Rewording the Brain

The endangered art of being present

Back in Houston we looked at concentration, the functional fixedness that can accompany acute focus. This time around, I put focus squarely into view, coming to the mindset’s defence.

We’ll also consider distraction—the antonym of focus—and how multitasking attracts its share of myths. And lastly, presuming your focus can hang in there, we’ll also consider how mindfulness can arise from diversions, despite what diverting (the word) may suggest: that flawed notion of deflecting one’s attention.

Historically, the word ‘focus’ hails from Latin where it meant ‘fireplace’, the heart as hearth if you like. In Caesar’s day, focus was the home’s central space, the source of warmth in Rome’s long winters. Hub is a close cousin, this word deriving from Old English hob, or stove, the source of comfort drawing everyone closer.

It’s ironic that the word focus is derived from a huddling of people, when the modern challenge of focusing lies more in isolating yourself from the intrusion of others. Because focus is perishable nowadays. Even as you read this paragraph, there’s half a chance you’re checking Facebook, or glancing to see if that email has arrived. If you’re not, chances are you’re still in a state of readiness, awaiting a ping. As I write this paragraph, my fingers are poised to switch from this document to my inbox, or to see which friend liked my holiday pic.

Welcome to the new millennium. Like it or not, our attention span is under siege.

Dr Bruce Morton, a researcher attached to Ontario’s Brain and Mind Institute, measured the impact of shredded focus in 2015. Under lab conditions, Morton studied the brain activity of 112 subjects, in addition to surveying 2000 participants across Canada. The experiment’s intent was to calculate the average length of the human attention span. Back in 2000, when similar research was conducted, the figure had been twelve seconds. Think about it—that’s five shifts in focus every waking minute. But the bad news doesn’t end there. Data from Morton’s consequent experiment suggested that figure had lapsed to eight. We lost four seconds in fifteen years. By way of a yardstick, a goldfish is reputed to boast an attention span of nine seconds. It seems the attention span of the human animal—well, the human Canadian at least—is one second shy of your pet, Bubbles.

From the goldfish bowl to the office think-tank, the figures are no less telling. Back in the early 2000s, Professor Gloria Mark and her team from the Department of Informatics at the University of California observed workers at multiple finance and high-tech companies. Their goal was to tally the average number of distractions that occur across the workday.

Among the subjects were engineers, software developers, market analysts and project leaders, spread across a range of offices. Distractions could be anything from a spouse’s SMS to a holiday pic to a colleague interrupting with project updates.

The magic figure they arrived at was three minutes—three minutes and five seconds to be precise: the interim between one interruption and the next. Of course, that interruption may have been self-triggered, a worker leaving her document mid-sentence to check her phone, or replenish her jasmine tea—any switch of focus that ushers her mind into a separate sphere.

And if the tally seems extravagant, then consider the impact of any distraction deemed as off-topic and exceeding two minutes. For example, if you’re trying to complete an essay, and a family member intervenes with a logistic problem regarding carpooling, an issue demanding at least two minutes of your focus, then you may well need around 23 minutes and fifteen seconds to resume the initial task, as that can be the effect of a major jump off-topic, off-track. The burden is less about regathering your thoughts, and more to do with realigning your workload until focus and flow have had the chance to resume.

Furthermore, the informatics team learnt that a fifth of all disrupted jobs are left in limbo on any given day. You may have had every hope of completing report A by five o’clock, but that chore will now have to wait until tomorrow, thanks to the stream of intrusions.

This leads us to the modern myth of multitasking, that common boast among the super-parents and high-achieving execs. The evidence shows, however, that even when you’re trying to do your best across several fronts, your brain struggles to succeed. Our slang recognises it, via such alternative labels as multislacking and multicrastinating. The ergonomic juggle of multitasking is, in fact, often only a matter of spreading your inefficiency across a range of focal points.

Multitask masters

Back in 2013, the New York Times commissioned two academics at Carnegie Mellon University to measure the actual brain drain that multitasking inflicts. Together, psychologist Eyal Peer and IT professor Alessandro Acquisti invited 136 volunteers to read a short passage, and then answer questions on the piece.

The volunteers were split into three groups. The first had nothing but the test to focus on, while the other groups were told they may well be contacted during the reading with further instructions.

And indeed, two interruptions waylaid groups two and three during the initial screening. But in a second appraisal—with identical group sizes, members and rules of engagement—there was one significant alteration: this time around, group three was spared the interruption, although still warned it might occur. The cohorts were labelled the Control Group, the Interrupted Group, and the Group on High Alert.

Given all those variants, which group would you expect to be more efficient? The results in many ways betray much about the state of modern life. In the first test, the two interrupted groups were 20 per cent ‘dumber’ than the control mob. That is, they botched an extra fifth of the questions, their focus the frailer for the interruptions as much as the distracted state that came with awaiting them.

The second time around, however, when group three was warned about an interruption but then spared the intrusion, their proficiency increased. Human beings seem to flourish when we recognise time is fleeting, possible disruption a heartbeat away. Compare that to the swamp of doing ten things at once, where the brain will often battle to switch focus and fulfil any single task properly.

MIND TRAPS

Plenty of playground questions, shared by kids to trap unwary thinkers, happen to prey on our non-mindful ways. Take care when cracking these chestnuts, as the obvious answer won’t be immediately obvious, owing to the way each conundrum is worded:

1. If a plane crashed on the border of France and Belgium, where would they bury the survivors?

2. David’s dad has three sons: Snap, Crackle and who?

3. If there are five apples on a table, and you take away three, how many do you have?

4. Driving a bus, you count the people as they get on. At the first stop, four got on. At the second stop, two joined the bus, and one got off. And at the next stop, two got off. What colour are the driver’s eyes?

5. Beware the sucker punch in this sequence’s final question:

(a) Acorns grow on what kind of tree? (Oak)

(b) What stinky cloud comes from fire? (Smoke)

(d) What do you call the white part of an egg?

Research suggests our brains have grown to accept the daily onslaught of interruptions, toiling more feverishly in dread of the trill of an SMS, the knock at our cubicle, the Facebook Like. It’s all at a cost, however. While our tempo might quicken, our stress levels spike too. And our intensity isn’t guaranteed to produce anything more polished than our less harried colleagues who can often languish in the rarity of not being interrupted, wasting what surplus of time they enjoy as they anticipate the disruption that never occurs.

For all these reasons, academics tend to avoid using the term ‘multitasking’. In a write-up of the Carnegie Mellon experiment, the preferred phrase was ‘rapid toggling between tasks’. This might seem like splitting hairs, but the phrasing speaks more to the frenzy of the action, rather than as a pledge of its efficiency.

Does all this remind you of something? Aside from your daily chaos, I mean. Reading the results of these various experiments, I kept dwelling on one word. It’s a sacred term of the early millennium, a catchword held dear for all the reasons thrown up by the research we’ve just been trawling. If focus was ever the basis of a new belief system, then that religion would be known as …

Mindfulness

Tess, my daughter, had to eat a blackberry in Year 12. Not the smart-phone, the fruit. And when I say eat, I mean savour. Slowly. Teasing off each drupelet (those mini-sacs making up the berry) and rolling each parcel on the tongue. After a while, one by one, each drupelet would burst and she’d go back for another.

The exercise was overseen by a mindfulness consultant, a visitor to the school. His task was to train the school’s senior students in flexing the ‘attentional muscle’, as he insisted on calling what we would otherwise call focus.

Known as the raisin exercise, this slo-mo consumption aims to muffle the brain’s white noise, to channel the senses into a single task. As you ponder the fruit in your hand, in your mouth, your peripheral cares dwindle for a time.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness, based in Massachusetts. He says, ‘Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.’ Presence and tolerance are the two pillars of the practice. In tandem, they benefit our brain: a tolerant outlook helps to lower stress, while the exaggerated sense of presence boosts the endangered art of focus.

In a joint 2010 study, combining Sydney University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, researchers found a proliferation of alpha waves in the meditative mind. ‘This wave type has been used as a universal sign of relaxation during meditation and other types of rest,’ explained Norwegian Professor Øyvind Ellingsen. ‘The amount of alpha waves increases when the brain relaxes from intentional, goal-oriented tasks. This is a sign of deep relaxation, but it does not mean that the mind is void.’ Indeed, alpha waves denote a state of wakeful rest, a focused mode midway between sleep and fierce concentration.

YOURS MINDFULLY

Numerous techniques can help you reach a mindful state. These include:

+	Monitor your breath – deep and rhythmic breathing is a useful practice to prepare for some of the techniques below.
+	Focus on a fixed object (the mandala principle) until your mind no longer wanders from the focal point. A candle is also useful: allow the image to imprint on your vision, and then close your eyes and hold the image.
+	Squeeze your hand, or pinch your forearm or leg, for twenty seconds. Then release your grip and concentrate on the body’s subsiding memory of the action.
+	Immerse yourself in silence, even if that means earplugs.
+	Overhear your own thoughts, and see how readily you can minimise the ‘i’ in your subconscious drift, becoming a conduit rather than a protagonist.

Or why not convert your phone into an ally? There are many helpful mindfulness apps on the market, including Smiling Mind, Headspace, Buddhify, Calm, Simply Being and Stop, Breathe & Think.

Let us return to my daughter Tess. Her twenty-minute blackberry was simple compared to the next assignment: to ditch her phone for three days. To switch it off. Ignore it. Suddenly eating a blackberry felt like a picnic compared to boycotting an Apple. For the adolescents, the gadget ban went close to breaching Geneva conventions.

In fact, forget adolescents—I dare anyone under 60 to exist without their pocket lifeline. Business execs, busy parents, tradies, journalists … as a race we are iPhone clones, Samsung slaves, Nokia zombies. The phone has come to represent our portable confidante, our oracle, our window on the world. The popular description of ditching your phone for a day, or living phoneless full stop, is a ‘digital detox’—a favour for our brain.

Instead, take up a mindful habit—which one depends on you. Maybe yoga elicits a mindful state, or long-distance swimming. Perhaps it’s finding time to stop and breathe deeply, lessening the body’s natural steroid cortisol (the so-called stress hormone). Others turn to meditation, colouring books, the music of Bach, or dining on a single blackberry.

Or possibly your fix is a puzzle—your transfix, if you like—the mindfulness arising from absorption in a finite grid with infinite permutations. For many people, sudoku offers that pure focus, the clinical discipline of working with hypotheses. ‘If this is 4, then that must be 3 or 8 …’ But for me, that mandala is a crossword, a sentiment shared by Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. Danesi describes the universal pull of puzzles as ‘using your mind … to restore order from the chaos’. Perhaps I should leave that quote there, for Danesi adds: ‘And once you have [restored order] you can sit back and say, “Hey, the rest of my life may be a disaster, but at least I have a solution.”’

Puzzle-solving is focus plus reward. Regardless of the diversion, from code-breaking to anagram-making, a puzzle gathers every atom of your attention, with progress as affirmation and closure as reward. The fire of focus, in that Roman sense, can crackle at its most intense when dealing with a mental challenge that’s actively designed to foil, an enigma reserving its solution only for those brains that can dwell on the task, to focus and potentially switch that focus in a new direction. Kenken or cryptic, a good puzzle is an invitation to freely associate ideas and theories, to speculate and troubleshoot, all within the call for fixity. Strange as it sounds, a solver can be lost and found at the same time—lost in the bafflement, and found in the sense of being thoroughly present, locked and alive in the conundrum. And in this era of shredded attention and meagre reward, that’s powerful medicine.