions based on memories,
values, and beliefs.” That said, the concept of free will
has a “mysterious, magical ‘black
box’ quality,” says Yantis. “When I consider two competing
courses of action and choose
one of them, I’m not sure how to think of the ultimate ‘me’
who makes that decision.”
IN THE SHORT term,
the interplay of attention and motivation is crucial to
taking care of business, and in the long term, it helps to
make you who you are. If your
high school yearbook described you as “most popular” or
“most likely to succeed,” it’s
likely that perhaps in contrast to your hair- or waistline,
your deep-seated focus on
making friends or running things has remained constant.
Where your immediate
as well as lifelong objectives are concerned, focus forges
the connection between your goals and your personal
resources. Despite our cultural
fixation on innate giftedness, the old-fashioned quality of
grit may be a better predictor of
real-world performance. Attention’s mechanics ensure that
when you lock on your
objective, you enhance that aspiration and suppress things
that compete with it, which
helps you to stay focused. That rapt dynamic works to your
advantage if your goal is
positive and productive but, as in addiction, can be deadly
if it isn’t.
CHAPTER 13
Health: Energy Goes
Where Attention Flows
Where your physical
and mental health are concerned, it’s hard to exaggerate
attention’s importance in shaping your immediate experience
and securing your
long-term well-being. Strengthening your ability to direct
your focus away from negative
ideas and events when such cogitation serves no purpose and
to reframe setbacks as
challenges or even opportunities helps you handle stress and
approach life as a creation
rather than a reaction.
Exhibit A for
attention’s power to foster well-being might be the Missouri
businessman Larry Stewart. His New York Times obituary
lauded him not so much for his
great financial success as for the way he turned one of
life’s hard knocks into a gift—in
his case, a big bag full of them. During every December
since 1979, Stewart took to the
streets as a Secret Santa who handed out hundred-dollar
bills to passersby who looked
like they could use a little boost. His Dickensian holiday
largesse began one day just a
week before Christmas, when he was fired from his job.
Parked at a drive-in restaurant,
Stewart felt pretty low until he noticed that the carhop in
a skimpy coat was shivering in
the cold. “I think I’ve got it bad?” he said to himself, and
tipped her twenty dollars. By
the time he died, he had not only prospered in business but
also anonymously given away
$1.3 million to strangers.
The way in which
Larry Stewart responded to adversity by directing his attention
away from paralyzing gloom and self-pity and toward a big
picture that put his loss in
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perspective and reenergized him could be an anecdote lifted
from a textbook on the
research of the Penn psychiatrist Aaron Beck. His discovery
that attention’s selective
nature plays a major role in mental illness was a crucial
step in his development of
cognitive therapy for depression, which has since
revolutionized psychiatric treatment,
period. Moreover, Beck’s insights into the way maladaptive
patterns of attention lead to
dysfunctional behavior shed light not only on emotional
disorders in particular, but on
maintaining well-being in general.
Depression is now
understood as a complicated problem that has individual
biological as well as environmental components, and its
treatment may involve
medication, psychotherapy, or both. Back in the 1960s,
dissatisfied with his patients’ lack
of progress, Beck looked beyond the psychoanalytical and
behaviorist schools that then
dominated therapy for a different approach. After combing
his patients’ case histories in
search of a behavioral common denominator, he had a
groundbreaking insight: the
depressed routinely focus on the negative thoughts and
feelings guaranteed to make them
feel hopeless and helpless—the cognitive and emotional
ingredients of the blues.
Even when asleep,
the melancholy tend to focus on futility. In a classic dream,
one of Beck’s patients saw himself putting coins into a
vending machine, then just
standing there, waiting for a soda or a refund that never
came. The prevalence of this
bleak mind-set among the depressed—about 10 percent of
Americans in the course of
their lifetimes—persuaded Beck that this noirish “selective
abstraction” was a crucial
element of the disorder. “These individuals would focus on
whatever negative
experiences they had, to the exclusion of positive ones or
the larger context,” he says.
“Even when looking back into the past, they would recall
only negative events.”
To succeed in the
rough-and-tumble game of life, however, you can’t afford to
focus on the dark side. In order to keep going up to bat,
you have to believe that if you
persist, sooner or later you’ll hit the ball. Anyone who has
ever felt discouraged even
briefly knows that it’s hard to keep swinging if you’re
convinced you’ll strike out.
To understand
attention’s role in causing and relieving mental illness, imagine
that you, like one of Beck’s patients, have been fired from
a valued job, failed to find a
new one, and fear you’ll lose your home and family next. You
become depressed and
spend all day shuffling around in your bathrobe. When
someone finally drags you into
treatment, you tell your cognitive therapist, “There’s no
point in even looking for a job
anymore. No one would hire me.”
Refocusing the
depressed person’s attention away from such hopeless and
helpless thoughts and feelings toward more positive,
productive ones is cognitive
therapy’s core. In weekly sessions over two to three months,
your therapist engages you
in Beck’s “collaborative empiricism,” in which you both test
the validity of your
knee-jerk negative thoughts against real-life experience.
She teaches you how to
recognize and counter self-defeating ideas before they can
spiral into destructive patterns
of behavior. Instead of commiserating over the unjust way
your former employer treated
you, or over your unhappy childhood, she challenges your
self-defeating focus and helps
you reinforce new positive insights with practical,
demonstrable achievements.
At your first
session, the therapist tells you to focus on a single task: be washed,
dressed, and breakfasted by eight o’clock each morning of
the next week. That’s it. You
can handle that, so at the next session, she tells you to
add reading a newspaper and
checking for opportunities on Monster.com to the morning
regimen. The following week,
110
she asks you to contact three potential employers from the
ads: just send the e-mails or
make the calls.
Over the course of
therapy, learning to direct your attention away from your old
what’s-the-use attitude toward can-do behavior inevitably
leads to some practical
improvements, which help to lift your mood. After all, you
do feel better after a shower,
some coffee, and plugging into the real world via the
newspaper. Moreover, taking real
steps toward your goal of employment, from rising at the
start of the business day to
making those cold calls, greatly increases your chances of
getting the break you need. In
short, you’ve acquired both a healthier, less self-absorbed
focus on life and a new set of
coping skills.
Cognitive therapy
has proved to be as effective as drugs in reversing mild to
moderate depression, and the approach is now used, often in
combination with behavioral
therapy and/or medication, to treat many other mental
illnesses and several physical ones
as well. As Beck says proudly, “The experimental work based
on clinical observations
concerning attentional deployment in psychiatric problems is
as scientific as the work in
neuroscience.”
The correction of chronically
misdirected attention is a public health issue, not
just an individual one. Depression costs the American
economy about $44 billion a year
in lost productivity due to affected employees’ reduced
ability to concentrate, remember,
and make decisions. In addition to their own suffering,
millions of untreated depressed
parents put their children at increased risk of succumbing
to the illness. Citing a study
showing that the daughters of such women are apt to share
their mothers’ dark
worldview, Beck says that possible genetic predispositions
notwithstanding, a parent’s
selectively bleak, despairing focus is “certainly a risk
factor, and in my view forms the
substrate for the negative thinking that occurs in
depression.”
Maladaptive patterns
of attention aren’t limited to depression but obtain across the
spectrum of behavioral disorders. Just as the melancholy
focus on negative information,
the anxious and paranoid home in on the threatening sort.
Other troubled individuals
selectively attend to negative physical rather than
psychological cues. Victims of panic
disorder fixate on medical catastrophe, hypochondriacs on
bodily symptoms, and
insomniacs on the consequences of insufficient sleep. As
with depression, effective
cognitive-behavioral treatments for these disorders aim to
correct the distorted attention
patterns that underlie them.
Not surprisingly, in
Beck’s view, William James would be pleased with cognitive
therapy for several reasons. First, he says, “because it
emphasizes consciousness, which
provides many of the clues to understanding psychiatric
disorders as well as normal
psychology. Secondly, cognitive therapy is pragmatic, and
James was a pragmatist.” As if
speaking of his own philosophy, Beck approvingly quotes
James: “The truth is what
works.”
MEDICAL TREATMENTS
THAT harness attention to restore or improve
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well-being are not limited to mental health. That the ability
to control attention and
channel it in affirmative directions can improve longevity
comes across in an intensive
study of a particularly clean-living population: the School
Sisters of Notre Dame born
before 1917. Researchers at the University of Kentucky found
that 9 out of 10 nuns from
the quarter of the group who focused most on upbeat
thoughts, feelings, and events lived
past the age of fifty-eight, but only 1 in 3 of the
population’s least positively minded
quarter survived that long.
One form of
directing your focus has been shown to help people cope with
diverse, sometimes intractable problems such as stress,
cancer, high blood pressure, and
gastrointestinal illnesses. As a result, some three hundred
health centers across America
now offer meditation—the practice of rapt attention—as an
adjunct to more conventional
medical treatments.
Much of the
enthusiasm for using attention to promote health is rooted in the
pioneering research of Jon Kabat-Zinn, now an emeritus
professor of medicine at the
University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center in
Worcester. Back in 1979, the
former molecular biologist founded the hospital’s
“mindfulness-based stress reduction
[MBSR] program,” in which participants attend eight weekly
classes and perform
breath-focused “mindfulness meditation” for forty-five
minutes daily. To appeal to
people of any faith or none at all, Kabat-Zinn peeled away
meditation’s ancient cultural
and religious trappings and stripped it to its behavioral
essence: the systematic
self-regulation of attention and affect.
On a rainy June
afternoon at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, in bucolic
Rhinebeck, New York, two hundred healthcare professionals
move through their Warrior
and Downward Dog poses so slowly that they might be under
water. The class is part of
Kabat-Zinn’s weeklong training retreat, which is meant to
steep participants in two
special ways of focusing: meditation and the mindful state
of purposeful,
moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness that it
encourages. Yoga classes
elsewhere can have a competitive edge, but here the goal is
not gymnastic feats but
simply “staying home” in your mind and body by “sinking into
the current of your
breath.” Some people just approximate the postures while
seated in a chair or lying on a
mat—a reminder that supermodels in ads notwithstanding,
there are all kinds of bodies,
workouts, and ways to think about health and fitness.
As medical
professionals, the Omega participants are all too familiar with the
plight of patients whose health problems, from insomnia to
infertility, haven’t responded
to standard treatments. Many such individuals suffer from
chronic pain, which is one of
the commonest and hardest-to-treat of all ailments.
Continual headaches, backaches, and
the like feel awful, of course, but they also can take a
serious toll on the body’s
cardiovascular, endocrine, respiratory, and immune
systems—to say nothing of the
economy, to the tune of tens of billions of healthcare
dollars each year. After
chronic-pain patients try various treatments without
success, doctors often give up on
them, writing them off as hopeless or even “mental” cases,
thus compounding their
misery.
Sheer desperation
motivates many pain patients to try anything that might help,
even if it seems as zany or foreign as paying attention to
their breath. All MBSR
practitioners basically follow the same regimen. “When you
put people with all kinds of
problems in the same room, you ask, ‘Where could you
possibly start to help?’” says
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Kabat-Zinn. “The answer is, ‘From where they are.’ They all
have bodies. They all have
minds. Can they pay attention? They all can. To what? It
almost doesn’t matter. You just
ask them to tune in, to befriend their own core of
well-being, as opposed to being
shredded by life’s events.”
At the beginning of
their attentional training, in a seemingly counterproductive
move, chronic-pain patients are asked to focus on their
throbbing heads or rigid necks.
Soon, they begin to differentiate between the physiological
sensations and their thoughts
and feelings about them, which may turn out not to be
particularly accurate or important.
In the transition from “me in agony” to “how about that
twinge,” much suffering can
evaporate. After eight weeks of classes and daily
meditation, half of patients in one study
reported that their pain decreased by a third or more—an
impressive result for a
treatment-resistant group. Moreover, most also learned to
manage their persistent
discomfort better, which enhances the feeling of control
that’s a major piece of
well-being.
Following the yoga
session, Kabat-Zinn, who looks more like a sports coach than
a scientist, finds a quiet spot to sit down and talk about
his research, which he describes
as “all about the healing power of attention,” defined
simply as “the capacity to be in a
salient relationship with one or another element of your
experience for a period of time.”
Generally, after you focus for a while, he says, you get
tired and stop. When you
meditate, however, “you bring your attention back online,”
which increases its capacity,
in both duration and depth of perception. Where health is
concerned, he says, “that kind
of disciplined focus has much more potential for rearranging
your physiology.”
No one knows exactly
how paying attention can promote healing. The best guess
is that meditation causes salubrious shifts in the nervous
and immune systems. In one
study, after people who worked in a highly stressful
environment completed the MBSR
program, EEG tests showed that the right hemisphere of their
brains had quieted down,
while activity had increased in the areas of the left
prefrontal region that are linked with a
zestful approach to life. They also had a stronger reaction
to flu vaccine than members of
the control group, which supports the thesis that meditation
enhances immune function.
On the subjective level, the participants reported that
after their training, they felt better
able to handle unpleasant events and emotions. As Kabat-Zinn
observes, “When you feel
more comfortable in your own skin, lots of things—outlook,
diet, exercise,
relationships—may also change, and all of them have profound
effects on your health.
When you drop in to your own experience and body, you get
this sense of belonging,
fitting in, coming to terms with things as they are. That’s what
healing is.”
On the most obvious
level, the act of focusing can short-circuit the fight-or-flight
reaction that’s linked to stressful situations. Two
impressive studies of psoriasis patients
were instigated by dermatologists who were discouraged that
so many individuals
dropped out of their effective phototherapy treatment. This
aversion was understandable,
considering that the patients had to stand naked in a kind
of phone-booth-style light box,
with a pillowcase over their heads and goggles over their
eyes, while being irradiated
with ultraviolet light. As Kabat-Zinn says, the experience
was about as pleasant as
“spending time in a toaster oven.”
Unlike people who
follow an intensive daily meditation regimen, the psoriasis
patients paid mindful attention only during phototherapy.
Throughout their sessions,
given three times per week for three to ten minutes, they
listened to an audio that simply
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asked them to focus on the present without making
good-or-bad judgments: Can you feel
the warmth? Can you hear the blowers moving the air? Can you
be in your body? After
four months, when the experiment concluded, their skin had
cleared four times faster than
that of patients in the control group. Psoriasis is caused
by uncontrolled cell proliferation,
which inclines Kabat-Zinn to think that the attention
exercises somehow accelerated the
skin’s healing down to the level of gene expression, DNA
replication, and cell division.
As is the case with
running, weight-training, or other healthful regimens, talking
about “just focusing on your breath” for forty-five minutes
is much easier than doing it.
As Kabat-Zinn says, “If I ask people to ‘just pay
attention,’ they know what to do, but it’s
hard. Your mind doesn’t want to focus on one thing for too
long without judging or
otherwise reacting to it.” On the other hand, a huge 2008
survey from the Pew
Foundation shows that a surprising number of people—about 40
percent of Americans of
all religious backgrounds, including Evangelical Christians
and Muslims—meditate in
one way or another at least once a week. For that matter,
often without realizing it,
everyone has moments of this active, nonjudgmental rapt
attention to . . . something. “It
really doesn’t matter what,” says Kabat-Zinn. “Meditation is
less about the target than
about a state of pure attention that occurs before thinking.
A knowing that’s more like
intuition than cognition.” Some practice with a particular
focus, often the breath, and
others attend to a sunset or the sounds of a stream, albeit
without the usual mental
commentary. The important thing, says Kabat-Zinn, is that
“when your mind goes off on
its own tangent, you gently bring it back.”
Meditation’s rewards
include a certain calmness that helps you handle what
Kabat-Zinn, in homage to the resilient Zorba the Greek,
calls the “full catastrophe” of
living. Despite continual romantic, financial, and familial
disasters, he says, “Zorba can
dance in the present moment, because he knows that
stress—the full catastrophe—is not
good or bad, but just part of the way life is. You’re in it,
so how can you best relate to
what’s happening, both for yourself and for any others
involved?”
One way in which meditation
ameliorates full-catastrophe living is by making it
easier to attend to the reality of the moment rather than
your judgments about it. “If
things go right, you can be happy; if not, not,” says
Kabat-Zinn. “That’s where we all
start out, but most situations are neither all good nor all
bad.” Until a catastrophe stops
you in your tracks, he says, “you may miss a lot of the
actuality of things. You’re too
busy zoning through the moments to get to a better one.”
Then too, even a serious illness
or reversal of fortune is not always as terrible as everyone
assumes, because “it can also
be very rich. We want things to turn out for the best, but
we don’t always know what the
best is. We go as far as we can in knowing, then we have to
rest in not knowing.”
After spending three
decades teaching sick people how to use attention to “fall
awake” and improve their health, Kabat-Zinn concludes that
“the knowledge that you’re
only here for a very short time, plus tender-hearted
mindfulness, lets you live inside your
experience with freedom and possibility. For many people,
much of life is a kind of
nightmare. The only way out is waking up—attending to
reality.”
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JUST AS SOME people
use the special form of attention called meditation to
relieve physical sickness, others use it to ease emotional
distress. For nearly twenty years
before he began conducting research at UCLA and Harvard, the
clinical and health
psychologist Lobsang Rapgay was a Tibetan Buddhist monk. As
a small child, he fled
from Lhasa across the Himalayas on foot with his family when
the Chinese invaded the
country. After getting a doctorate in Tibetan medicine in
India, he came to the United
States to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology. His unusual
cultural, philosophical, and scientific
background led Rapgay to a major research interest: a novel
hybrid treatment for anxiety
that combines Western psychiatry and Eastern meditation.
People who are
diagnosed as having “generalized anxiety disorder” are afflicted
by three major problems that many of us experience to a
lesser extent from time to time.
First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human
inclination to focus on threats and
bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even
significant positive events get
suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward
excessive verbalizing make
therapeutic intervention a further challenge.
By the time they
enroll in one of Rapgay’s studies, his subjects’ level of anxiety
and distress makes normal life impossible. Describing their
uncontrollable fixation on
fears, he says, “They worry about everything, not just a
certain thing.” Where work is
concerned, for example, such a person might not just fret
about performance on the job,
but also about the remote possibility of missing the bus,
perhaps, and being late. “Many
of these patients worry literally all day,” he says. “They
know it’s destructive, but they
just can’t stop.”
In the East-West
treatment approach, anxious patients learn to pay less attention
to worries and fears in two different ways. Standard
cognitive-behavioral therapy
techniques identify and correct destructive patterns of
thought and emotion. Training in
“classical mindfulness,” which is based on seated,
breath-focused Theravadin Buddhist
meditation, helps them sustain a flexible, expansive
awareness without relying on verbal
or cognitive activity.
For half of each
session, the therapist uses a variety of cognitive and behavioral
techniques to help the patient free his anxious mind of
counterproductive thoughts. He
learns to “worry the worry” until it becomes boring, for
example, or to stop it in its tracks
by substituting another idea. He might also practice
challenging a fear, so that “I’ll miss
the bus to work” yields to “I’ve never missed it and
probably won’t tomorrow, either”
and ultimately to “If I do, it’s not the end of the world.”
Even if the person
comes to accept that focusing on missing the bus makes no
sense—a cognitive advance—he may still have trouble calming
his mind and directing
his attention more productively. That’s where classical
mindfulness comes in. In each
session, the patient gets instruction in gradually more
sophisticated aspects of meditation,
with the aim of cultivating what Rapgay calls “an open
awareness that’s free of
preconceptions.” Using both approaches is much more
effective than either one used
alone, he says, because the Western therapy addresses the
anxious mind’s
content—maladaptive thoughts—and Eastern practice its
“process”—a churning state of
fretful awareness that’s rigid, narrow, and focused on
worry: “You have to address both
content and process, and Western science doesn’t have enough
nonpharmacological
interventions for changing states of mind.”
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For an anxious
person, who struggles with an attentional bias toward threat, a
narrow, brittle mind-set, and a tendency toward too much
talk, regular immersion in a
quiet, relaxed, nonjudgmental, focused state of mind is like
time spent in a restorative
mental spa. Moreover, the mindfulness cultivated by daily
meditation helps the anxious
go about their lives calmly, “attending to one thing, then
to the next thing, and the next,
while disregarding distractions,” says Rapgay. “You aren’t
just mindful when you
meditate. Afterward, you can deal with life’s many details
in a systematic, regulated, less
stressful way, rather than having them all jumbled up in
your field of consciousness.”
This East-West
approach to directing attention from worries to calm awareness
seems to help the brain’s more cognitive cortical region to
regulate its more emotional
subcortical area which, according to EEG studies, becomes
quieter during treatment. The
hybrid therapy’s effectiveness is supported by some
impressive statistics. After a course
of fifteen sessions, the average patient’s anxiety level, as
measured on a test scale of 0 to
50, drops from a jangling high of 42 to a mellow 12. Next,
Rapgay plans to study the
approach’s efficacy in treating obsessive-compulsive and
post-traumatic disorders.
As clinician,
researcher, and former monk, Rapgay believes that whether you’re
the anxious type or not, “it’s very important to learn to
attend to your immediate
experience with awareness. This is a state of mind that’s
open to the spaciousness of
consciousness without focusing on any particular content
within that spaciousness. The
difference between attending and attending with awareness is
greater brain stability.”
NOT JUST ANXIETY and
depression, but also cardiovascular disease and
immune dysfunction can be bound up with what you focus on
and how. Learning to shift
your attention away from unhelpful thoughts and emotions and
recast negative events in
the most productive light possible is one of the most
important of all “health habits” to
cultivate. The recognition of the role played by skewed
attentional patterns in mental
disorders is one of modern psychiatry’s greatest advances.
As research blurs the
distinction between many mind and body problems, increasing
numbers of people who
suffer from hypertension, infertility, and psoriasis as well
as from stress add a regimen of
paying rapt attention to their medical treatment, which at
the very least increases the
feeling of control over one’s own experience that’s
essential to well-being.
CHAPTER 14
Meaning: Attending
to What Matters Most
Of all the subjects
that can arrest Homo sapiens’ rapt attention, among the most
distinctive is the fundamental nature of reality and its
implications for our lives. For
better and sometimes worse, we are the only creatures who
focus on questions such as
What does it all mean? What’s the point of life? What is the
right thing to do?
In their different
ways, philosophy, religion, and psychology all probe the
essential principles of being, knowledge, and behavior, and
indeed, for most of history,
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there was little distinction between the first two systems.
Here is Marcus Aurelius, Stoic
philosopher and Roman emperor: “One universe made up of all
that is; and one God in it
all, and one principle of being, and one law, the reason,
shared by all thinking creatures,
and one truth.”
Much has changed
since Marcus Aurelius posited ultimate reality’s essential
oneness in the Meditations, yet we too redirect our
attention from the daily grind to the
contemplation of some deeper, more fundamental truth or
reality by any name.
Something of this preoccupation’s postmodern tenor comes
across in a survey of eighteen
intellectuals, including Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and
Martin Scorsese, who were
asked if there is a God. Six said no, five said yes, and
seven said maybe, so that even in a
seemingly skeptical group, a clear majority thought there is
or might be . . . something
else. After dismissing the idea of a deity as omnipotent
cosmic puppeteer, the writer
Jonathan Franzen said, “At the same time, I think there’s a
reality beneath what we can
see with our eyes and experience with our senses. There’s
ultimately something
mysterious and un-materialistic about the world. Something
large and awe-inspiring and
eternal and unknowable.”
Not coincidentally,
the disciplines that direct your attention to something large
and awe-inspiring, whether called God or universe,
consciousness or commonweal, also
focus you on the improvement of your self and your world and
on the appreciation of life.
Indeed, philosophy, religion, and psychology advance many of
the same kinds of
behavior that account for much of our species’ success. At
the very least, focusing on
values such as altruism and forgiveness that stir positive
emotions expands your
attentional range, whether trained on your own possibilities
or others’ needs, which
benefits not only you but also the community.
THE IDEA THAT, as
the French philosopher and activist-mystic Simone Weil
put it, “attentiveness without an object is prayer in its
supreme form” has been
percolating in American culture since the New England
Transcendentalists. Insisting that
experiencing reality’s true nature, and your own, requires
focusing on the present
moment, Emerson says, “We are always getting ready to live,
but never living.” Chiming
in, Thoreau says, “As if you could kill time without
injuring eternity.”
In the 1960s and
’70s, some of their philosophical heirs tried to pay rapt attention
to ultimate reality with help from a pill. Whether they had
good or bad LSD experiences
had much to do with the drug’s unpredictable effects on
attention, so that some trippers
got fixated on heaven and others on hell. Certain of these
neo-transcendentalists went on
to experiment with yoga, Zen, and other forms of Eastern
meditation. Among the first of
many psychologists to take up the practice was Harvard’s
Richard Alpert, who went to
India and studied with Bhagavan Das, a Californian turned
Hindu guru whose
autobiography is tellingly called It’s Here Now (Are You?).
Alpert became Ram Das and
wrote his own best-selling Be Here Now.
More than a thousand
years before Americans started chanting “Om” at the gym
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and scanning the meditating brain, Buddhism had turned
attention into an art and a
science. Indeed, like William James, Buddha was a profound
psychologist and
philosopher whose insights grew out of a dark personal
epiphany: no matter who you are,
you and everyone you love must endure pain, sickness, aging,
and death.
In developing what
is arguably less a religion than a philosophy for the relief of
human suffering, Buddha recognized the strong bottom-up
salience of anger, fear, and
sadness, which are rooted in the past or future. The best
response, he concluded, is to pay
active top-down attention to the present moment and to
positive thoughts and feelings,
such as kindness and compassion. After a difficult early
family life and struggles with
depression, James came to a similar conclusion, which he
expressed in his pragmatic
terms: “I don’t sing because I’m happy. I’m happy because I
sing.”
Dugu Choegyal
Rinpoche, a teacher and artist who’s based in India and Nepal, is
an expert in the Tibetan Buddhist way of paying attention to
reality. Indeed, he is a lama
in the Kargyu sect, which is famed for its great cave-dwelling
hermit-contemplatives
such as Milarepa. If you tried to describe the effect of
Choegyal’s presence, “lighten up”
might come to mind. After a little chat with the
rinpoche—Tibetan for “precious
jewel”—you may still have the same problems, but somehow
they don’t seem so bad.
There’s a good
chance that you’ve seen Choegyal or even have his photo stashed
somewhere in your home. In 2007, the rinpoche materialized
on many American coffee
tables on the cover of National Geographic. In contrast to
his timeless monastic robes,
his shaved head was completely wired with high-tech sensors
for an fMRI study of the
brain during meditation. “This work is very, very good,” he
says, “because it brings
knowledge and truth.”
Asked to define
attention, Choegyal says, “It means mindfulness—just the mind
being simple. Whether in meditation or daily life, we try to
pay attention to just being
present, rather than being caught between hope and fear,
which is the mind’s usual
condition.”
Choegyal began to
cultivate attention to the moment while still very young. “I
realized that there’s no escape from death, no matter what,”
he says. “I saw that before
doing anything else, I must see how to deal with that, so
I’ll know what to do. That
became my priority and freed me from many negative things.
All my practice was
concentrated on seeing what mind really is.” Realizing that
he has ventured into deep
water, he laughs merrily and says, “Mind is not like any
other thing, so it’s hard to
explain. Just as air can’t explain fire, or space explain
earth.”
In the rinpoche’s
tradition, paying attention is the way to experience true clarity
about what is—knowledge that can’t be accessed through
thinking, but only through
being. (In the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s terms, this
awareness comes from the
experiencing rather than the remembering self.) Within
Buddhism, someone who sustains
this effortless rapt focus on the right here, right now on a
continual basis is said to be
“enlightened” or “realized.” In the rinpoche’s Kargyu world,
the ranks of these special
individuals include elite yogi-monks called togdens. One of
them, called Amtrin, spent
many years meditating alone in desolate mountain caves, attained
realization, and became
a revered figure in his community. During thunderstorms,
people from the local village
would say, “That’s Amtrin, shaking out his blanket.”
During one audience
shortly before his death, Amtrin pretty much just sat there on
a dais, wearing an Adidas wifebeater, a togden’s white
robes, and an incipient smile.
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Nevertheless, the large group of Tibetans and Westerners
watched him as intently as if he
were Eli Manning throwing the winning pass at the Superbowl.
Everyone wanted to
know what Antrim knew, so they could be like him, at least a
little. As to whether his old
friend had still meditated, Choegyal says, “No, no.
Eventually that concentrated
mindfulness disappears, so that awareness has no
boundaries.”
In the Buddhist
scheme of things, of course, Amtrin’s life may be finished, but his
mindful attention isn’t. By way of explaining reincarnation,
the rinpoche says that mind’s
basic nature is “a vibration or energy that over many
lifetimes becomes stronger. The
good things you learn stay and develop from life to life,
giving you a head start. The
more clarity you gain, the fewer negative emotions you will
have next time.”
On the long road to
enlightenment, says the rinpoche, a person first meditates so
that the mind can “get a glimpse of itself. Eventually, you
take away the meditative state
and free the mind even from that. Then mind can come back to
its own nature of attention
and awareness without contamination by concepts—even
meditation.” After visiting five
hundred spiritual masters and evaluating their approaches to
enlightenment, he says, the
Buddha saw that cultivating this “simple mind” is the best
strategy: “He didn’t really
teach ‘Buddhism,’ but how to let the mind rest in its
nature, undisturbed by fear and
illusion, or even by meditation.”
As an experienced
teacher, Choegyal knows that for most people, the mind is a
rickety contraption assembled from to-do lists, intimations
of the sublime, petty gripes,
and thoughts of the next meal. “Some say, ‘But the ordinary
person has no
mindfulness!’” he says. “They’re really talking about
‘confused mind.’ Ordinary mind is
basic, clear, and natural. It’s dharma”—Sanskrit for the
universe’s underlying
order—“but any name spoils it.”
Tibetan Buddhism
offers many supporting practices, such as the repetition of
mantras and the veneration of deities, but meditation’s core
remains stilling the mind.
Research increasingly supports Choegyal’s description of two
basic ways to achieve this
end: the targeted and expansive approaches, which suit two
different attentional styles.
“One is more structured, one more simple,” he says. “The
first kind of person thinks, ‘We
must make an effort! What are the rules for meditation?’ For
the simple type of person,
however, this approach doesn’t work. I’m that type. I went
through all the monastic
training, but I don’t take any of that very seriously
anymore and just try to be simple and
natural. I just try to have ordinary mind. On top of that,
you can have concepts, like God,
prayer, devotion, meditation, or no concepts. Views or no
views. Those things can
change. There can be only one truth, however, so that must
be the same for everyone.”
ECKHART TOLLE WOULD
enthusiastically agree. He likes to tell the story of
how, as he was preparing to publish his first book—The Power
of Now, which has since
sold millions of copies in thirty-two languages—he shared
his ideas about paying
attention to the moment with a fellow in a café. The man
said, “‘Forget it! That’s already
been done.”
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Even a timeless
message requires timely rephrasing, however, and Tolle excels at
putting ancient ideas about attention’s importance in
shaping experience into the
nonsectarian Western vernacular. He’s described as a
“spiritual teacher,” but he neither
espouses nor rejects any dogmas or rituals, even meditation.
The practice he advances is
this: shift your focus from the past or the future to pay
rapt attention to the present and
experience true reality.
In October 2007, the
small, unprepossessing man whom his fans simply call
Eckhart does a two-day presentation at NYC’s Beacon Theatre.
The Rolling Stones, Van
Morrison, Al Green, Emmylou Harris, and many other musicians
have performed here,
and like their events, this one has drawn a sold-out crowd
of mostly hip-looking youngish
and middle-aged adults. One woman says that she has come all
the way from Florida,
because Eckhart doesn’t teach very often, and yes, he
changed her life.
Practicing what he
preaches, Tolle appears on stage, takes a chair, and just
focuses quietly for a few moments. Everyone else settles
down, too. Then, with a twinkle,
he says, “If you live in New York, this beginning is too
slow for you,” and illustrates with
a typical tourist’s anecdote. When he ventured onto Park
Avenue that morning, the
hard-charging citizens behind him turned what he had
intended to be a leisurely stroll into
a kind of speed-walk. He was able to go with the flow and
enjoy the experience but
noticed that his fellow pedestrians didn’t seem to. “They
were trying to get to the next
moment,” he says, “which they believed would be better than
this one. It’s a form of
collective madness.” The first of many bursts of laughter
resounds in the big space.
Despite his
Hobbit-like mien and droll sense of humor, which inclines him to
follow a comment on the meaning of life with a wry,
oh-brother eye roll, Tolle is a
mystic: someone who, regardless of religious denomination,
lives in a state of intense,
smell-the-roses attention to the unity and goodness of the
ultimate reality that Marcus
Aurelius described. Aware that new listeners can focus only
on bits and pieces of this
very big picture, he reiterates the same few basic concepts
throughout his Friday-night
and Saturday-afternoon talks.
Whether called
consciousness or Now, mind or God, the ultimate reality to which
Tolle directs his audience’s attention is all that there is:
not “up there” to be perceived in
some hazy future paradise but experienced “down here,” right
now, inside you. Seen
from this perspective, our customary focus on things
temporal and material is the major
cause of human misery, because it distracts us from
attending to timeless, formless true
reality.
In different ways
throughout both sessions, Tolle explains how focusing on
matters of time and form—stuff, including thoughts—prevents
us from apprehending the
way things really are. The obsession with time attunes us to
the past or future, which
makes no sense because the past is, well, past, and “when
the future comes, it too is the
present,” he says. “The clock’s hands move, but it’s always
now.” Considering that this
moment is all that there is, he says, we might as well pay
attention to it: “Can you allow
the present to be as it is? Make friends with it?”
Moving from our
fixation on time to our focus on thoughts, Tolle says that we
believe we could grasp the point of life if we could just
read the right book or find the
right teacher—in short, by thinking about it. Yet the
awareness of true reality is an
experience, not an idea, that in fact requires a “radical
refusal of thoughts” in favor of a
simple state of attending to the moment. “Your purpose—the
fullness of life—is just to
120
be here now,” he says. “To be the space for whatever
happens. Try to do that often
throughout the day. The length of time doesn’t matter.
Always choose now.”
ALONG WITH DIRECTING
your attention to a deeper reality than the humdrum
status quo, philosophy, religion, and psychology focus you
on morality and ethics:
becoming a better person and creating a better world by
cultivating what previous
generations unabashedly called virtues. You don’t hear that
term very often these days,
but the University of Michigan psychologist Chris Peterson
and some academic peers
would like to change that. They’ve identified six major
qualities—wisdom, courage,
temperance, justice, humanity (love), and transcendence—and
their subcategories as
amenable to scientific study. They have a practical
motivation for what at first might
seem to be a very high-minded pursuit: virtues are robustly
associated with well-being.
Despite the
traditional emphasis on development as a youthful phenomenon, new
studies of the brain’s neuroplasticity and of how we acquire
certain values, such as
honesty or fairness, support the experience of Ebenezer
Scrooge: it’s never too late to
focus on becoming a better person. In fact, says Peterson,
“Aristotle taught that you work
on developing virtues over your whole life, but you don’t
really display them until middle
age.” (Along with more familiar qualities, the sage’s list
included “magnificence,” or
making generous gifts to the gods.)
Attention plays a
major role in the cultivation of virtue. In fact, in a secular,
materialistic culture, the first hurdle in developing such a
quality is often simply
recognizing it as what it is: not just some random nice
thing that you do almost by
accident, but the deliberate exercise of a particular
ethical or moral strength. Thus, when
you stifle a harsh comment or put a problem in the proper
perspective, you label it
correctly as “self-control” or “wisdom.” Unaccustomed to
thinking in such terms, many
of Peterson’s subjects are surprised when he shows them
evidence that they’re kind, say,
or courageous; they’d just never thought of themselves that
way.
Once you’re clear
about what virtues are and which ones you want to cultivate,
the next step is to be on the lookout for what Peterson
calls “character moments,” or
everyday opportunities to practice these qualities. “That’s
a very Jamesian idea,” he says.
“You deliberately pay attention to your behavior and
establish habits that eventually
become second nature.”
We tend to focus on
virtue displayed in heroic circumstances: the bravery of John
McCain in an enemy’s prison or the justice sought by Martin
Luther King in the
segregated South. In everyday life, however, most
opportunities to build character are
modest in scope and easily missed if you’re not paying
attention. Mother Teresa and
Mahatma Gandhi may epitomize the quality of humanity, or
unconditional love, but that
doesn’t stop Peterson from his own pursuit of the virtue on
a smaller scale. Offering an
example, he says that while rushing home from the psych
department one evening, he
saw a distraught student clutching a late term paper in the
hallway. He could have easily
continued on his way, but instead of passing her by, he
stopped to reopen the locked
121
office and help her find the faculty mailbox she sought.
This small act didn’t change the
world, but it helped one person and brought another closer
to making kindness a habit. “It
only required two minutes of my life,” he says, “so I took
that opportunity and felt a little
bit nicer, a little bit better after wards.”
When Emerson wrote,
“Make yourself necessary to someone,” he anticipated
modern research that strongly correlates altruism with
well-being. “It’s virtually
impossible to be happy without good relationships,” says
Peterson. “That comes out in
the research again and again.” It’s often said that virtue
is its own reward, but love and its
corollary of kindness confer other major benefits on those
who practice them. Whether or
not the recipients gain, says Peterson, “we know that the
doers do! They’re happier and
healthier and live longer than people who pursue all the
latest toys but never have
enough.”
The world abounds in
kind and hopeful people, but exemplars of what the
philosophers sternly called “corrective virtues” are fewer
on the ground. Temperance and
its habits of modesty, prudence, and avoidance of excess are
difficult to develop because
they counter stubborn flaws in human nature. As Peterson
says, “We’re temperate
because we’re tempted not to be. Are you in control of
yourself or are you out of control?
It’s all about ‘self-regulation,’ which is a trendy subject
in psychology these days. And
you become self-regulating by being self-regulating, by
forgoing or delaying
gratification.” Because temperance is difficult to develop
and requires your deliberate
action, he says, “attention plays a particularly important
role. We need to concentrate on
acquiring a trait such as modesty, because we all want to
brag about ourselves.”
Most parents draw
their kids’ attention to the importance of developing honesty,
fairness, and other virtues, but fewer follow through on the
principle that actions speak
louder than words. “It’s teaching through example,” says
Peterson. “The parent should
label the behavior, whether it’s wisdom, courage, or
temperance, and also model it.” As
with adults, the most important virtue for kids to develop
in terms of their short- and
long-term well-being is love. “When I get up on my soapbox
to talk to parents,” says
Peterson, “I tell them, ‘If you want your kids to be happy,
don’t worry about their GPA,
worry about their extracurricular activities. Never stand in
the way of their making
friends.’ ”
Data gathered by the
Pew Research Center suggest that, in their own self-interest
and for the common good, the eighteen- to
twenty-five-year-olds who comprise the
so-called Generation Next may need to focus on developing
concern for others. They’re
more socially and politically liberal than the Generation
Xers who preceded them, but
their overriding goal is to become rich and famous. “It’s
all me, me, me and pleasure,
pleasure, pleasure,” says Peterson, “but there’s lots of
evidence that that’s what makes
people unhappy.”
To the poet W. H.
Auden, “To pray is to pay attention or, shall we say, to ‘listen’
to someone or something other than oneself.” Most academics
are cautious if not negative
about discussing religion, and it’s with a certain
hesitation that Peterson says, “I’m a
card-carrying liberal, but politically and religiously
conservative people are much more
generous. They’re responsible for most of the charity in
America—not just money, but
even blood. Maybe the religious aspect makes them more
optimistic and hopeful and not
so cynical. They’re not so squeamish about focusing on
trying to improve their
character.”
122
Attending to the
pursuit of virtue rather than profit or pleasure may sound
positively un-American, but the string of best sellers
chronicling the lives of the
Founding Fathers suggests otherwise. Flaws and failings
notwithstanding, Washington,
Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin actively focused on
cultivating and projecting good
character, which included public service. “Nowadays you
don’t hear people saying that
they’re working on becoming a better person,” says Peterson,
“but once upon a time, they
did. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of just working out at
the gym, we’d go off and focus
on doing something that makes us better people?” PHILOSOPHY,
RELIGION, AND
psychology not only focus you on a larger reality and the
creation of a better self and
world, but also, albeit more recently for psychology, on the
often overlooked fact that life
is good and meant to be appreciated. As Albert Einstein put
it, “There are two ways to
live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The
other is as though everything is
a miracle.”
Traditionally,
behavioral science has focused less on life’s goodness than on its
struggles and pain. When Fred Bryant, a psychologist at
Chicago’s Loyola University,
combed his field’s archives for research on pleasure, what
little information there was
suggested that the point of enjoyment is to serve as an
occasional “breather” that helps
get you through hard times. Dissatisfied with this bleak
conclusion, Bryant began to
study a form of rapt attention that he calls “savoring,” or
the mindful, intentional focus on
positive feelings: “If you can’t say, ‘Yes, I was aware of
and attended to that pleasure,’
it’s not savoring.”
Research on savoring
shows that your sense of satisfaction depends more on your
top-down focus, whether it’s enjoying the first day of
spring or stewing over a bitchy
relative’s behavior, than on your circumstances, such as
whether you’re rich or poor, sick
or well. In one experiment, Bryant tested his subjects’
psychological health, then divided
them into three groups. Each was asked to go for a
twenty-minute walk every day for a
week, but in pursuit of three different top-down goals. One
group was told to focus on all
the upbeat things they could find—sunshine, flowers, smiling
pedestrians. Another was to
look for negative stuff—graffiti, litter, frowning faces.
The third group was instructed to
walk just for the exercise.
At the end of the
week, when the walkers’ well-being was tested again, those who
had deliberately targeted positive cues were happier than
before the experiment. The
negatively focused subjects were less happy, and the just
plain exercisers scored in
between. The point, says Bryant, is that “you see what you
look for. And you can train
yourself to attend to the joy out there waiting to be had,
instead of passively waiting for it
to come to you.”
If you want to
savor, you can focus on an internal feeling, as when you thrill with
joy, bask in pride, swell with gratitude, or marvel in awe.
You can also attend to a
sensory pleasure, such as gazing at a rainbow or letting a
great piece of chocolate melt in
your mouth. Recalling a man who took a special delight in
concrete sidewalks, Bryant
says, “One person can enjoy something that no one else
could. Savoring reveals the
tremendous creativity of the human mind.”
Whether you’re
focused on your ice cream cone or your Nobel Prize, the
experience’s beginning and ending offer the best savoring
opportunities. Initially, sheer
novelty grabs your attention, as do later cues that
something is almost finished. Those
first and last few bites of cake, rays of light, or days of
vacation prompt you to appreciate
123
what you have and then, are about to lose. “Like the songs
put it, you don’t know what
you had till it’s lost,” says Bryant. “You want to wring out
all the joy that you can from a
good experience.”
Thanks to your
brain’s time-traveling capacity, your potential for focusing on
life’s good things isn’t limited to the here-and-now. You
can look back at or forward to
something nice, of course. Thanks to “anticipated recall,”
you can also think, while on
your honeymoon, perhaps, or at a graduation, about how much
you’ll enjoy recalling the
happy event some day. As Bryant says, “You can even return
to the past and remember a
happy time when you looked forward to something in the
future.”
Despite our great
potential for attending to life’s pleasures, it often remains
largely untapped. As Robert Louis Stevenson observed, “There
is no duty we so much
underrate as the duty of being happy.” At one end of the
savoring spectrum are people
who never relish anything, says Bryant: “They can take a
beautiful day and run it into the
ground.” At the opposite end are the lucky individuals,
particularly older people, who
take delight in little things, like pancakes for breakfast
or a stupid pet trick.
Despite their
generally lower socioeconomic status worldwide, women savor
more than men. One reason could be that females usually get
more encouragement to feel
and express emotion than males, who are generally trained to
have a stiff-upper-lip,
action-oriented approach to life. As Bryant puts it, “Why
would a guy bask in pleasure
when there’s more work to be done?”
Whatever your age or
gender, the great obstacle to enjoying the moment’s
delights is not paying attention to them. The world’s most
beautiful garden might as well
be an asphalt parking lot if you pound through it while
barking into your cell phone.
Urgency about time is another major obstacle to savoring.
“‘If we have to walk through
the garden, let’s get a move on!’ ” says Bryant. “‘I have
stuff to do!’ ” As he points out,
however, “No moment comes twice. If you don’t attend to it,
you miss it. If you want to
smell the roses, you have to linger.”
Just as the ancient
Greeks feared their pleasure would anger the gods, some
people won’t focus on the joys of the present lest they jinx
the future. Particularly in
Japan, Bryant has observed this anxious “yin/yang feeling
that if something good
happens, something bad will come along to ‘make up for it.’
The more you hold this
view, the more you try to short-circuit savoring and ‘calm
down.’ ”
Attending to
pleasure is a reward in itself, but savoring also boosts your quotient
of positive emotion, which in turn expands your focus and
may confer health benefits,
such as improved resilience and immune function. During an
illness, says Bryant, “you
should savor not just for the sheer joy of it, but also to
help yourself recover.” Then too,
he says, “just because something bad is happening doesn’t
mean lots of good things
aren’t also. They’re two very different phenomena. The joy
and meaning you find in life
and the current stressor—an illness, a troubled relative, a
career setback—are separate
concerns, and you can experience both.”
The best strategy
for savoring is learning to pay rapt attention to carefully chosen
top-down targets. To practice this skill, Bryant suggests
taking a “daily vacation”:
spending twenty to thirty minutes focusing on something you
enjoy or suspect you might
but have never done. Then, at the end of the day, you
revisit and relish that pleasurable
interlude and plan the next sojourn. After seven days, he
says, “most people say, ‘What a
great week! I wish I could do that all of the time!’ Well,
why not?”
124
AFTER WORD
Over the five years
since running the psych experiment that led to this book,
learning about the nature of attention and how it affects
love, work, and everything
between has changed my life in some important ways.
Actually, I’ve come to feel that
paying rapt attention is life, at least at its best.
Focused is how we
want to feel. The evidence is all around us, from the calm yet
alert faces of athletes “in the zone” to mothers cradling
their babies, tradesmen bent over
their work, musicians playing their instruments. In Shine a
Light, Martin Scorsese’s
documentary on the Rolling Stones, when Keith Richards is
asked how he feels when he
emerges on-stage to confront a hundred thousand screaming
fans, he says simply, “I
wake up.” He’s a rocker, not a philosopher, yet his remark
echoes those of William
James—“Compared to what we ought to be, we are half
awake”—and the Buddha: “I am
awake.” In life’s best moments, whether we’re writing a book
or a letter, making love or
dinner, that’s how we are, too: awake, focused, rapt.
Some of what I’ve
learned about attention has very practical applications. Aware
of our limited focusing capacity, I take pains to ensure
that electronic media and
machines aren’t in charge of mine. When I need to learn and
remember certain
information, do difficult work, or acquire a new skill, I
shield myself from such
distractions for at least ninety minutes at a stretch. If I
tense up over a big decision, I
remember the fortune-cookie rule: nothing is as important as
I think it is when I’m
focusing on it.
Confronted with a
seemingly dull chore—say, the laundry—I recall William
James’s experiment with the dot on the piece of paper and do
it a little differently. (One
day last summer, when I decided to hang the clothes on the
line outdoors instead of just
sticking them in the dryer, I saw a double rainbow.) When I
can’t fathom something that
a dear one has just said or done, I try to remember that he
or she focuses on a different
world and ask for some illumination.
Most important, I’ve
become much more aware of how the way I feel affects what
I pay attention to and vice versa. Depending on my emotional
state du jour, I might
barely notice the stack of dirty dishes that someone has
dumped in the sink or perceive it
as a smoldering Mt. Vesuvius. Should the latter reaction
prevail, I’ve learned that I can
ameliorate its consequences for all concerned by refocusing
on the situation in a different
light—the party responsible is not an awful person but
perhaps only distracted by a big
project—or by shifting my attention to something else for a
while. Simple as it sounds,
this strategy is surprisingly effective.
Even in far more
difficult situations, I’ve learned that once any appropriate
problem-solving efforts are under way, I needn’t stay
focused on outrageous fortune’s
slings and arrows. Tomorrow morning, I’ll visit my
ninety-four-year-old mother, Winnie,
who is becoming very frail in body and mind and is once
again in a nursing home. To
paraphrase John Milton, “Heaven or hell?” It will depend on
what we focus on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their
contributions to our understanding of attention and for kindly sharing
their insights with me, I wish to thank George Ainslie,
Marie Banich, Aaron Beck,
Marlene Behrmann, George Bonanno, Thomas Bradbury, Rodney
Brooks, Bill Brown,
125
Fred Bryant, Laura Carstensen, Javier Castellanos, Tanya
Chartrand, Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi, Richard Davidson, Edward Deci, Angela
Duckworth, Dugu Choegyal
Rinpoche, Carol Dweck, Barbara Fredrickson, Howard Gardner,
Joseph Giunta, Scott
Hagwood, Shannon Howell, Amishi Jha, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel
Kahneman, Ellen
Langer, Marsel Mesulam, Richard Nisbett, Donald Norman,
Elinor Ochs, James
Pawelski, Chris Peterson, Gail Posner, Michael Posner,
Lobsang Rapgay, Mary Rothbart,
Paul Rozin, Oliver Schultheiss, Barry Schwartz, Paschal
Sheeran, Ann Treisman, and
Leslie Ungerleider.
I also thank Rachel
Aviv for research and reporting made possible by the Hertog
Fellowship Program at Columbia University’s School of the
Arts.
For their particular
insights and generosity I am especially grateful to Steve
Yantis, Auke Tellegen, David Meyer, and Ann-Judith
Silverman.
Finally, I thank Ann
Godoff, my editor, Kristine Dahl, my agent, and Lindsay
Whalen, John McGhee, and the staff of Penguin Press for
their erudition, kindness, and
hard work on my behalf.
NOTES AND SUGGESTED
READINGS
INTRODUCTION
p.5. John Milton
might have been thinking: John Milton, Paradise Lost. New
York: Penguin Classics, 2003.
p.6. In his
masterwork: WilliamJames, The Principles of Psychology, Chapter
XI: “Attention.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1981.
p.6. Despite this
kind of gut-level understanding: Donald Norman, Memory
and Attention. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969.
p.7. Still unable to
penetrate the black box: E. C. Cherry, “Some Experiments
on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears.”
Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America 23:915-19, 1953.
p.7. Some theories
stressed the stimulus’s physical characteristics: D. E.
Broadbent, Perception and Communication. London: Pergamon
Press, 1958.
p.7. others its
content, such as your own name: N. Moray, “Attention in
Dichotic Listening: Affective Cues and the Influence of
Instructions.” Quarterly Journal
of Experimental Psychology 11, 1959.
p.7. and still
others both: A. Treisman and G. Gelade, “A Feature Integration
Theory of Attention.” Cognitive Psychology 12, 1980.
p.7. Their efforts
were so vague: H. Egeth and W. Bevan, “Attention,” in B. B.
Wollman (ed.), Handbook of General Psychology. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1973.
p.8. There’s no tidy
“attention center”: Michael Posner, The Cognitive
Neuroscience of Attention. New York: Guilford, 2004.
p.9. Neuroscience’s
truly groundbreaking insight: Robert Desimone and John
Duncan, “Neural Mechanisms of Selective Visual Attention.”
Annual Review of
Neuroscience 18, March 1995.
p.12. Even in the
hell of the Nazi death camps: Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search
for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
p.12. The rates of
psychological problems: Peter Suedfeld, “Stressful levels of
126
environmental stimulation,” in I. G. Sarason and C. D.
Spielberger (eds.), Stress and
Anxiety, Halstead, 1979.
CHAPTER 1: PAY
ATTENTION
p.17. Many
extraordinary achievers are fueled: David Lykken, “Mental
Energy.” Intelligence 33, 2005.
p.18. Even the New
York Times’s psychologically savvy: David Brooks, “The
Neural Buddhists.” New York Times, July 13, 2008.
p.19. An amusing
experiment on “change blindness”: Daniel J. Simons and
Christopher F. Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained
Inattentional Blindness for
Dynamic Events.” Perception 28, 1999.
p.20. A little
knowledge about this neurological “biased competition”: Robert
Desimone and John Duncan, “Neural Mechanisms of Selective
Visual Attention.” Annual
Review of Neuroscience 18, March 1995.
p.20. According to
the Johns Hopkins neuroscientist: Steven Yantis, “To See
Is to Attend.” Science, January 2003.
p.21. If you’re told
to concentrate on a spot: S. Kastner, Leslie Ungerleider et
al., “Increased Activity in Human Visual Cortex during
Directed Attention in the
Absence of Visual Stimulation.” Neuron 22, 1999; Leslie
Ungerleider and S. Kastner,
“Mechanisms of Visual Attention in the Human Cortex.” Annual
Review of Neuroscience
23, 2000.
p.23. Unlike peers
who see a dichotomy: M. Behrmann and J. J. Geng,
“Attention,” in E. E. Smith and S. M. Kosslyn (eds.),
Cognitive Psychology: Mind and
Brain. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2006; J. Duncan, “Eps
Mid-Career Award 2004: Brain
Mechanisms of Attention.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental
Psychology 59, 2006.
p.24. subjects who
focused on a task while researchers flashed images: Alan J.
Parkin, John M. Gardiner, and Rebecca Rosser, “Functional
Aspects of Recollective
Experience in Face Recognition.” Consciousness and
Cognition, December 1995.
p. 24. As the poet
John Ashbery observes: John Ashbery, Rivers and
Mountains. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966.
p.25. As research on
the “beauty bias” shows: Ingrid Olson, “Facial
Attractiveness Is Appraised in a Glance.” Emotion 5, 2005.
p.26. After much
research on binding: A. Treisman, “Search, Similarity and the
Integration of Features Between and Within Dimensions.”
Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27, 1991.
CHAPTER 2: INSIDE
OUT
p.30. The painting’s
subject matter reflects: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998.
p.31. Scientists as
well as artists: J. A. Easterbrook, “The Effect of Emotion on
Cue Utilization and the Organization of Behavior.”
Psychological Review 66, 1959. As
Charles Darwin wrote . . . Charles Darwin. Expression of the
Emotions in Man and
Animals. Philosophical Library, 1955.
p.32. In August
2007:
www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_episode.aspx?sched=1203.
127
p.32. In a survey of
which topics: Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin
Finkenauer, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Bad Is Stronger Than
Good.” Review of General
Psychology, 2001.
p.32. You’ll spot an
angry face: Christine Hansen and Ranald Hansen, “Finding
the Face in the Crowd.” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 1988.
p.33. You’ll process
and remember negative material: Kyle Smith et al.,
“Being Bad Isn’t Always Good: Affective Context Moderates
the Attention Bias Toward
Negative Information.” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 2006.
p.33. react to critical
words: M. Inaba, M. Nomura, and H. Ohira, “Neural
Evidence of Effects of Emotional Valence on Word
Recognition.” International Journal
of Psychophysiology, 2005.
p.33. focus on
printed adjectives that describe personality: Felicia Pratto and
Oliver P. John, “Automatic Vigilance: The Attention-Grabbing
Power of Negative Social
Information.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
1991.
p.33. You’ll listen
longer to complaints: W. G. Graziano et al., “Attention,
Attraction, and Individual Differences in Response to
Criticism” (1980), cited in Smith et
al., “Being Bad Isn’t Always Good.”
p.33. Even when you
sleep: Natalie Angier, “In the Dreamscape of Night-mares,
Clues to Why We Dream at All.” New York Times, October 23,
2007.
p.33. Here’s the icing on the cake: “Chances
of Heart Attack Are Greatest on
Birthday.” New York Times, March 19, 1993.
p.33. Looking at the
dark side of things: Emine Kapcli et al., “Judgement of
Control Revisited: Are the Depressed Realistic or Pessimistic?”
Counselling Psychology
Quarterly 12: 1, March 1999.
p.35. In fact, some
research asserts that most people feel “mildly pleased”:
Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing
Daily Life Experience:
The Day Reconstruction Method.” Science, December 3, 2004.
p.35. According to
complementary studies, you’ll tend to: Richard Walker,
Rodney Vogl, and Charles Thompson, “Autobiographical Memory:
Unpleasantness
Fades Faster Than Pleasantness Over Time.” Applied Cognitive
Psychology, 1997.
p.35. There are as
many nights as days: Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams,
Reflections . New York: Vintage, 1989.
p.35. Based on
objective lab tests that measure vision: Barbara Fredrickson,
Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace
the Hidden Strength of
Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive. New
York: Crown, 2009.
p.36. the “weapons
effect”: Michael Wilson, “After 50 Witnesses in Trial Over
Police Killing, Still No Clear View of 50 Shots.” New York
Times, April 5, 2008.
p.36. Just as bad
feelings constrict your attention: Barbara Fredrickson and
Thomas Joiner, “Positive Emotions Trigger Upward Spirals
Toward Emotional
Well-Being.” Psychological Science, 2002.
p.37. Here’s Prince
Andrei in War and Peace: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace,
translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New
York: Knopf, 2007.
p.37. The type of
complex inner experience: Donald A. Norman, Emotional
Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York:
Basic Books, 2004.
p.38. The
influential Dutch psychologist: A. Dijksterhuis et al., “Of Men and
Mackerels: Attention and Automatic Behavior,” in Herbert
Bless and Joseph P. Forgas
128
(eds.), The Message Within. Philadelphia: Psychology Press,
2000.
p.40. Research on a
fascinating group of brain-injured patients: Marlene
Behrmann and J. J. Geng, “Attention,” in Smith and Kosslyn
(eds.), Cognitive
Psychology. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2006.
p.40. In one
much-cited experiment, a man is shown a picture: John C.
Marshall and Peter W. Halligan, “Blind-sight and Insight in
Visuo-Spatial Neglect.”
Nature 336, December 29, 1988.
CHAPTER 3: OUTSIDE
IN
p.43. As the poet:
W. H. Auden, A Certain World. London: Faber and Faber,
1982.
p.44. Fortunately,
all cultures try to help you bias: Paul Rozin and C.
Nemeroff, “Sympathetic Magical Thinking: The Contagion and
Similarity ‘Heuristics, ’”
in T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, and D. Kahneman, Heuristics and
Biases: The Psychology of
Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
p.44. “Disgust is
the basic emotion”: P. Rozin, J. Haidt, and C. R. McCauley,
“Disgust,” in M. Lewis and J. Haviland (eds.), Handbook of
Emotions, 2nd ed. New
York: Guilford, 2000.
p.48. In one large,
rigorous study of 941 Dutch subjects over ten years: Erik J.
Giltay et al., “Dispositional Optimism and the Risk of
Cardiovascular Death: The
Zutphen Elderly Study.” Archives of Internal Medicine 166,
February 27, 2006.
p.48. Because your
reaction to any event: B. L. Fredrickson and C. Branigan,
“Positive Emotions Broaden the Scope of Attention and
Thought-Action Repertoires,”
Cognition and Emotion 19, 2005.
p.50. Compared with
the young, the old experience: Laura Carstensen and J. A.
Mikels, “At the Intersection of Emotion and Cognition: Aging
and the Positively Effect.”
Current Directions in Psychological Science 14, 2005.
p.51. The
differences in what young and old people: Laura Carstensen, “The
Influence of a Sense of Time on Human Development.” Science
312, 2006.
p.52.
Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma: Sharon Begley, “Get Shrunk
at Your Own Risk.” Newsweek, June 18, 2007.
p.52. Even when
you’re reeling from a severe blow: G. Bonanno and K.
Coif-man, “Does Repressive Coping Promote Resilience?:
Affective-Autonomic
Response Discrepancy During Bereavement.” Journal of
Personality and Social
Psychology, April 2007.
p.52.The idea that
directing your attention away: Anthony Papa et al., “Grief
Processing and Deliberate Grief Avoidance: A Prospective
Comparison of Bereaved
Spouses and Parents in the United States and the People’s
Republic of China.” Journal of
Consulting & Clinical Psychology 73, 2005.
p.53. Individuals of
sanguine temperament: G. Bonanno and H. Siddique,
“Emotional Dissociation, Self-Deception, and Psychotherapy,”
in Jefferson A. Singer and
Peter Salovey (eds.), At Play in the Fields of Consciousness.
Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1999.
CHAPTER 4: NATURE
p.56. When
discussing his favorite targets: Winifred Gallagher, Just the Way
129
You Are. New York: Random House, 1996.
p.57. Among these
temperamentally unhappy campers are “reactant”
personalities: Allison Van Dusen, “Don’t Like Being Nagged?”
Forbes.com, April 22,
2007.
p.57. A particularly
interesting example of how: Lorraine and J. Clayton
Lafferty, Perfectionism: A Sure Cure for Happiness. Chicago:
Human Synergistics, 1997.
p.57. Because they
consistently pay too much attention to the wrong things:
Clayton Lafferty, Perfectionism: A Sure Cure for Happiness.
Chatsworth, Calif.: Wilshire
Books, 1997.
p.59. A person’s
attentional style: Auke Tellegen, Multidimensional Personality
Questionnaire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993.
p.63. Similarly,
physiological differences in tongues and taste buds: L. M.
Bartoshuk, V. B. Duffy, and I. J. Miller, “PTC/PROP Tasting:
Anatomy, Psychophysics,
and Sex Effects.” Physiology & Behavior 56, 1994.
p.64. He describes
its alerting, orienting, and executive networks: Michael
Posner, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention. New York:
Guilford, 2004. p.64. With
the University of Oregon psychologist Mary Rothbart: Michael
Posner and Mary
Rothbart, Educating the Human Brain. Washington, D.C.:
American Psychological
Association Books, 2006.
CHAPTER 5: NURTURE
p.67. For a story
called: Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast.”
Washington Post, April 8, 2007.
p.68. In one
much-publicized early demonstration of the adult brain’s
unsuspected malleability: E. A. Maguire et al.,
“Navigation-Related Structural Changes
in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers.” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences
97, 2000.
p.69. Using
sophisticated EEG (electroencephalography) and fMRI scanning:
R. J. Davidson and A. Lutz, “Buddha’s Brain: Neuroplasticity
and Meditation.” IEEE
Signal Processing 25, 2008.
p.70. Indeed,
research done by Paul Ekman: D. Keltner et al., “Facial
Expression of Emotion,” in R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer,
and H. H. Goldsmith (eds.),
Handbook of Affective Sciences. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
p.75. In The Big
Sort: Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing, The Big Sort. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
p.75. In his
research on how cultural experience influences: R. E. Nisbett, The
Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think
Differently . . . and Why. New
York: The Free Press, 2003.
CHAPTER 6:
RELATIONSHIPS
p.82. Because it’s
impossible to communicate: Rodney A. Brooks, Flesh and
Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. New York: Pantheon,
2003.
p.82. Intrigued by
the “monkey see, monkey do” antics: Marco Iacoboni et al.,
“Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation.” Science 286, 1999;
Marco Iacoboni,
Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with
Others. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2008.
130
p.82. Evolution
seems to have designed us: Daniel Goleman, Social
Intelligence. New York: Bantam, 2007.
p.84. Indeed, having
social ties is the single best predictor: Ronald Kessler et
al., How Healthy Are We? Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004.
p.85. Research by
the Canadian psychologist Joanne Wood shows: J. V.
Wood et al., “Downward Comparison in Everyday Life:
Reconciling Self-Enhancement
Models With the Mood-Cognition Priming Model.” Journal of
Personality and Social
Psychology 79, 2000.
p.85. When employees
focus on how their efforts: Adam Grant and Elizabeth
Campbell, “Doing Good, Doing Harm, Being Well, and Burning
Out: The Interactions of
Perceived Prosocial and Antisocial Impact in Service Work.”
Journal of Occupational &
Organizational Psychology 80 (4), December 2007.
p.85. When they’re
focused on either a social activity or a task: Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience. New York: Harper,
1991.
p.86. An
anthropologist, linguist, winner of the MacArthur “genius” award:
Elinor Ochs, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday
Storytelling. Boston: Harvard
University Press, 2002.
p.87. Despite the
claims made for products: Alice Park, “Baby Einsteins: Not
So Smart After All.” Time, August 6, 2007.
p.91. Yet as the
director of the UCLA family project’s “marriage lab”: T. N.
Bradbury and B. R. Karney, “Understanding and Altering the
Longitudinal Course of
Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 66, 2004; T.
N. Bradbury et al.,
“Problem-solving Skills and Affective Expressions as
Predictors of Change in Marital
Satisfaction.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
73, 2005.
p.91. In fact,
research shows that contented spouses see each other: Sandra
Murray et al., “Putting the Partner Within Reach: A Dyadic
Perspective on Felt Security
in Close Relationships.” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 88, 2005.
p.91. A study with
the seemingly counterintuitive title: Shelly Gable et al.,
“Will You Be There for Me When Things Go Right? Supportive
Responses to Positive
Event Disclosures.” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 91, 2006.
p.92. First, half of
the subjects were told they were “home-buyers”: J. D.
Bransford and M. K. Johnson, “Contextual Prerequisites for
Understanding: Some
Investigations of Comprehension and Recall.” Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal
Behavior 11, 1972.
p.93. spouses were
given a long checklist: Patti L. Johnson and K. Daniel
O’Leary, “Behavioral Components of Marital Satisfaction: An
Individualized
Assessment Approach.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology 64, 1996.
p.96. In a
maladaptive version of the Punch-and-Judy dynamic: Jee Burgeon,
Charles Berger, and Vincent Waldron, “Mindfulness and
Interpersonal Communication.”
Journal of Social Issues 56, 2000.
p.96. Differences in
self-esteem also influence: Sandra Murray, “Regulating the
Risks of Closeness.” Current Directions in Psychological
Science 14, 2005.
p.98. the good old
Friday-night date, especially one that features: A. Aron et
al., “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing
Activities and Experienced
Relationship Quality.” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 72, 2000.
131
CHAPTER 7: PRODUCTIVITY
p.99. To William
James, rapt attention requires: William James, The
Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI: “Attention.”
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981.
p.101. According to
the underappreciated mid-twentieth-century
psychologist Nicholas Hobbs: Nicholas Hobbs, “A Natural
History of an Idea: Project
Re-Ed,” in J. M. Kaufman and C. D. Lewis (eds.), Teaching
Children with Behavioral
Disorders. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1974.
p.101. Tellingly,
one group is distinguished by its zeal: David C. McClelland,
The Achieving Society. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
p.102. The insights
into rapt attention’s role in human behavior in general:
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience. New York:
Harper, 1991; Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the
Making of Meaning. New York:
Viking, 2003; and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of
Discovery and Invention. New
York: Harper, 1997.
p.105. Research
conducted by the University of Michigan psychologist Oliver
Schultheiss: Oliver Schultheiss and Joachim C. Brunstein,
“Goal Imagery: Bridging the
Gap Between Implicit Motives and Explicit Goals.” Journal of
Personality 67, 1999.
p.105. Support for
these underremarked workplace gratifications: Arlie
Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life:
Notes from Home and
Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
p.107. According to
the psychologist Gilbert Brim: Gilbert Brim, Ambition.
New York: Basic Books, 1992. p.111. In one ESM study, 866
teenagers: Jennifer
Schmidt and Rich Grant, “Images of Work and Play,” in Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi and
Barbara Schneider (eds.), Becoming Adult: How Teenagers
Prepare for the World of
Work. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
p.113. In The
Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium: Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi, The Evolving Self. New York: Harper
Perennial, 1994.
CHAPTER 8:
DECISIONS
p.116. Early in his
long and varied career: Daniel Kahneman, Attention and
Effort. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
p.119. He traces
this disconnect: D. Kahneman and J. Riis, “Living, and
Thinking About It: Two Perspectives on Life,” in F. A. Huppert,
N. Baylis, and B.
Keverne (eds.), The Science of Well-being. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
p.120. In one
much-cited illustration of the focusing illusion: D. Schkade and
D. Kahneman, “Does Living in California Make People Happy? A
Focusing Illusion in
Judgments of Life Satisfaction.” Psychological Science 9,
1998.
p.127. In our age of
endlessly proliferating consumer goods: Barry Schwartz,
The Paradox of Choice. New York: Harper, 2005.
CHAPTER 9:
CREATIVITY
p.133. William
James’s simple experiment on how to improve: William James,
The Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI: “Attention.”
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981.
132
p.134. Since the
muses of ancient Greece: J. P. Guilford, “The Traits of
Creativity,” in H. H. Anderson (ed.), Creativity and Its
Cultivation. New York: Harper &
Row, 1959.
p.135. This
association of focusing and freedom: Susan Stamberg, “Jazz
Improv Cranks Up Creativity.” Weekend Edition, National
Public Radio, March 22, 2008.
p.136. Creativity is
most commonly associated with the arts, but: Ellen
Langer, Mindfulness. Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1989;
“Mindful Learning,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science 9, 2002; On
Becoming an Artist:
Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity. New York:
Ballantine, 2006.
p.140. In one
poignant indication of what happens when young children:
Constance Kamii and Barbara Anne Lewis, in Ron Ritchhart and
David N. Perkins, “Life
in the Mindful Classroom: Nurturing the Disposition of
Mindfulness.” Journal of Social
Issues 56, 2000.
CHAPTER 10: FOCUS
INTERRUPTUS
p.148. When writing
about two common attentional styles: William James,
The Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI: “Attention.”
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981.
p.148. That
proverbial professor is not the only person: Daniel Schachter,
“The Sin of Absent-mindedness.” The Seven Sins of Memory.
New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2001.
p.149.
Notwithstanding the importance of “explicit” learning: D. L. Schachter,
“Implicit Memory: History and Current Status.” Journal of
Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition 13, 1987.
p.149. At first
glance, recent research that indicates: Jonathan Smallwood,
Daniel Fishman, and Jonathan Schooler, “Counting the Cost of
an Absent Mind.”
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14, 2007.
p.150. When you head
to the cafeteria or gym: Edward M. Bowden et al.,
“New Approaches to Demystifying Insight.” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 9, July 2005.
p.151. Finally, not
paying attention to anything in particular: Rachel Kaplan
and Stephen Kaplan, The Experience of Nature. New York:
Cambridge University Press,
1989.
p.152. after an
enormous amount of practice: Ulric Neisser, Cognition and
Reality . San Francisco: Freeman, 1976.
p.152.
Multitasking’s most obvious drawback: David Meyer, “Précis to a
Practical Unified Theory of Executive Cognitive Processes
and Multiple-Task
Performance,” in D. Gopher and A. Koriat (eds.), Attention
and Performance XVII.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
p.153. Using fMRI
imaging, UCLA psychologists found: Peter N. Steinmetz,
“Alternate Task Inhibits Single-neuron Category-selective
Responses in the Human
Hippocampus while Preserving Selectivity in the Amygdala.”
Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, 2008.
p.153. American
youths spend an average of 6.5 hours per day: Claudia
Wallis, “The Multitasking Generation.” Time, March 19, 2006.
p.154. Eloquent
testimony comes from five of Japan’s ten best-selling
novels: Norimitsu Onishi,
“Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular.” New York
Times, January 20, 2008.
133
p.156. if you’re,
say, driving across Nebraska on I-80: N. H. Mackworth,
“Researches on the Measurement of Human Performance.”
Medical Research Council
Special Report 268. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,
1950.
p.157. In their work
with young children: M. Rosario Rueda, Mary Rothbart,
and Michael Posner, “Training, Maturation, and Genetic
Influences on the Development
of Executive Attention.” Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences 102, 2005.
p.158. In a study of
adults, subjects were presented with from one to five
columns: Paul Verhaeghen, John Cerella, and Basak
Chandramallika, “Working Memory
Workout: How to Expand the Focus of Serial Attention from
One to Four Items in 10
Hours or Less.” Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition
30, 2004.
p.159. Her
investigation of training attention to improve daily experience: A.
P. Jha, J. Krompinger, and M. J. Baime, “Mindfulness
Training Modifies Subsystems of
Attention.” Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral
Neuroscience
7, 2007; K. K.
Sreenivasan and A. P. Jha, “Selective Attention Supports Working
Memory Maintenance by Modulating Perceptual Processing of
Distractors.” Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience 19, 2007.
p.161. as suggested
by the hyperactive title of a recent book: Edward
Hallowell, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About
to Snap! Strategies for
Coping in a World Gone ADD. New York: Ballantine, 2007.
CHAPTER 11:
DISORDERED ATTENTION
p.166. No one is
more aware of the discontent over the current state of
knowledge: F. X. Castellanos et al., “Developmental
Trajectories of Brain Volume
Abnormalities in Children and Adolescents with
Attention-Deficit/- Hyperactivity
Disorder,” Journal of the American Medical Association 288,
2002;
“Cingulate-Precuneus Interactions: A New Locus of
Dysfunction in Adult
Attention-Deficit /Hyperactivity Disorder,” Biological
Psychiatry 63, 2008; F. X.
Castellanos and R. Tannock, “Neuroscience of
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder:
The Search for Endophenotypes,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience
3, 2002.
p.167. That it’s six
times likelier to affect children: R. C. Herrenkohl, B. P.
Egolf, and E. C. Herrenkohl, “Preschool Antecedents of
Adolescent Assaultive Behavior:
A Longitudinal Study.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
67, 1997.
p.168. About 25
percent of the biological parents of diagnosed kids: P. C.
Kendall and C. Hammen, Abnormal Psychology. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1995.
p.169. Waving a book
called Attention, Memory, and Executive Function: G.
Reid Lyon and Norman A. Krasnegor (eds.). Attention, Memory,
and Executive Function.
Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1996.
CHAPTER 12:
MOTIVATION
p.173. After his
subjects had fasted for eight hours: M.-M. Mesulam, “Spatial
Attention and Neglect: Parietal, Frontal and Cingulate
Contributions to the Mental
Representation and Attentional Targeting of Salient
Extrapersonal Targets.”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B:
Biological Sciences, 1999.
p.174. many simply
don’t focus on their food: Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating.
New York: Bantam, 2007.
134
p.176. According to
his successor: David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society.
New York: The Free Press, 1967.
p.176. When they
examine images of faces: Oliver C. Schultheiss and Jessica A.
Hale, “Implicit Motives Modulate Attentional Orienting to
Perceived Facial Expressions
of Emotion.” Motivation and Emotion, 31, 2007.
p.177.
Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying
motivated: Georgia Panayiotou and Scott Vrana, “The Role of
Self-Focus, Task
Difficulty, Task Self-Relevance, and Evaluation Anxiety in
Reaction Time Performance.”
Motivation and Emotion 28, June 2004.
p.177. Where
nurture’s impact is concerned: J. S. Pang and O. C. Schultheiss,
“Assessing Implicit Motives in U.S. College Students:
Effects of Picture Type and
Position, Gender and Ethnicity, and Cross-Cultural
Comparisons.” Journal of Personality
Assessment 85, 2005.
p.177.
Interestingly, much of the conventional wisdom: Carol Dweck,
“Caution—Praise Can Be Dangerous.” American Educator, Spring
1999; Mindset: The
New Psychology of Success. New York: Ballantine, 2007.
p.178. Locker-room
pep talks and bonuses notwithstanding: Edward Deci and
Maarten Vansteenkiste, “Competitively Contingent Rewards and
Intrinsic Motivation:
Can Losers Remain Motivated?” Motivation and Emotion,
October 2003; Edward Deci
and Richard Ryan, “The Initiation and Regulation of
Intrinsically Motivated Learning
and Achievement,” in Ann Boggiano and Thane Pittman (eds.),
Achievement and
Motivation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
p.178. Why some very
focused individuals have lots of the stick-to-itiveness:
A. L. Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for
Long-Term Goals.” Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 92, 2007.
p.179. A genius such
as Isaac Newton, however, has enough “mental energy”:
David Lykken, “Mental Energy.” Intelligence 33, 2005.
p.182. In a less
dramatic illustration of a hidden motivation’s power: Gráinne
M. Fitzsimons and John A. Bargh, “Thinking of You:
Nonconscious Pursuit of
Interpersonal Goals Associated with Relationship Partners.”
Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 84, January 2003.
p.182. In an
ingenious experimental illustration: Tanya Chartrand et al.,
“Consequences of Nonconscious Goal Activation.” To appear in
J. Shah and W. Gardner
(eds.), Handbook of Motivation Science. New York: Guilford,
2007.
p.183. In an
experiment on how best to deal: T. L. Webb and P. Sheeran, “How
Do Implementation Intentions Promote Goal Attainment? A Test
of Component
Processes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43,
2007.
p.183. Concerned
about the high incidence: Atul Gawande, “The Checklist.”
The New Yorker, December 10, 2007.
p.184. Some
intriguing new research: George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
CHAPTER 13: HEALTH
p.189. Exhibit A for
attention’s power: “Larry Stewart, a Businessman Known
for a Santa-Size Generosity, Dies at 58.” Associated Press,
January 15, 2007.
p.190. His discovery
that attention’s selective nature: Aaron T. Beck et al.,
135
Cognitive Therapy of Depression. New York: Guilford, 1987;
David A. Clark, Aaron T.
Beck, and Brad A. Alford, Scientific Foundations of
Cognitive Theory and Therapy of
Depression. New York: Wiley, 1999.
p.192. Depression
costs the American economy: Walter Stewart et al., “Cost of
Lost Productive Work Time Among US Workers with Depression.”
Journal of the
American Medical Association, June 2003.
p.193. That the
ability to control attention: Suzanne Tyas et al., “Transitions to
Mild Cognitive Impairments, Dementia, and Death: Findings
from the Nun Study.”
American Journal of Epidemiology , June 2007.
p.193. Much of the
enthusiasm for using attention: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to
Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through
Mindfulness. New York:
Hyperion, 2005.
p.195. After eight
weeks of classes and daily meditation: Jon Kabat-Zinn, “An
Outpatient Program in Behavioral Medicine Chronic Pain
Patients Based on the Practice
of Mindfulness Meditation.” General Hospital Psychiatry,
1982.
p.196. Two
impressive studies of psoriasis patients: Jon Kabat-Zinn et al.,
“Influence of a Mindfulness Meditation-Based Stress
Reduction Intervention on Rates of
Skin Clearing in Patients with Moderate to Severe Psoriasis
Undergoing Photo Therapy
(UVB) and Photochemotherapy.” Psychosomatic Medicine 60,
1998.
p.197. On the other
hand, a huge 2008 survey from the Pew Foundation: The
U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, February 25, 2008;
www.pewforum.com.
p.198. His unusual
cultural, philosophical, and scientific background: R. A.
Baer, “Mindfulness Training as a Clinical Intervention.”
Clinical Psychology 10,
Summer 2003.
CHAPTER 14:
MEANING
p.203. Here is
Marcus Aurelius: Martin Hammond (ed.), Meditations. New
York: Penguin, 2006.
p.203. Something of
this preoccupation’s postmodern tenor: Antonio Monda,
Do You Believe? Questions on God and Religion. New York:
Vintage, 2007.
p.205. a Californian
turned Hindu guru: Bhagavan Das, It’s Here Now (Are
You?). New York: Broadway Books, 1998. p.205. Alpert became
Ram Das: Ram Das,
Remember, Be Here Now. San Cristobal, N.M.: Lama Foundation,
1971.
p.208. He likes to
tell the story: Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. Novato,
Calif.: New World Library, 2004.
p.210. You don’t
hear that term very often: Chris Peterson, A Primer in
Positive Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press,
2006.
p.213. To the poet:
W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand. New York: Vintage, 1990.
p.214. Dissatisfied
with this bleak conclusion: Fred B. Bryant and Joseph
Veroff, Savoring. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
2006.
INDEX
absentmindedness
absorption
academics
achievement
136
Adams, John
adaptation effects
Adderall
addiction
ADHD
(attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder)
in boys vs. girls
brain and
lack of basic
knowledge about
researcher-clinician
gap and
treatment of
adolescents
ADHD and
advertising
subliminal
affection
affiliation
aging
Ainslie, George
airplanes, jumping
out of
Alpert, Richard (Ram
Das)
altruism
American dream
Amtrin
anger
anhedonic people
Aniston, Jennifer
anxiety
ADHD and
treatment for
archaeologists
Aristotle
Arnold, Magda
artists
creativity and
feelings and
Aryananda, Lijin
Ashbery, John
Asia, Asians:
attentional style of
relationships in
see also China,
Chinese; Japan, Japanese
attention:
defined
“discovery” of
narrow vs. broad
selective nature of
137
Attention, Memory,
and Executive Function (Lyon and Krasnegor, eds.)
“attentional blink”
experiments
attentional problems
benefits of
improvement of
multitasking and
normal
see also ADHD;
distraction
attentional style
brain and
culture and
intelligence and
nature and
nurture and
personality traits
and
physical and social
environments and
Western vs. East
Asian
Attention Network
Test
Auden, W. H.
Augustine, Saint
awareness
Bach, Johann
Sebastian
ballet
Bardeen, John
Bartók, Béla
bathrooms
Beatles
beauty bias
Beck, Aaron
behavioral change
behavioral economics
behavioral research
behavioral therapy
Be Here Now (Alpert)
Behrmann, Marlene
Bell, Joshua
Beowulf
Bernini, Giovanni
Lorenzo
Bhagavan Das
biased competition
Bible
Big Sort, The
(Bishop and Cushing)
bird-watching
birthdays
Bishop, Bill
BlackBerries
138
blacks
Blake, William
body image
Bonanno, George
bonding
boredom
Born Fighting (Webb)
bottom-up attention
magicians and
negative emotion and
pros and cons of
bounded rationality
Bradbury, Thomas
Bradley, Charles
Brahms, Johannes
brain
ADHD and
amygdala of
cerebellum of
cortex of
creativity and
Davidson’s views on
hemispheric neglect
and
hippocampus of
insula of
left hemisphere of
LSD and
motivation and
multitasking and
neuroplasticity of
Norman’s conceptual
model of
older vs. younger
parietal and frontal
cortexes of
paying attention and
Posner’s model of
attentional system of
prefrontal cortex of
right hemisphere of
time-traveling
capacity of
visual cortex of
Brain Fitness
program
“Break-Up” (radio
show episode)
Brim, Gilbert
Brooks, David
Brooks, Rodney
Brown, Bill
Browning, Elizabeth
Barrett
139
brownout
Brown University
Bryant, Fred
Buckley, William F.,
Jr.
Buddha
Buddhism
bulimics
bull’s-eye mode of
paying attention
Burke, Edmund
Burke, Renny
Burke, Tracey
cafeteria line
workers
California,
well-being in
California Milk
Processor Board
cancer
Capote, Truman
cardiovascular
disease
careers, choice of
cars
Carstensen, Laura
Castellanos, Javier
cell phones
CEOs
change blindness
character moments
Chartrand, Tanya
Chicago, University
of
childbirth
children
ADHD in, see ADHD
attention drugs and
creativity and
depressed
electronic
communications gap of
executive attention
of
neurophysiological
differences in
personality tests
for
productivity and
quality and quantity
of family time of
socialization and
language learning in
China, Chinese
motivation of
Chouinard, Yvon
Clement VIII, Pope
Clinton, Bill
“cocktail party
effect”
140
coffee
Cog (robot)
cognition
consciousness and
see also thought
cognitive appraisal
of emotions
cognitive illusions
cognitive therapy
colleges
admissions process
at
selection of
Collins, Phil
compassion
computers
attentional training
and
concentration
creativity and
interference with
machines and
Ritalin and
time and
top-down attention
and
work and
Concerta
consciousness
cosmic
health and
consumer goods
Consumer Reports
contamination, fear
of
context, Asian focus
on
control
relationships and
conversation
dinnertime
e-mail or voice mail
vs.
cooking
cooperation
coping strategies
Così Fan Tutte
(Mozart)
courage
CrazyBusy
(Hallowell)
creativity
arts and
brain and
damaging myths and
141
education and
in Langer’s study of
behavior
mindfulness and
personal renaissance
and
work and
Csíkszentmihályi,
Mihály
ESM studies and
flow research of
leisure studied by
culture
attentional style
and
family relationships
and
motivation and
Cushing, Robert
Dalai Lama
dance
danger
Darwin, Charles
Davidson, Richard
daydreaming
death
Death of a Salesman
(Miller)
decision-making
behavioral economics
and
bounded rationality
and
about consumer goods
education and
effects of
adaptation and
experiencing vs.
remembering self and
focusing illusion
and
Kahneman’s views on
leisure and
risk and
for short vs. long
term
Delta Wedding
(Welty)
demand-withdraw
pattern
depression
cognitive therapy
for
drugs and
Desimone, Robert
Dickinson, Emily
dictation, taking
dieting, motivation
for
Dijksterhuis, Ap
disgust
distraction
142
attentional problems
and
divorce
dopamine
dreams
drinking
drinking water,
purity of
drug abuse and
addiction
drugs
ADHD and
LSD
du Barry, Madame
Duckworth, Angela
Dugu Choegyal
Rinpoche
Duncan, John
Dutch study
Dylan, Bob
EA Ranch
eating
dinnertime and
forgetting about
motivation and
eating disorders
economic turmoil and
goals
economics,
behavioral
education
ADHD and
attention drugs and
creativity and
daydreaming and
decision-making and
multitasking and
testing and
see also colleges
EEG
(electroencephalography) tests
efficiency
multitasking and
Einstein, Albert
Ekman, Paul
e-mail
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
emotions and
feelings
“cobra”
high-value
motivation and
negative
Norman’s conceptual
model of brain and
143
overeating and
positive
relationship of
thought and
robots and
subliminal
information and
of wellness
see also specific
emotions and feelings
empathy
engagement
Epictetus
epigenetics
epileptics, epilepsy
evaluation, tyranny
of
Evan G.
evolution
Evolving Self, The
(Csíkszentmihályi)
executive network
Experience Sampling
Method (ESM)
experiencing vs.
remembering self
experiential or
respondent attention
extraversion,
extraverts
eye-tracking
experiments
eyewitness testimony
facial expressions
fairness
family
friends vs.
productivity and
relationships and
see also fathers;
mothers; parents
fathers
fear
amygdala and
the sublime and
see also anxiety;
worrying
Federal
Communications Commission
feedback
feelings, see
emotions and feelings
Fellini, Federico
Feynman, Richard
fighter pilots
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
flow
fMRI (functional
magnetic resonance imaging)
ADHD and
creativity and
144
multitasking and
focus
experiments on
emotion’s effect on
feelings as frame
for
life as creation of
loss of
mastery of
shifting of
focusing illusion
(fortune cookie maxim)
forgetting
Forster, E. M.
Fragonard,
Jean-Honoré
Franklin, Ben
Franzen, Jonathan
Fredrickson, Barbara
freedom, free will
Freud, Sigmund
friends
decision-making and
social interactions
with
frustration
full catastrophe of
living
future
cooperation and
decision-making and
focus on
Gable, Shelly
Gandhi, Mohandas K.
(Mahatma)
Gardner, Howard
gastrointestinal
illness
Gehry, Frank
Generation Next
genes, genetics
Germany, motivation
in
Glick, Paul
God
Gore, Al
Gould, Glenn
grandparents
gratitude
Greeks, ancient
Greenberg, Jack
Greenberg, Julia
grief
grit
group effort,
motivation and
145
guilt
Hagwood, Scott
happiness
Csíkszentmihályi’s
views on
decision-making and
meaning and
of paraplegics vs.
lottery winners
well-being vs.
work and
Harvard University
health
anxiety treatment
and
meditation and
mental
heart attacks
Hegel, Georg
hemispheric neglect
high blood pressure
Hobbs, Nicholas
Hochschild, Arlie
honesty
honor culture
Honsaker, Mary Ellen
hope
Horse Frightened by
a Lion (Stubbs)
housework
Howell, Shannon
humanity (love)
hunger
hunting
hypochondria
ideas:
high-value
negative
immune system
implicit information
impulsiveness
incubation period
individualism
infants and babies
information
technology
inner experience
insomnia
instant
gratification
instant messaging
instrumental
attention
146
intelligence
interaction
Internet
introversion
Iraq, IED detection
in
iRobot
Italy
It’s Here Now (Are
You?) (Bhagavan Das)
Jack S.
James, Henry
James, William
on attentional
styles
cognitive therapy
and
on improving
attention
Langer compared with
on length of focus
on rapt attention
on wisdom
Japan, Japanese
Jefferson, Thomas
Jha, Amishi
Johns Hopkins
Hospital
Johnson, Samuel
joy
Jung, Carl
justice
Kabat-Zinn, Jon
Kahneman, Daniel
bounded rationality
and
effects of
adaptation and
fortune cookie maxim
and
Nobel Prize of
personality tests
and
Kaiping Peng
Kant, Immanuel
Kaplan, Rachel
Kaplan, Stephen
Karney, Benjamin
kindness
Kine, Starlee
King, Martin Luther
Kismet (robot)
knowledge, previous,
integration of new
information with
knowledge workers
Kohut, Heinz
147
Langer, Ellen
language
Lazarus, Richard
learning
explicit vs.
implicit
of language
leisure
decision-making and
Leonard, Elmore
leverage points
Levertov, Denise
life, as creation of
what is focused on
see also meaning; quality
of life
Limb, Charles
Listening to Prozac
(Kramer)
Locke, John
longevity
“look for the silver
lining”
loss
risk vs.
lottery winners
love
unconditional
LSD
Lykken, David
McCain, John
McClelland, David
McGinty, Joe
MacLean, Paul
magnetoencephalography (MEG)
Marceau, Marcel
Marcus Aurelius
marriage
attentional
flexibility in
balance of power in
biased rose-colored
vision in
demand-withdraw
pattern in
fundamental
attribution errors and
housework and
self-esteem
differences in
marriage counseling
martial robots
Maslow, Abraham
Maugham, Somerset
meaning
meditation and
148
virtues and
meditation
attentional training
and
health and
mindfulness
Meditations (Marcus
Aurelius)
memory
as biased and
unpredictable
championship
competition and
improvement of
orgasm and
remembering vs.
experiencing self and
Mertz (robot)
Merzenich, Michael
Mesulam, Marsel
meteoric mode of
paying attention
Meyer, David
Michelangelo
Michigan, University
of
Mies van der Rohe,
Ludwig
Milarepa
Miller, Arthur
Milton, John
mind
“mind/brain problem”
mindfulness
meditation and
mindfulness-based stress
reduction program
(MBSR)
Mindless Eating
(Wansink)
mind-wandering
Mischel, Walter
modafinil
monks
Morrison, Toni
mothers
motivation
ADHD and
dieting and
emotions and
grit and
self-esteem and
unconscious
willpower and
movies
see also specific
movies
149
Mozart, Wolfgang
Amadeus
Multidimensional
Personality Questionnaire
(MPQ)
multitasking
Murray, Henry
Murray, Sandra
music, musicians
alertness and
childhood experience
of
creativity and
leisure and
mystery moods
names, forgetting of
narcissism
National Institutes
of Health
nature
motivation and
see also genes,
genetics
negativity bias
theory
Neisser, Ulric
Nelson, Horatio
nervous system
neurons, mirror
neuroscience
Newton, Isaac
New York, N.Y.
Central Park in
choices in
Frick Collection in
Nietzsche, Friedrich
NIMH
Nisbett, Richard
Nixon, Richard
Norman, Don
Nureyev, Rudolf
nurture
brain
neuroplasticity and
motivation and
see also culture
obesity epidemic
object-orientation
Ochs, Elinor
Ohio Longitudinal
Study
old age
Omega Institute for
Holistic Studies
optimism
150
organization
orgasm
pain
chronic
panic disorder
Paradox of Choice,
The (Schwartz)
paranoia
paraplegics
parents:
attention drugs and
of children with
ADHD
depressed
evening homecoming
of
productivity and
quality and quantity
of children’s time with
relationships and
past
Paul, Saint
paying attention
to someone else
to unhappy emotion
use of expression
W. James’s
experiment on
see also meditation
peak experience
“Pearls Before
Breakfast” (Weingarten)
“perceptual load”
theory
perfectionism
personality tests
personality traits,
attentional style and
pessimism
Peterson, Chris
Peterson, Oscar
Pew Foundation
Pew Research Center
Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and
Beautiful (Burke)
philosophy
phototherapy
treatment
Piaget, Jean
Picasso, Pablo
play
pleasure
from cars
poets, poetry
politicians
151
Posner, Gail
Posner, Michael
power, will to
Power of Now, The
(Tolle)
pragmatism
prayer
present
Principles of
Psychology, The (James)
problem solving
productivity
family and
leisure and
mind-wandering and
multitasking and
work and
Progress of Love,
The (Fragonard)
Pronovost, Peter
Prozac
psoriasis patients
psychological
problems, rates of
psychology,
psychologists
amateur
attention and
cognitive
economics and
Freudian
functioning well and
positive
psychopharmacology
industries
quality of life
decision-making and
happiness and
see also well-being
race, academic
achievement and
Ramana Maharshi
Ramanujan, Srinivasa
ranching
Rapgay, Lobsang
“rapt,” use of term
rapture
Rashomon (film)
rationalism, reason
bounded
Ravel, Maurice
Joseph
Rawne, Jean
Razor’s Edge, The
(Maugham)
152
“reactant”
personalities
reading
reality
effect of bad
feelings on
marriage and
meaning of, see
meaning
stories about real life
vs.
subjectivity and
reincarnation
relationships
control in
family
happiness and
loss of
marriage
robots and
relativity theory
religion
remembering
remembering vs.
experiencing self
Richards, Keith
risk,
decision-making and
Ritalin
dopamine and
Rizzolatti, Giacomo
Robertson, Rev. Pat
robots
Rogers, Carl
Rolling Stones
Rome, family life in
Roomba (robot)
Room With a View, A
(Forster)
Rothbart, Mary
Rozin, Paul
Rushdie, Salman
sadness
salesmen
Samoa
satisfaction, work
and
savoring
Schooler, Jonathan
School Sisters of
Notre Dame
Schultheiss, Oliver
Schwartz, Barry
Schwarz, Norbert
science
153
see also
neuroscience
Scitovsky, Tibor
Scorsese, Martin
scuba diving
self, sense of
self-esteem
motivation and
self-regulation
(self-control)
Seligman, Martin
sex
sexual abuse
Shakespeare, William
shame
Sharpton, Rev. Al
Sheena (dog)
Sheeran, Paschal
Shine a Light
(documentary)
sleep
smoking
social behavior,
mirror neurons and
social interactions,
sensitive attention and
sonnets
“SOUL selects her
own Society, THE”
(Dickinson)
Sparky (Langer’s
dog)
spelling bees
Spinoza, Baruch
sports and games
status
decision-making and
status quo, myths
about
Stevenson, Robert
Louis
Stewart, Larry
stimulants
stress
health and
meditation and
mindfulness and
relationships and
therapy and
stroke
Stroop effect
Stubbs, George
subjectivity
reality and
sublime, the
154
subliminal
information
substance abuse,
ADHD and
superficiality
Surveillance Camera
Players
talent
targets
creativity and
meditation and
selection of
taxi drivers
Taymor, Julie
teachers
teenagers, see
adolescents
Tellegen, Auke
temperance
Teresa, Mother
Terman, Lewis
“termites,” use of
term
terror
therapy
cognitive
This American Life
(radio show)
Thoreau, Henry David
thought
reality vs.
relationship of
feeling and
see also cognition
“Three of Us, The”
(McGinty and Greenberg)
Tibet
Tibetan Buddhist
monks
time
choices for use of
see also future;
past; present
togdens
Tolle, Eckhart
Tolstoy, Leo
top-down attention
change blindness and
and jumping out of a
plane
Transcendentalists
transportation,
public
trauma, dealing with
Treisman, Anne
Trope, Yaacov
Tversky, Amos
TV watching
155
UCLA
Center on Everyday
Life of Families of
Ungerleider, Leslie
USA Memory
Championship
vacation, daily
van Gogh, Vincent
virtues
vision
“visual search”
experiment
voice mail
waking up
walkers
Wansink, Brian
War and Peace
(Tolstoy)
Washington, George
Washington Post
weapons effect
Webb, Jim
Webb, Thomas
Weil, Simone
Weingarten, Gene
well-being
focusing illusion
and
happiness vs.
mind-wandering and
of older vs. younger
people
virtues and
see also health;
quality of life
Welty, Eudora
Whitman, Walt
willpower
“Will You Be There
for Me When Things Go Right?” study
Winnie (author’s
mother)
wisdom
Wood, Joanne
Woods, Tiger
Woolf, Virginia
work
anxiety and
cognitive therapy
and
creativity and
flow and
happiness and
play or game vs.
productivity and
workaholics
156
World War II
worrying
writers
Wundt, Wilhelm
Yantis, Steve
Yeager, Chuck
yoga
Zorba the Greek
157
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