Making Sense - Sam Harris - #380 — The Roots of Attention

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:44.300 Today I'm speaking with Amishi Jha. Amishi is a professor of psychology at the University of

00:00:49.920 Miami, and she serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness

00:00:54.840 Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. She received her PhD from

00:01:01.200 the University of California, Davis, and did postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and

00:01:06.300 Analysis Center at Duke University. Amishi's work has been featured at NATO and the World Economic Forum

00:01:13.380 and the Pentagon. She's been covered in the New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, Forbes, etc.

00:01:20.640 And her TED Talk, titled How to Tame Your Wandering Mind, has been viewed over 5 million times,

00:01:27.960 and she's the author of the book Peak Mind. We focus mostly on attention and the brain. We discuss

00:01:35.200 how attention is studied, the failure of brain training games, the relationship between attention

00:01:41.020 and awareness, mindfulness as an intrinsic mental capacity, the neurological implications of

00:01:47.240 different types of training and meditation, the neural correlates of attention and distraction,

00:01:52.500 the prospects of self-transcendence, the link between thought and emotion, the difference between

00:01:58.440 dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness, how we might study non-dual awareness in the lab,

00:02:04.820 the influence of smartphones, the value of mind-wandering, and other topics. And I bring you Amishi Jha.

00:02:12.760 I am here with Amishi Jha. Amishi, thanks for joining me.

00:02:22.440 Very happy to be here, Sam.

00:02:24.000 So tell our audience what you have focused on scientifically and academically up to now.

00:02:32.280 Sure. So I am a, like you, a neuroscientist. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. And the work I do in my lab

00:02:39.900 is focused on understanding how the brain's attention system functions, what makes it fail

00:02:46.320 and makes it vulnerable. And as it relates to mental training and mindfulness, what we can do

00:02:52.600 to strengthen it. So a lot of our effort has been kind of shifting over the years from more of the

00:02:58.520 basic mechanisms of how attention operates to understanding the factors that we must consider

00:03:07.320 in trying to strengthen it and protect it, especially for groups for whom attention can

00:03:13.240 be a matter of life and death. I mean, in some sense, that's all of us. But particular professions

00:03:18.140 like emergency services folks, military service members, medical and nursing professionals,

00:03:24.800 truly their lapses could mean grave consequences for others.

00:03:28.740 Yeah. Yeah. So what tools do you use to study attention at the level of the brain?

00:03:33.580 Yeah. So we use functional MRI and EEG, as well as with most of our work sort of out in the field,

00:03:40.960 so to speak, we're doing behavioral measures with various cognitive tasks, as well as a whole battery

00:03:46.000 of sort of subjective or self-report metrics.

00:03:48.940 Let's bring in your interest in mindfulness and meditation. How did you come by that? And what has

00:03:55.200 been your level of exploration there personally? And what teachers or traditions have been important

00:04:02.660 to you? Right. So the answer is sort of in two parts, the personal journey and the professional

00:04:08.220 or actually research-related journey. And of course, they intersect at multiple points. As I mentioned,

00:04:13.260 you know, most of my training as a cognitive neuroscientist was really in the basic mechanism.

00:04:18.420 So just figure out, which is not a simple thing, but figure out how it works. And I started getting a

00:04:24.500 little bit antsy around this because what we were finding repeatedly that my advisors had already known

00:04:29.400 was that this system of the brain is extremely powerful. So much so that I'll refer to it as

00:04:35.480 the brain's boss, because we know that wherever it is that we devote our attention will modify

00:04:42.800 almost the entirety of the computational functioning of the brain. It can bias it in very,

00:04:47.040 very profound ways. So if it is this boss, I started getting excited in my early years as an assistant

00:04:52.400 professor, that was at the University of Pennsylvania, on what we could do to perturb attention.

00:04:56.540 And that meant doing all kinds of fun things in the lab, like bringing in undergrads and having

00:05:01.120 them do intentionally demanding tasks and then sort of messing with them and in kind and IRB approved

00:05:05.940 ways. So either negative mood inductions or psychosocial threat, you know, telling them that

00:05:12.240 they're not doing as well as other folks, stressing them out in various ways. And repeatedly and reliably,

00:05:17.300 we saw that their attention failed them. So we started getting a picture of all the ways in which

00:05:21.800 you could perturb attention. And that, of course, led to devastating consequences for the normal ways

00:05:27.600 in which attention could bias information processing. And that's what, from the laboratory

00:05:32.020 perspective, got me extremely curious, and I would say desperate to find some way in which we might

00:05:38.640 train attention. So this was the early 2000s. And at that point, sort of two things were happening.

00:05:44.460 In the cognitive neuroscience literature, there was a proliferation of studies on brain training

00:05:49.340 approaches, right? So these simple brain, simple behavioral tasks that people play as games,

00:05:55.460 and seeing if we can actually strengthen functioning. And even at that point, now it's sort of been very

00:06:01.180 much clarified that this is a problematic approach because you get better at the game, but not much

00:06:05.400 else. There's many, I think, very well-intentioned enterprises that have, and then many researchers that

00:06:11.240 have tried to do this in their laboratories. But the problem was you'd get better and better at the

00:06:15.240 game. But then when you shifted even the most subtle aspects of the perceptual input or the task

00:06:21.300 demands, you were kind of back to square one. So we weren't seeing that there's some core

00:06:26.740 strengthening of attention as a general resource. And so we tried other things like light and sound

00:06:32.340 or technology facilitated things. And now people have gotten much more sophisticated with direct

00:06:37.180 current stimulation, et cetera. Nothing was really working. I was not finding that anything was able to,

00:06:42.780 in a sustained way, benefit attentional functioning. So that's sort of happening in my lab, in my pursuit

00:06:49.540 of trying to understand how to strengthen attention in the face of these sort of potent kryptonite

00:06:53.820 factors that disable it. In my personal life as a young assistant professor who had just had her first

00:06:59.380 kid, I was battling a lot of what can happen with a multitude of demands and trying to be the best I

00:07:07.500 could be in all the roles that I played in my life. And I found that I just could not keep hold of my own

00:07:14.660 attention. And it was this very sort of ironic realization. It's like, this is all I study. This is what I do in

00:07:21.580 the lab. Yet I am just all over the place. I'm not aware of what's happening. And it got to the point,

00:07:28.980 especially as it related to my family, that I felt like it was unacceptable. And there was one moment that I

00:07:34.440 remember trying to read my then, I don't know, toddler, a book. And at some point in the middle

00:07:39.720 of, there's a book I read, and you have children, right? I mean, just read the same book over and

00:07:46.080 over and over again, to the point where I could tell you the words on the next page. But at some

00:07:50.220 point he is, so we've read this book multiple times. It's a bedtime story. And at some point

00:07:54.360 in the middle of the story one night, he sort of stops me and he asks me something about what's on

00:07:59.740 the page. And I had absolutely no idea. It's like, I was completely going through the motions.

00:08:05.800 And that made me very, very, I don't know. I felt very tender about it. Like this is him as a

00:08:11.500 toddler. I mean, if I'm starting to miss things now, what about when he really, really needs me?

00:08:15.800 And it was a wake up call in my life of like, I got to figure out how to pay better attention.

00:08:19.840 And so I went sort of on a personal hunt, trying to see if there's anything in the literature and the

00:08:23.720 scientific literature of like, okay, look, maybe there's something I missed, right? These brain

00:08:27.300 training games we know aren't really working or technology solutions aren't working. There's not

00:08:31.220 really a lot of evidence that there's anything. And through a series of sort of fortuitous events,

00:08:37.240 one having to do with Richie Davidson visiting Penn at that same period of time in the spring of the

00:08:41.880 semester, I was having all these things. And he gave a talk sort of in his standard affective

00:08:46.280 neuroscience talk, you know, because this was so early on in the whole mindfulness, I don't know,

00:08:51.500 explosion of literature. He didn't even talk about or mention anything about the meditation work he was

00:08:56.400 doing. But at the end of his talk, he showed this kind of now very often seen image, but at that

00:09:02.920 point, it was pretty novel. A brain that had been induced to be in a negative state and showing this

00:09:07.820 sort of functional MRI brain activation profile. And right next to it, one that was induced to be

00:09:13.500 in a positive state. And, you know, he did this basically by having people remember autobiographical

00:09:17.520 memories that were either positive or negative. And what was his point was essentially, look how distinct

00:09:22.160 these are, that we can put the brain in these affective states and they're different from each

00:09:26.180 other. But given what was going on in my life, at the end of the talk, I raised my hand and I basically

00:09:30.240 was like, how do you get that brain pointed to the negative one to look like that brain,

00:09:35.000 the positive one? And he almost a little bit in a flippant way said meditation. And that was sort of

00:09:42.700 the close of the session. And, you know, and I was sort of like, what? Never, I'd never,

00:09:47.140 ever heard anybody use that term in a context like that. And what's your background, Amishi?

00:09:54.780 I was just going to tell you. So my background is as an Indian woman, you know, of course I'd heard

00:09:58.960 about meditation. I mean, it was like my earliest memories are my parents meditating. So this is

00:10:04.980 something I knew very much as part of the cultural landscape of my personal life. But frankly, for a lot

00:10:10.560 of reasons, which we can choose to go into for one, I had completely rejected it to shorthand it.

00:10:15.500 Essentially, I was not interested in anything at that point that I thought was not serious,

00:10:20.360 like a serious endeavor that could have some basis in science. But the second part was that the

00:10:24.980 culture itself, I felt had a lot of sexism and other things that I didn't feel were welcoming to

00:10:29.960 me and who I was. And so I just kind of rejected the whole thing outright. So in some sense, like I had

00:10:35.640 already had like a thing against meditation from my personal background. And then here is this affective

00:10:40.740 neuroscientist who I admire and, you know, I really respect. And he's saying this term and I couldn't

00:10:46.000 kind of square the two. So at some point later on in his visit, we had a chance to sit down and talk

00:10:51.280 about what he'd been up to. And that opened me up a bit. Like, okay, given what he's starting to find

00:10:55.980 with the, you know, adept monastics regarding some of the structural and functional changes they were

00:11:00.360 seeing, I opened up my curiosity and took a walk down to the Penn bookstore and started kind of

00:11:06.120 browsing through the section on meditation. And I got very, very fortunate that the book I ended up

00:11:10.800 picking was Jack Kornfield's Meditation for Beginners. And committed to kind of checking it out and

00:11:17.180 reading it and started doing some of the practices that came at that point with the CD, which my

00:11:21.120 children don't even know what that is. But, you know, it really started making a difference. And it was a

00:11:27.180 real aha moment where I realized that, oh, my goodness, the thing that I've been doing in these

00:11:32.360 practices quietly by myself every day, which is essentially a foundational, one of the things

00:11:37.900 was essentially a mindfulness of the breath practice of focus your attention on breath related

00:11:42.520 sensations, notice when the mind wanders, and when you do return it back, that this activity was very

00:11:49.840 much tied to what I was desperately looking for within my lab, an approach that may help to protect

00:11:56.180 and strengthen attention. So after maybe six months, I said, that's it, I'm going to try to figure out

00:12:00.940 what's going on here and bring these tools that I'm personally practicing, put them to a strong

00:12:05.800 test, and wrote my first NIH grant on exploring the effect of mindfulness meditation on attention.

00:12:13.660 And then I've sort of haven't stopped since. So that sort of brings together the journey of the

00:12:18.220 personal and the professional.

00:12:19.700 Nice, nice. And so when did you first start publishing on mindfulness and attention?

00:12:25.720 2007.

00:12:26.200 So your interest in all of this, it's perhaps surprising to realize that all of this precedes

00:12:34.500 what the smartphone has done to everybody's life, right? I mean, it's amazing. When we think about

00:12:39.680 a crisis of attention now and a war being fought for our attention, I think the first thing people

00:12:47.560 think of now, I mean, really the front lines of this battle is the computer they're carrying around

00:12:52.800 in their pockets. But obviously this has been a problem for thousands of years and everything

00:12:57.800 the Buddha recommended was appropriate to a scattered human mind 2,500 years ago. But let's define a few

00:13:04.300 terms. How do you define attention? How would you differentiate it from mindfulness? And how do you

00:13:12.220 think about these, both of those things in relation to consciousness or awareness, which I use as

00:13:19.400 synonyms?

00:13:20.280 All three?

00:13:21.220 Yeah. So you go for attention, mindfulness, and just the basic faculty of consciousness

00:13:27.480 slash awareness slash sentience.

00:13:30.060 Yeah. Well, I definitely want to dig in on how that relates to what I'll tell you in my view of

00:13:36.120 attention. So the main thing about attention is that it really, if we think about it, sort of

00:13:41.140 evolutionary purpose, right? Or how it became something that we all possess in our own minds,

00:13:46.520 to solve a big computational problem that the brain suffered from, that there was just far more

00:13:50.980 information in the environment than could be fully processed in any one moment. So the notion of

00:13:55.580 selecting a subset of what one is experiencing for full interrogation using the full computational

00:14:01.320 power of the brain, whether it's in much less sophisticated organisms than the human brain,

00:14:07.000 makes sense to me. And from the kind of standard cognitive neuroscience perspective, attention and

00:14:13.580 its selection ability isn't one thing, but at least three things. And we could probably laundry list

00:14:18.980 even more. But the three ways in which we pay attention really guide and connect to your second

00:14:24.720 part of your question regarding mindfulness. So the first system of attention is really regarding sort

00:14:29.620 of selective focus or selection, content-based privileging of some information at the exclusion

00:14:36.640 of other information. And that prioritizing and privileging in the brain, we know, shows up as biased

00:14:43.140 information processing in favor of what we pay attention to. So this would be something like the brain's

00:14:47.940 orienting system, as well as aspects of what executive functioning does. But the core thing here is

00:14:53.980 some things matter and are advantaged and other things are not. So I refer to this in this kind of metaphor

00:14:59.960 of a flashlight. So if you're in a darkened room, this aspect of attention would be like having a

00:15:05.080 flashlight privilege wherever it is that you're directing it toward. And the holding of the

00:15:09.640 flashlight is its sort of endogenous or control capability that you can move around and guide what

00:15:15.120 you need to do on a sort of piece-by-piece basis to put together, you know, making your way out of

00:15:19.560 the room if you're in a darkened room. So the features of this kind of attention are really narrow,

00:15:24.700 constrained, high signal-to-noise ratio. But if we move away from that system and kind of talk

00:15:29.960 about the next aspect of attention, it's almost the exact opposite. And it might even tie into what

00:15:34.680 you were describing as awareness, which is formerly the brain's alerting system. So this we could

00:15:40.940 think of as privileging, not the content like the flashlight, but the moment. Because really,

00:15:46.400 when you think about being alert, it's about what is happening, the full spectrum of what is

00:15:49.640 happening right now. You can't save up being alert for later. Low signal-to-noise ratio, broad,

00:15:54.720 receptive, and sometimes I'll refer to this as sort of a floodlight. Just everything that is

00:15:58.320 happening without a selectivity is illuminated in this moment for your full conscious access.

00:16:04.620 So narrow, directed, broad, and receptive. And then the third aspect of attention,

00:16:09.340 which of course, all of these interact with each other in some way and are supported by

00:16:12.540 distinct brain systems. The third aspect is really regarding goal-related selection. So it's not based

00:16:18.020 on the particular content or the moment, like the first two, but what are my goals in this moment?

00:16:22.780 What do I want to be doing? And then ensuring that our actions align with our goals. So something

00:16:29.160 called executive functioning and this system's job, or you might call it attentional control,

00:16:33.840 this system's job is to ensure that goals and actions are aligned and to course correct

00:16:38.720 when they're not. And I like the metaphor here of a juggler. So you're kind of keeping all the

00:16:43.560 balls in the air. You're not trying to do every single individual task, but you're overseeing and

00:16:47.760 coordinating. So all three of these in my mind very much relate to mindfulness and mindfulness

00:16:54.620 practice, which I'm happy to talk about next, but just want to pause. Is there anything else you

00:16:58.860 wanted to ask me about? Yeah.

00:16:59.960 So just to frame that just slightly differently, but give it an experiential sense for people.

00:17:06.520 So people are obviously listening to us now and trying to pay attention to the thread of this

00:17:12.200 conversation, but they might be doing other things simultaneously. They might be taking a walk or

00:17:17.160 driving and paying attention to other things. And so they're this kind of spotlight function of

00:17:22.040 awareness that can select a subset of experience. However, momentarily is constantly doing that,

00:17:31.060 right? So you're, they get distracted from the flow of this conversation by something in the

00:17:36.220 environment. They might suddenly notice that might quote, demand their attention. And all of those,

00:17:41.740 all of that competition is happening in the context of this wider field of awareness that you just

00:17:49.120 described as a kind of floodlight. It's the space of, the wider space of experience from which things

00:17:56.400 can get promoted to focus where, where, you know, the background can suddenly become foreground.

00:18:01.620 So you can take this in one sensory channel, right? So if you're looking in your visual field,

00:18:07.220 you can focus on a single object, you know, and you can attempt to focus on that thing to the

00:18:13.780 exclusion of everything else. And yet you, you still notice that you see more than that object.

00:18:19.340 There's stuff in your peripheral field that might suddenly capture your attention. You know,

00:18:24.500 suddenly, if someone suddenly just steps into the, into the room, you are going to, you're going to

00:18:29.820 notice and turn your head and engage that person, right? So there's this...

00:18:34.440 By the way, this... I'm sorry, finish your thought.

00:18:36.240 Yeah. So, so, so there's this kind of foreground background dynamic we can see in what we notice

00:18:42.980 in awareness and it can be ever-changing. And so, you know, that, that really grabs two of the

00:18:50.560 concepts I mentioned at the outset, which is attention, this narrow focus and awareness or,

00:18:56.120 or consciousness, which admits of a much wider field of contents. And now we're bringing in

00:19:01.500 mindfulness to the picture, which is this export from Buddhism explicitly, although it has analogs

00:19:08.420 and other traditions, which is a way of training the mind to pay attention in a very specific way.

00:19:16.540 Yeah. So no, I mean, she bring in mindfulness. How do you, how do you think about it?

00:19:20.300 Yeah. So, I mean, I think that just to go back to what you said a second ago, right? The broader

00:19:24.160 field of the unfolding of what occurs in our, in our experience, some of which we have conscious

00:19:31.260 access to and the spotlighting of information. So I would say in some sense, if the spotlighting

00:19:37.820 can happen in all three ways that I described, the spotlight could literally be like a spotlight

00:19:43.000 where you're highlighting some part of space and not other part of space, or it can be spotlighting

00:19:47.180 in quotes of this moment relative to other things that are happening in your past or something about

00:19:51.840 the future, which would be more like alerting, or the spotlighting can be relative to the goals I'm

00:19:57.040 holding right now. And that can be both in terms of how we relate to the external environment,

00:20:02.160 like we were talking about the flashlight being pointed toward a part of space, as well as the

00:20:06.400 internal environment. And part of the reason I really like that flashlight approach is it's like,

00:20:12.440 and I will get to mindfulness in a second. I just did want to kind of mention this because it relates to

00:20:16.800 the full scope of what mindfulness I think will help with. The flashlight metaphor is useful because

00:20:21.820 we can hold a flashlight. We have that agency and control, but if we are walking down a darkened

00:20:27.440 path and we're pointing the flashlight toward where we want to walk it, it's goal-directed

00:20:31.340 attention, right? So sort of executive control and this kind of capacity to select are working

00:20:36.000 together. If you hear a rustling, what's going to happen? You're going to get captured by it.

00:20:39.740 The flashlight, even without much preparation, is going to be pointing to something else, probably

00:20:43.680 where you thought you heard the noise come from. So not only is it endogenous or controlled,

00:20:48.340 but it can be exogenous and captured by things that are happening in our environment. And this

00:20:53.480 flashlight can be pointed to internal mental content and can also be captured by internal

00:20:58.240 mental content. So if I ask you to remember, you know, what you had for dinner last night,

00:21:02.580 in some sense, what you're doing is recalling the episode of last night's events, pointing the

00:21:07.480 flashlight to the granular time period of dinner, maybe even visualizing what you had and pulling

00:21:12.540 that out so you have more access to that information. Or it could be captured by like a thought,

00:21:17.920 like, oh shoot, did I leave my, you know, faucet running or whatever it might be.

00:21:22.880 So I think that the internal external domain, as well as this multiplicity of how we spotlight

00:21:27.600 information is important to think about. Now, the excitement for me regarding mindfulness is that

00:21:32.980 it seemed to cover a lot of this terrain. And the way that I would describe mindfulness sort of most

00:21:37.320 broadly is that it's a mental mode, a way of making the mind. It's an intrinsic capacity. You don't

00:21:43.180 get mindful only by practicing mindfulness meditation. You hold this in what you possess,

00:21:47.700 in your mind. And that mental mode is characterized by this sort of purposeful attention to our

00:21:52.960 present moment experience with these qualities of non-elaboration and non-reactivity. So we're

00:21:59.660 doing our best when we are in a mindful mode of getting the raw data, not an editorialized version,

00:22:07.500 but the raw data of our present moment experience that has both to do with what's happening sort of

00:22:12.240 externally and internally.

00:22:13.980 Yeah. So again, just to take another pass over that same ground with slightly different words,

00:22:19.940 what mindfulness is, is, as you say, it's not some artifice that you're adding to your experience.

00:22:27.100 You're invoking a capacity of the mind that you already have. It is, in fact, attention. It is noticing

00:22:33.420 what you notice in each moment, but it is doing it in a non-discursive and, one could argue, ultimately

00:22:41.420 non-conceptual way, which is that you're, you know, insofar as is possible to make contact with the raw

00:22:47.780 data of experience in all your sensory channels and in your mind. It is attempting to do that,

00:22:54.880 and it's also attempting to do it in a way that is not reactive to what is pleasant and unpleasant,

00:23:01.340 because our habitual mode is to notice that much of our experience is valenced and sometimes quite

00:23:08.500 strongly valenced positively or negatively. So things taste really good or they taste really bad,

00:23:13.720 they feel really good or they feel really bad. We like the way certain, you know, ideas and thoughts

00:23:18.660 feel, you know, their implications, and we have strong emotional reactions to them. And all of that reactivity

00:23:27.580 is what mindfulness as a practice is designed to bypass and ultimately quiet, right? I mean, the goal of

00:23:36.920 mindfulness is not merely to be mindful from the point of view of Buddhist practice. It's to achieve a kind of

00:23:45.080 equanimity in the mind where the mind is no longer reacting to the pleasant and unpleasant in the

00:23:51.000 usual ways, and where a kind of native tranquility and well-being can be found in the present moment

00:24:00.480 really, you know, orthogonal to anything that's happening, right? So your happiness, if the practice

00:24:07.220 succeeds, your sense of well-being and fulfillment and happiness is no longer contingent upon

00:24:14.000 the changing winds of experience, right? It's not, your happiness is no longer predicated on,

00:24:20.020 can I secure this next thing that I just thought to desire? Rather, you're noticing something about

00:24:26.360 the native capacity, the mind, to be open and relaxed. And, you know, we can talk about this, but

00:24:32.860 even positively valenced in a way that is not reaching forward into experience in a grasping,

00:24:38.880 anticipatory, you know, greedy way, but is actually just positively valenced based on the fact that

00:24:46.540 it's no longer contracting, it's no longer reacting, it's no longer at war with experience inside or

00:24:54.740 outside, but it's just open. And so mindfulness as a practice is a way of invoking that kind of

00:25:02.780 tension and training it to the point where it becomes a kind of default. You know, that takes

00:25:10.240 some practice, but that's the goal of the practice. Absolutely. And I love the way you put it

00:25:16.860 regarding the sort of naturally emerging equanimity and positive-leaning mind, right? So you're not

00:25:22.720 contriving anything. Because again, when you're contriving, you're elaborating or you're conceptually

00:25:26.920 constraining in some rigid way. And the thing that becomes interesting from the brain training

00:25:33.860 perspective is, well, what do you do to get there? So if we all have this mode, why do we need to

00:25:38.200 bother practicing mindfulness and mindfulness exercises or mindfulness practices? And what are

00:25:43.700 the factors that deter us from holding that mental mode more often? And this gets into what I would

00:25:50.040 sometimes refer to as sort of the dark matter of cognition, which are also known as distractibility

00:25:54.800 or mind-wandering, having off-task thoughts during an ongoing task or activity. And so one of the ways

00:26:01.060 that I like to describe mindfulness is using this sort of metaphor of an MP3 player and thinking about

00:26:08.000 our capacity, our intrinsic capacity for mental time travel. There's a lot of chatter happening and

00:26:13.980 we're filled with that chatter. And oftentimes that chatter takes us to the past so that we can reflect on

00:26:19.740 it or it takes us to the future so we can plan for it. But oftentimes, especially for the kinds of

00:26:24.940 populations that my lab works with, under high stress circumstances, especially when those periods

00:26:29.860 are protracted, you're rewinding and fast forwarding in very unproductive ways. So that now when you're

00:26:36.200 rewinding, the chatter may be a lot of rumination and you're kind of that flashlight is yanked to the past

00:26:41.440 and almost stuck there, or you are forecasting a doom-filled, catastrophic scenario in the future,

00:26:48.540 which you just made up in your mind. And in some sense, this is what we're kind of jockeying between,

00:26:54.680 rumination and catastrophizing. And so when we think about what mindfulness is, it's keeping the

00:26:59.900 button on play so that you are actually experiencing the moment-to-moment unfolding of what is transpiring

00:27:06.580 of your life, frankly. And so this also, I think, makes it very kind of accessible. Like, okay, I get that.

00:27:12.660 I get that there's a need for me to do something because I can imagine the tendency of my mind,

00:27:18.560 and we know what the data says about 50% of our waking moments, we're not here. We're in the past

00:27:23.920 or the future, you know, and kind of rapidly going back and forth between those. So it will take some

00:27:28.740 kind of exercise if I want more moments where I spontaneously end up able to be in the mindful mode

00:27:35.220 in the present moment with that button on play.

00:27:38.000 Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing I like about that metaphor is that it cuts through this association,

00:27:43.280 which can even get ramified by adopting the practice of mindfulness, that mindfulness is this

00:27:49.840 thing you're adding to your experience strategically so as to change it, right? So before you learn how to

00:27:56.760 practice mindfulness, you hear about it as a practice, and then you get some instruction. And in the

00:28:01.740 beginning, that might be to focus on the breath, and, you know, gradually you begin to include

00:28:07.620 everything in your experience, but you're still focusing strategically on experience, and it can

00:28:13.640 seem like you're doing something. Whereas in reality, when the practice is actually working,

00:28:20.680 what you're doing is less of something. You're less distracted, right? So you're on play

00:28:26.300 more and more. And the truth is, there really is only play, right? I mean, your life is always on

00:28:33.340 play, and what you're calling rewind and fast forward are really just the intrusions of thoughts

00:28:40.240 about the past and the future. And you're not noticing thoughts as thoughts because you're

00:28:45.560 distracted by them and identified with them. And mindfulness is just this ultimate stepping back

00:28:52.400 into a recognition that you are simply this condition in which everything is appearing,

00:28:58.620 thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, present percepts and sensations. And there's simply

00:29:05.400 this condition of appearance, and you can either recognize it clearly, or you can be confused. You can

00:29:12.380 be in a kind of waking dream where you are unaware of your actual condition, right? I mean, there is

00:29:19.420 something, perhaps we can bring in this other feature here, which we have begun to talk about,

00:29:25.080 but not named, which is this, what is the nature of our distraction? I mean, there's this capacity we

00:29:30.780 have to be thinking without clearly knowing that thoughts are arising. And what's more, we not only

00:29:39.140 don't recognize the presence of thought clearly, we feel in some way identical to our thoughts. We feel

00:29:47.180 that we, the arising of this next thought seems to be the, our true condition as subjects in the middle

00:29:57.660 of our experience. It seems to create a middle of experience, right? We don't feel identical to the

00:30:02.600 totality of our experience. We feel like we are having an experience and we're appropriating it

00:30:07.680 from one side or from some, you know, some position in the head as a subject. And this feeling of

00:30:14.320 subjectivity, this feeling of self, the feeling that there's this I in the middle of things

00:30:18.480 is what it feels like to be identified with thought. It's what it feels like to be thinking

00:30:24.920 without clearly knowing the status of each arising thought as an appearance in consciousness.

00:30:31.400 Absolutely. And that's where we can talk about it as cognitive fusion. I mean, there's many words to

00:30:35.900 describe what that is and sort of what the antidote to that might be in terms of defusion or

00:30:41.080 de-centering. But if I could just take a moment to talk about even the most basic or let's say

00:30:47.120 foundational practice of mindfulness, because I mean, I see where, where you're going and, you know,

00:30:51.120 there's this sort of three-dimensional model that my colleagues, Antoine Lutz and John Dunn and

00:30:57.100 Cliff Saren and I developed that tries to capture all three of these regarding this object orientation,

00:31:03.360 like we've been talking about. There is something I'm focusing on.

00:31:06.080 I've met each of those guys, but I haven't seen them in quite some time. So nice to hear their

00:31:11.240 names. I mean, we can talk about sort of the multidimensionality. We call it the matrix of

00:31:15.300 mindfulness. But if we just go back to sort of the foundational practice that, you know, everybody

00:31:19.560 listening to us can anchor around. So if it's something like mindfulness of the breath and the

00:31:24.400 instruction, again, is focused on breath-related sensations, where you're saying as sensory as

00:31:28.860 possible with regard to those. So in some sense, the flashlight is focused on an anchoring object,

00:31:34.520 which is the unfolding of the breath without manipulating it in any way. And the second part

00:31:38.740 of the instruction being, notice when your mind has wandered away. So in some sense, the floodlight

00:31:44.000 is on. What is happening in my unfolding experience right now? And then the third, which is redirect

00:31:49.460 back, which is essentially, am I on my goal-related task? And for the formal period of time, I'm doing

00:31:54.700 this mindfulness of breath practice. My attention should be on breath-related sensations. So even if you

00:32:00.200 shorthand this, and a lot of our military colleagues will call this our mental push-up. So

00:32:03.960 focus, notice, redirect, and repeat as what might be going on in an unfolding of a couple, 20-minute,

00:32:11.200 10-minute, 12-minute mindfulness practice. The qualities that you're talking about become engaged

00:32:16.560 and exercised pretty quickly. And the idea is that the repeated engagement in those aspects are what

00:32:22.560 gets strengthened and allow us to then carry them around, like you said, by default.

00:32:27.000 So being able to have a target for where you should be placing your mind in the backdrop allows you to

00:32:34.140 see when you're off that target. And part of that requires kind of tuning in to what is the unfolding

00:32:39.840 of my present moment experience. I'm watching it. And that watching requires a distancing between my

00:32:46.380 immersion in the experience, you know, essentially making me the object of my experience instead of

00:32:52.360 the subject of my experience, which is where we can start talking about de-centering, where I'm taking

00:32:58.500 a more distanced perspective. And that distancing also allows me to now maybe even see more clearly

00:33:03.960 what's going on, that these thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, all this stuff arising,

00:33:09.120 they're simply mental phenomenon that are coming into kind of full fruition in my conscious experience

00:33:14.760 now and then potentially fading away. So it was this aspect that got me excited, like,

00:33:19.800 oh my goodness, I see how each of the kind of fundamental systems of attention is getting

00:33:24.080 engaged over and over again. And through their engagement, we're cultivating an even sort of

00:33:29.300 more exciting capacity, which is to watch the mind at some distance to get clearer data on what is going

00:33:36.440 on. I want to talk about the brain basis of attention and mindfulness and distraction insofar as we

00:33:43.860 know it at this point. But do you think it matters which bases and experience one uses to train

00:33:52.000 mindfulness? I mean, do you think that there's any difference between being mindful of the breath,

00:33:57.680 say, or being mindful of sounds or sights, right? Because it's very, in the beginning, people pick

00:34:04.540 these arbitrary objects and preferentially train attention on them. So for a very long time, you can

00:34:11.160 be doing what's called, you know, mindfulness of the body, because the Buddha described four

00:34:16.220 foundations of mindfulness. And it's often taught, or seemingly taught, it's implied at least, that any

00:34:23.420 foundation is as good as any other foundation for achieving the results you want. And I've always

00:34:30.840 wondered, I mean, in the limit, perhaps that's true, but I've always wondered if, you know, along the way,

00:34:39.040 there are significant differences in spending that much time focused in precisely that way on a subset

00:34:48.000 of experience, right? So if you're spending all your time focusing on the rising and falling of the

00:34:53.240 abdomen, right, which is one way that people focus on the breath, as opposed to all your time listening

00:34:59.860 to sounds in your environment. And in each of these techniques, you're doing it dispassionately,

00:35:05.880 you're letting go of thoughts, you're just connected with the raw date of experience, and

00:35:10.280 you're not clinging to the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away. But it does seem to me that

00:35:15.980 neurologically, you're still doing something fairly distinct between those two types of training. And

00:35:22.820 if you're spending 10,000 hours doing one versus the other, you might achieve a different result in

00:35:28.660 some ways.

00:35:30.120 Yeah, absolutely. So I think the answer is yes and no. So in some sense, if you think about the way that

00:35:35.260 attention is a what we call domain general capacity exists, it's very nature is supposed to be that you

00:35:41.120 can use it for a variety of different content domains. And those could be different sensory

00:35:45.140 domains like vision or, you know, auditory functioning, or body sensations, or even concepts.

00:35:53.000 But what it's doing is going to be the same on it, which is amplifying certain aspects,

00:35:57.200 and essentially, improving the efficiency which which with that amplification can happen. So

00:36:03.160 if you spend 10,000 hours focusing on a particular visual image, it's very likely with the qualities

00:36:10.200 that you described of sort of my kind of core mindfulness quality of this present centered

00:36:14.640 non judgmental, non reactive orientation or mode, then the visuals that if we do this with a visual

00:36:20.800 image, it's very likely that not only with frontal lobe function improve meaning the brain network

00:36:26.840 involved in kind of control processes of attention, but its connection to visual cortex would be

00:36:33.160 strengthened. Versus I'm going to do some kind of sound practice, probably it'd be to temporal or

00:36:39.200 auditory cortex. Or if I'm doing some kind of repetition of a phrase, I'm going to have, you know,

00:36:44.140 different language areas that could be the efficiency of that relationship would improve,

00:36:48.500 but the core attentional functioning probably would be the same. And what it tends to look like

00:36:52.740 is that that is the case, that when you compare different traditions and different functions,

00:36:57.900 if the recipient of that mindful orientation differs, the system with which frontal lobe

00:37:04.180 attention systems will connect will be different. But the frontal lobe, I don't want to call it

00:37:09.180 frontal lobe, but the control circuitry will be the same. At least that's the picture that's

00:37:13.580 emerging. And in some sense, if you want to maximize the flexibility and generalizability

00:37:18.740 of the strengthening of attention, it might even be a good idea to vary what the recipient is,

00:37:24.140 whether it is a sound or a body sensation or something else. Because the target or anchor may

00:37:30.740 not really be the thing that you care about most, but really cultivating the control of your relationship

00:37:37.740 to it that you're looking at. Yeah. And I've often worried that a narrow focus, I mean, let's say that

00:37:44.920 you use entero reception as your foundation, which is effectively what one is doing if one is focusing

00:37:52.340 on the rising and falling of the abdomen, that gets pretty quickly to just a sense of the internal

00:37:58.740 body states as one's primary focus. How much one wants to be, you know, growing one's connections

00:38:05.860 to insular cortex, you know, is given all that that does. I mean, the insula is doing many essential

00:38:13.700 things, but it's also the basis for feelings of disgust and sensitivity to a wide variety of internal

00:38:21.560 states, which if you turn up the volume on all of that, I can imagine, and, you know, having done a

00:38:27.840 fair amount of practice of that sort, I, you know, I felt, I wasn't thinking about it in neuroanatomical

00:38:32.740 terms at the time, but I can imagine that it can make you sensitive to things that, where increasing

00:38:39.900 sensitivity in that channel isn't actually making you more functional, more functional, much less wise,

00:38:47.300 right? Like, to be acutely conscious of your, you know, the state of your gut does not equip you to

00:38:55.320 function happily in most experiences most of the time, right? And it can actually become synonymous with

00:39:01.080 just something like, you know, irritable bowel syndrome, right? Like, it's just, it's not, it's

00:39:05.440 not what you want to have capturing your attention all the time. And, you know, so insofar as the

00:39:10.880 practice is not, the goal of the practice is not to become more inward and neurotic and distracted by

00:39:17.080 one's, you know, every, you know, digestive misadventure, it's worth taking a moment to think

00:39:22.920 about the consequences of paying attention to specific things. And I, and, you know, I agree

00:39:29.460 that it does make sense to just cast the net of attention as widely as possible and remain aware

00:39:37.460 that the goal is upstream of any one of the downstream channels that we might notice, right?

00:39:45.320 It's at the seat of, are you actually able to remain awake and aware and equanimous given all

00:39:54.360 the things you notice moment to moment? Absolutely. So I would say for sure, we want to think through

00:40:01.480 the downstream systems that we're going to be interacting with, so to speak. And for sure,

00:40:06.600 we do adjust when there are particular populations where it's a particularly bad idea, right? Somebody

00:40:11.920 that has high anxiety or hypervigilance, you don't want them to spend a lot of time in sensations that

00:40:18.360 are already going to be at baseline heightened. And so you might do something like, let's keep,

00:40:23.180 don't close the eyes and focus on sort of the interoceptive landscape. Instead, let's keep your

00:40:27.920 eyes open and maybe do something that has to do with an active practice, like the sensations of the

00:40:33.760 feel of the ground as you're walking. So I think things have to be adjusted in a way that we can do

00:40:38.960 to ourselves, obviously, but also as we're thinking about what to offer people from a variety of

00:40:43.760 different backgrounds and predispositions and even illnesses, we want to be sensitive to that.

00:40:48.820 So that's true on the one hand, and I agree with you. I think I agree with myself because I said it

00:40:53.900 initially, but that we want to probably mix it up and be sensitive to where it is that we're putting

00:40:58.700 our focus in terms of the anchor. The other side of it is though, that in doing this in a multiple

00:41:04.500 kind of way, by not rejecting any particular channel as the anchoring content domain on which

00:41:11.320 we're going to place this particular mindful orientation does give us a chance to develop

00:41:17.200 more familiarity with a particular set of phenomena. So though it may be correct or true that focusing

00:41:26.080 on the gut isn't going to do all that much for you in this sort of broad sense, it may actually

00:41:30.680 familiarize you as you start understanding that, oh, that particular sensation in the body is tied

00:41:36.520 to this type of emotion that arises. And those kind of couplings can allow us to have more familiarity

00:41:42.740 with what is going on moment by moment and is part of the insight, I think, that we can develop

00:41:47.500 an advantage for ourselves because now when we have that little ache in the side of our left side,

00:41:55.100 oh, I might be really feeling tense. I notice in my practice that tends to happen or whatever

00:41:59.380 the particular things are. But so I'd say, again, kind of yes and no, that I think that

00:42:03.560 we should be broad, yet we should think about benefiting intimacy or familiarity with various

00:42:10.140 aspects of our experience. So what are the neural correlates of the kind of the seat of attention

00:42:17.360 as you've been describing it? And what does mindfulness do to, characteristically do to brain

00:42:25.020 function? And I think inevitably something about the default mode network will find its way in here.

00:42:30.800 What do we know about the antithesis of mindfulness at the level of the brain? I mean, what is distraction?

00:42:38.260 What is mind wandering? What is, I guess, there are other types of reactivity to experience that we

00:42:44.120 might talk about. But what does the goal look like and what are our failure modes?

00:42:49.780 Right, right. And this is a very nicely emerging literature. I mean, this is so heartwarming to me

00:42:55.760 as somebody who started her career in mindfulness pretty lonely. I mean, I could talk to Richie,

00:43:00.580 but that was about it at that point. And most of my colleagues thought I was absolutely nuts to decide

00:43:04.980 to study mindfulness in those days. So it is really nice to see how much we have learned. And not just

00:43:11.320 with regard to mindfulness, but in general in terms of brain function over the last 20 years. So when I was

00:43:16.440 going to grad school, of course, we thought of the brain as modular and we talked about regions like

00:43:20.620 I was starting to kind of default to, like the frontal lobe does this and the parietal lobe does

00:43:24.520 this. And of course, now we don't see brain function in that modular way. We see it in a network way so

00:43:30.780 that there is an entire series of nodes that coordinate and collaborate to produce certain kinds of

00:43:37.840 mental processes. And that network view has really helped, I think, strengthen our understanding.

00:43:44.560 And there's sort of two ways to think about it. One is from the point of view of what happens when

00:43:48.620 you're actually practicing. So you're doing a mindfulness practice, what networks are active

00:43:53.740 at what points in time? And then kind of extrapolating that, if you do a practice for a long,

00:43:58.680 if you practice for a long time, what might become intrinsically sustained changes in the operating of

00:44:05.380 these brain networks? And then, of course, you can go even one step beyond that and say,

00:44:09.180 how might that network functioning result in sustainable structural changes in the brain?

00:44:15.420 And that's sort of, I think, the journey of brain training and neuroplasticity. So in terms of

00:44:19.720 describing what happens and what brain networks are involved, I think it might help to start talking

00:44:23.840 about what happens during a practice itself and how we can name these networks. And of course,

00:44:28.800 this is an extremely simplified view, right? We know that the complexity of the brain is enormous

00:44:33.560 and these dynamics are really, it's a delicate dance. But in general, what we could say is that

00:44:40.340 when we have the instruction to focus our attention on a specific object, there's kind of two prominent

00:44:48.740 things that might happen. The first is that we have... If you'd like to continue listening to this

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 23, 2024

#380 — The Roots of Attention

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