What Is Higher Consciousness?: How We Can Transcend Our Petty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deeper Wisdom

in Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology | November 25th, 2019

Each of us has a normal state of mind, as well as our own way of reaching a different state of mind. As the School of Life video above reminds us, such habits go back quite deep into recorded history, to the eras when, then as now, “Hindu sages, Christian monks and Buddhist ascetics” spoke of “reaching moments of ‘higher consciousness’ – through meditation or chanting, fasting or pilgrimages.” In recent years, the practice of meditation has spread even, and perhaps especially, among those of us who don’t subscribe to Buddhism, or indeed to any religion at all. Periodic fasting has come to be seen as a necessity in certain circles of wealthy first-worlders, as has “dopamine fasting” among those who feel their minds compromised by the distractions of high technology and social media. (And one needs only glance at that social media to see how seriously some of us are taking our pilgrimages.)

Still, on top of our mountain, deep into our sitting-and-breathing sessions, or even after having consumed our mind-altering substance of choice, we do feel, if only for a moment, that something has changed within us. We understand things we don’t even consider understanding in our normal state of mind, “where what we are principally concerned with is ourselves, our survival and our own success, narrowly defined.”

When we occupy this “lower consciousness,” we “strike back when we’re hit, blame others, quell any stray questions that lack immediate relevance, fail to free-associate and stick closely to a flattering image of who we are and where we are heading.” But when we enter a state of “higher consciousness,” however we define it, “the mind moves beyond its particular self-interests and cravings. We start to think of other people in a more imaginative way.”

When we rise from lower to higher consciousness, we find it much harder to think of our fellow human beings as enemies. “Rather than criticize and attack, we are free to imagine that their behavior is driven by pressures derived from their own more primitive minds, which they are generally in no position to tell us about.” The more time we spend in our higher consciousness, the more we “develop the ability to explain others’ actions by their distress, rather than simply in terms of how it affects us. We perceive that the appropriate response to humanity is not fear, cynicism or aggression, but always — when we can manage it — love.” When our consciousness reaches the proper altitude, “the world reveals itself as quite different: a place of suffering and misguided effort, full of people striving to be heard and lashing out against others, but also a place of tenderness and longing, beauty and touching vulnerability. The fitting response is universal sympathy and kindness.”

This may all come across as a bit new-age, sounding “maddeningly vague, wishy washy, touchy-feely – and, for want of a better word, annoying.” But the concept of higher consciousness is variously interpreted not just across cultural and religious traditions but in scientific research as well, where we find a sharp distinction drawn between the neocortex, “the seat of imagination, empathy and impartial judgement,” and the “reptilian mind” below. This suggests that we’d benefit from understanding states of higher consciousness as fully as we can, as well as trying to “make the most of them when they arise, and harvest their insights for the time when we require them most” — that is to say, the rest of our ordinary lives, especially their most stressful, trying moments. The instinctive, unimaginative defensiveness of the lower consciousness does have strengths of its own, but we can’t take advantage of them unless we learn to put it in its place.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Benefits of Boredom: How to Stop Distracting Yourself and Get Creative Ideas Again

in Creativity, Neuroscience, Psychology | November 7th, 2019

Here in the 21st century, we have conquered boredom. Impressive though that achievement may be, it hasn’t come without cost: As with many other conditions we’ve managed to eliminate from our lives, boredom now looks to have been essential to full human existence. Has our reality of on-demand distractions, tailored ever more closely to our impulses and desires, robbed us of yet another form of everyday adversity that built up the character of previous generations? Perhaps, but more importantly, it may also have dried up our well of creativity. The frustration that descends on us when trying to come up with new ideas; the itch we feel, whenever we start doing something, to do something else; our inability to go more than a few minutes without looking at our phones: we can hardly assume these modern problems are unrelated.

“When you’re bored, you tend to daydream, and your mind wanders, and this is a very, very important part of the creative process,” says psychologist Sandi Mann in the animated BBC REEL video at the top of the post. “If you find that you’re stuck on a problem, or you’re really worried about something and can’t seem to find a way out, take some time out. Just be bored. Let your mind wander, and you might just find that a creative solution will pop into your head.”

But we’ve fallen into the habit of “swiping and scrolling our boredom away,” seeking “a dopamine hit from new and novel experiences” — most often digital ones — to assuage our fears of boredom. And the more such stimulation we get, the more we need, meaning that, “paradoxically, the way to deal with boredom is to allow more of it into our life.”

“Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to really wander,” Mann says, “you start thinking a little bit beyond the conscious, a little bit into the subconscious, which allows sort of different connections to take place.” She says it in “How Boredom Can Lead to Your Most Brilliant Ideas,” a TED Talk by journalist Manoush Zomorodi. Like the public-radio podcaster she is, Zomorodi brings in interview clips from not just Mann but a range of experts on the subject of boredom and distraction, including neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, who warns that “every time you shift your attention from one thing to another, the brain has to engage a neurochemical switch that uses up nutrients in the brain to accomplish that.” And so the “multitasking” in which we once prided ourselves amounts to nothing more than “rapidly shifting from one thing to the next, depleting neural resources as you go.”

We’ve become like the experiment subjects, described in the Veritasium video above, who were asked to sit alone in an empty room for a few minutes with nothing in front of them but a button that they knew would shock them. In the end, 25 percent of the women and 60 percent of the men chose, unasked, to shock themselves, presumably out of a preference for painful stimulation over no stimulation at all. How much, we have to wonder, does that ultimately differ from the distractions we compulsively seek at every opportunity in the form of social media, games, and other addictive apps? And what do these increasingly frequent self-administered jolts do to our ability to identify promising avenues of thought and follow them all the way to their most fruitful conclusions? As the old saying goes, only the boring are bored. But if our technological lives keep going the way they’ve been going, soon only the bored will be interesting.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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The Morals That Determine Whether We’re Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian

in Politics, Psychology | October 3rd, 2019

An old friend once wrote a line I’ll never forget: “There are two kinds of people in the world, then there are infinitely many more.” It always comes to mind when I confront binary generalizations that I’m told define two equally opposing positions, but rarely capture, with any accuracy, the complexity and contrariness of human beings—even when said humans live inside the same country.

Voting patterns, social media bubbles, and major network infotainment can make it seem like the U.S. is split in two, but it is split into, if not an infinity, then a plurality of disparate ideological dispositions. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there are two kinds of people. Let’s say the U.S. divides neatly into “liberals” and “conservatives.” What makes the difference between them? Fiscal policy? Education? Views on “law and order,” social welfare, science, religion, public versus private good? Yes, but….

Best-selling NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt has controversially claimed that morality—based in emotion—really drives the wedge between competing “tribes” engaged in pitched us-versus-them war. The real contest is gut-level, mostly centered on disgust these days, one of the most primitive of emotional responses (we learn in the hand-drawn animation of a Haidt lecture below). Haidt argues that our sense of us and them is rooted, irrevocably, in our earliest cognitions of physical space.

Haidt situates his analysis under the rubric of “moral foundations theory,” a school of thought “created by a group of social and cultural psychologists to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes.” Another moral foundations theorist, Peter Ditto, professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, uses his research to draw similar conclusions about “hyperpartisanship” in the U.S. According to Ditto, as he describes in the short video at the top, “morals influence if you’re liberal or conservative.”

How? Ditto identifies five broad, universal moral categories, or “pillars,” that predict political thought and behavior: harm reduction, fairness, loyalty, authority/tradition, and purity. These concerns receive different weighting between self-identified liberals and conservatives in surveys, with liberals valuing harm reduction and fairness highly and generally overlooking the other three, and conservatives giving equal weight to all five (on paper at least). Ditto does step outside the binary in the last half of the segment, noting that his studies turned up a significant number of people who identified as libertarians.

He takes a particular interest in this category. Libertarians, says Ditto, don’t rank any moral value highly, marking their worldview as “pragmatic” and strikingly amoral. They appear to be intensely self-focused and lacking in empathy. Other strains—from democratic socialism to anarchism to fascism—that define American politics today, go unmentioned, as if they didn’t exist, though they are arguably as influential as libertarianism in the strange flowerings of the American left and right, and inarguably as deserving of study.

The idea that one’s morals define one’s politics doesn’t seem particularly novel, but the research of psychologists like Haidt and Ditto offers new ways to think about morality in public life. It also raises pertinent questions about the gulf between what people claim to value and what they actually, consistently, support, and about how the evolution of moral sensibilities seems to sort people into groups that also share historical identities, zip codes, and economic interests. Nor can we cannot discount the active shaping of public opinion through extra-moral means. Finally, in a two-party system, the options are as few as they can be. Political allegiance can be as much convenience, or reaction, as conviction. We might be right to suspect that any seeming political—or moral—unity on one side or the other could be an effect of amplified oversimplification.

via Aeon

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Why Time Seems to Fly By As You Get Older, and How to Slow It Down: A Scientific Explanation by Neuroscientist David Eagleman

in Neuroscience, Psychology | September 20th, 2019

The Buddha, it’s said, struggled mightily with three specters of adulthood—aging, sickness, and death—when reflections on mortality harshed his hedonistic life as a prince. His “intoxication with life entirely dropped away,” the stories say, when he reflected on its passing. Nothing cured his fatal unease until a memory from childhood arose unbidden: of stopping time by quietly sitting under a rose-apple tree.

In another version of this story, Marcel Proust discovered timelessness baked in a cookie. His potent memories of madeleines also came from childhood. As he recalled “the taste of tea and cake,” he writes, “at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory …. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.”

Neuroscientist David Eagleman also invokes a childhood memory in his discussion of time and aging, in the BBC video above. It is also a memory resonant with a remarkable physical detail: red brick pavement hurtling toward him as he falls from the roof of a house, experiencing what must have been a terrifying descent in slow motion. Quite a different experience from communing with trees and eating tea cakes, but maybe the content of a childhood memory is irrelevant to its temporal dimensions.

What we can all remember is that along with impatience and distractibility, childhood seems rich with carefree, absorptive languor (or moments of slow-motion panic). Psychologists have indeed shown in several studies that adults, especially those over the age of 40, perceive time as moving faster than it did when they were children. Why?

Because time is a “psychological construct,” says Eagleman, and can vary not just between ages and cultures, but also between individual consciousnesses. “It can be different in your head and my head,” he says. “Your brain is locked in silence and darkness inside the vault of your skull.” In order to “figure out what’s going on outside,” it’s got to do “a lot of editing tricks.” One trick is to convince us that we’re living in the moment, when the moment happened half a second in the past.

But we can notice that gap when we’re faced with novelty, because the brain has to work harder to process new information, and it creates thicker descriptions in the memory. All of this additional processing, Eagleman says, seems to take more time, so we perceive new experiences as happening in a kind of slow motion (or remember them that way). That includes so many experiences in our childhood as well as emergency situations in which we have to navigate a challenging new reality very quickly.

As writer Charles Bukowski once said, “as you live many years, things take on a repeat…. You keep seeing the same thing over and over again.” The brain can coast on familiarity and expend little energy generating perception. We retain fewer detailed memories of recent events, and they seem to have flown by us. The remedy, says Eagleman, is to seek novelty. (You thought he was going to say “mindfulness”?) Wear your watch on a different wrist, change the way you brush your teeth….

Mundane examples, but the point remains: we need new and varied experiences to slow our sense of time. Routine lack of novelty in adulthood may be the primary reason that “our early years,” write psychologists James Broadway and Brittaney Sandoval write at Scientific American,“tend to be relatively overrepresented in our autobiographical memory and, on reflection, seem to have lasted longer.”

They can also, for that reason, seem all the sweeter. But nostalgia, however tempting, can’t take the place of going new places, meeting new people, reading new books, hearing new music, seeing new films, and so on and so forth—and thereby effectively slowing down time.

via Aeon

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

in Life, Neuroscience, Psychology, Religion | September 6th, 2019

St. Benedict by Fra Angelico, via Wikimedia Commons

We might imagine that life in a monastery is one of the safest, most predictable ways of life on offer, and therefore one of the least distracted. But “medieval monks had a terrible time concentrating,” writes Sam Haselby at Aeon, “and concentration was their lifelong work!” They complained of information overload, forgetfulness, lack of focus, and overstimulation. Their jumpy brains, fundamentally no different from those we use to navigate our smart phones, were the culprit, though, like us, the monks found other sources to blame.

“Sometimes they accused demons of making their minds wander. Sometimes they blamed the body’s base instincts.” Given the nature of their restrictive vows, it’s no wonder they found themselves thinking “about food or sex when they were supposed to be thinking about God.” But the fact remains, as University of Georgia professor Jamie Kreiner says in an interview with PRI’s The World, monks living 1600 years ago found themselves constantly, painfully distracted.

It wasn’t even necessarily about tech at all. It was about something inherent in the mind. The difference between us and them is not that we are distracted and they aren’t, it’s that they actually had savvier ways of dealing with distraction. Ways of training their minds the way we might train our bodies.

So, what did the wisest monks advise, and what can we learn, hundreds of years later, from their wisdom? Quite a lot, and much of it applicable even to our online lives. Some of what medieval monks like the 5th century John Cassian advised may be too austere for modern tastes, even if we happen to live in a monastery. But many of their practices are the very same we now see prescribed as therapeutic exercises and good personal habits.

Cassian and his colleagues devised solutions that “depended on imaginary pictures” and “bizarre animations” in the mind,” Haselby explains. People were told to let their imaginations run riot with images of sex, violence, and monstrous beings. “Nuns, monks, preachers and the people they educated were always encouraged to visualize the material they were processing,” often in some very graphic ways. The gore may not be fashionable in contemplative settings these days, but ancient methods of guided imagery and creative visualization certainly are.

So too are techniques like active listening and nonviolent communication, which share many similarities with St. Benedict’s first rule for his order: “Listen and incline the ear of your heart.” Benedict spoke to the mind’s tendency to leap from thought to thought, to prejudge and formulate rebuttals while another person speaks, to tune out. “Basically,” writes Fr. Michael Rennier, Benedict’s form of listening “is taking time to hear in a certain way, with an attitude of openness, and commitment to devote your whole self to the process,” without doing anything else.

Benedict’s advice, Rennier writes, is “great… because obstacles are all around, so we need to be intentional about overcoming them.” We do not need to share the same intentions as St. Benedict, however, to take his advice to heart and stop treating listening as waiting to speak, rather than as a practice of making space for others and making space for silence. “Benedict knew the benefits of silence,” writes Alain de Botton’s School of Life, “He knew all about distraction,” too, “how easy it is to want to keep checking up on the latest developments, how addictive the gossip of the city can be.”

Silence allows us to not only hear others better, but to hear our deeper or higher selves, or the voice of God, or the universe, or whatever source of creative energy we tune into. Like their counterparts in the East, medieval Catholic monks also practiced daily meditation, including meditations on death, just one of several methods “Cistercian monks used to reshape their own mental states,” as Julia Bourke writes at Lapham’s Quarterly.

“A medieval Cistercian and a modern neuroscientist” would agree on at least one thing, Bourke argues: “the principle that certain feelings and emotions can be changed through meditative exercises.” No one devises numerous formal solutions to problems they do not have; although their physical circumstances could not have been more different from ours, medieval European monks seemed to suffer just as much as most of us do from distraction. In some part, their lives were experiments in learning to overcome it.

via Aeon

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Meditation for Beginners: Buddhist Monks & Teachers Explain the Basics

in Health, Psychology, Religion | September 3rd, 2019

In the app-rich, nuance-starved culture of late capitalism, we are encouraged to conflate two vastly different concepts: the simple and the easy. Maybe no better example exists than in the marketing of meditation—the selling of an activity that, in essence, requires no specialized equipment or infrastructure. What mediation does require is a good instructor and encouragement. It is simple. But it is not easy. It’s true, you’ll hear teachers ruefully admit, they don’t print this on the brochures for retreat centers: but sustained meditation can be difficult and painful just as well as it can induce serenity, peace, and joy. When we sit down to meditate, we “feel our stuff,” to paraphrase David Byrne.

Next to the host of physical complaints and external stressors clamoring for attention, if we’ve got personal bad vibrations to contend with, they will hamper our ability to accept the present and relax. This is why, historically, those wishing to embark on the Buddhist path would first take ethical precepts, and practice them, before beginning to meditate, under the presumption that doing good (or non-harm) quiets the mind. “It is true that meditation is important in the Buddhist tradition,” writes Tibetan teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at Lion’s Roar. “But in many ways, ethics and virtue are the foundation of the Buddhist path.”

Of course, there are non-Buddhist meditation traditions. And the mindfulness movement has demonstrated with great success that one can carve most of the religion away from meditation and still derive many short-term benefits from the practice. But to do so is to dispense with thousands of years of experiential wisdom, not only about the difficulties of sustaining a meditation practice over the long term, but also about meditation’s inherent simplicity—something those of us inclined to overcomplicate things may need to hear over and over again.

Tibetan teachers like Mingyur (and teachers from every Buddhist lineage) are generally happy to expound upon the simplicity and joy of mediation, with the good nature we might expect of those who spend their lives letting go of regrets and fears. Sometimes their messages are packaged for easier consumption, which is a fine way to get a taste of something before you decide to explore it further. But the point remains, as Mingyur says in the video at the top from The Jakarta Poet, that “meditation is completely natural.” It is not a product and doesn’t require any accessories or subscriptions.

It is also not an altered state of consciousness or a nihilist escape. It is allowing ourselves to experience what is happening inside and all around us moment by moment by tuning into our awareness. We can do this anywhere, at any time, for any length of time, as the monk further up tells us. “Even three seconds, two seconds, while you’re walking, while you’re having coffee and tea, while you’re having a meeting… you can meditate.” Really? Yes, since meditation is not a vacation from your life but an intensified experiencing of it (even the meetings).

We get a celebrity endorsement above from the man who plays the angriest man on television, Gordon Ramsay. The chef takes a break from his abusive kitchen rages to meet with a Thai monk, who says of his decision to enter the monastery, “I’ve been to many different places, I’d traveled around, but the one place I hadn’t looked at was my mind.” Westerners may hear this and think of far out states—and there are plenty of those to be found in Buddhist texts, but not much talk of them among Buddhist teachers. Generally, the word “mind” has a far more expansive range here than the firing of synapses: it includes movement of the stomach lining, the tension of the sinews, and the beating of the heart.

One of the most tragic misunderstandings of meditation casts it as a mental discipline, splitting mind and body as Western thought is wont to do for centuries now. But the awareness cultivated in meditation is awareness of everything: the senses, the body, the breath, the space around us, our cognition and emotion. Every Buddhist tradition and secular offshoot has its way of teaching students what to do with their often-ignored bodies while they meditate. The differences between them are mostly slight, and you’ll find a good guided introduction to beginning meditation focused on the body just above, led by Mingyur Rinpoche.

The happiness one can derive from a meditation practice does arrive, according to meditators worldwide, but it is not a solitary achievement, Buddhist teachers say, a prize claimed for oneself like a profit windfall. It is, rather, the result of more compassion, and hence of more humility, better relationships, and less self-involvement; the result of stripping away rather than acquiring. Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who left a career in cellular genetics in his twenties to study and practice in the Himalayas, hasn’t shied away from marketing as a way to teach people to meditate. But he is also upfront about the importance of ethics to beginning mediation.

In addition to being a “confidante of the Dalai Lama,” notes Business Insider, Ricard is also “a viral TED Talk speaker, and a bestselling author.” His message is the importance of compassion—not as a goal to achieve some time in the future, but as the very place to start. “There’s nothing mysterious” about it, he says in an interview on Business Insider’s podcast. He then goes on to describe the basic practices of “Metta, ”among other things a way of training oneself to have kind and loving intentions for others in an ever-widening circle outward. In the video above, Ricard talks about the practice, and the science, of compassion at Google.

Many people balk at this kind of sentimental stuff, even from a man Google describes as “the world’s best bridge between modern science and ancient wisdom.” But if we can hear anything in the ancient wisdom distilled by these Buddhist teachers, perhaps it’s a simple idea fast-meditation apps and utilitarian programs generally skip. No, you do not need to put on robes, become a monk or nun, or take on a set of ancient traditions, beliefs, or rituals. But as American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says below, “if you want to learn to be wise and present, the first step is to refrain from harming yourself or others.”

How Meditation Can Change Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Buddhist Practice

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Aldous Huxley Trips on Acid; Talks About Cats & the Secret of Life (1962)

in History, Psychology | August 19th, 2019

Dystopia and drugs: these are the two concepts most commonly associated with Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World and, decades later, advocated the mind-expanding possibilities of psychedelic substances. The sociopolitical realities of the 21st century have prompted us to return to and more fully understand what Huxley was trying to tell us with his novelistic vision of a society engineered and automated into total submission. But how many of us really understand his perspective on what the drugs did for his thinking?

Huxley may have written eloquently on the subject, most popularly in 1954’s The Doors of Perception, but in the audio clip above we can hear some of that thinking straight from the visionary’s mouth. “This is a recording of Aldous Huxley on 100 μg of LSD, made on December 23 1962,” writes the uploader, “gonzo philosopher” Jules Evans. “The trip sitter is his wife, Laura Archera Huxley.” A trip sitter, for the uninitiated, is like the designated driver of a psychedelic journey, a companion who stays on the ground to look out for the one who gets high. (This same wife would, the following year, take Huxley on his final trip, the one that would take him all the way out of this world.)

Huxley “discusses the secret of life — to be oneself and at the same time ‘identical with the divine.’ And he wonders about the value of blasting off into the stratosphere, like Timothy Leary.” Leary, a fellow champion of psychedelics, began his career as a clinical psychologist at Harvard and ended up dedicating his life to the possibilities of LSD, along the way popularizing the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out.” “Tim is alright,” says the tripping Huxley. “He’s just sort of… an Irishman, banging around, but I think he’s doing a lot of good.” But in Huxley’s view, Leary also “just wants to be an ass. We all have to be forgiven for something. My God, will you forgive me!”

In just three minutes drawn from a longer recording stored at UCLA’s Huxley archive, the writer makes a variety of other observations as well. These include the desire of drug-users to “take holidays from themselves,” the value of psychedelic experiences showing people that “they don’t have to always live in this completely conditioned way,” and the challenge of having to be “completely boxed up in oneself as that cat is” — as he gestures, presumably, toward a household pet — “at the same time one has to be completely identical with God!” LSD has reportedly led some of its users to communion with the divine, but on this trip Huxley settles for trying to commune with the feline. After a brief attempt at speaking the cat’s own language, he returns to English to make a broader point about the human and animal condition: “Luckily he doesn’t have our problems. But he has his own.”

Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics Enthusiast, Lectures About “the Visionary Experience” at MIT (1962)

Aldous Huxley Tells Mike Wallace What Will Destroy Democracy: Overpopulation, Drugs & Insidious Technology (1958)

When Michel Foucault Tripped on Acid in Death Valley and Called It “The Greatest Experience of My Life” (1975)

How to Use Psychedelic Drugs to Improve Mental Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

Woman Takes LSD in 1956: “I’ve Never Seen Such Infinite Beauty in All My Life,” “I Wish I Could Talk in Technicolor”

The Historic LSD Debate at MIT: Timothy Leary v. Professor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Concentration

in Creativity, Life, Neuroscience, Psychology | August 9th, 2019

Disagree though we may about what’s wrong with life in the 21st century, all of us — at least in the developed, high tech-saturated parts of the world — surely come together in lamenting our inability to focus. We keep hearing how distractions of all kinds, but especially those delivered by social media, fragment our attention into thousands of little pieces, preventing us from completing or even starting the kind of noble long-term endeavors undertaken by our ancestors. But even if that diagnosis is accurate, we might wonder, how does it all work? These five video talks offer not just insights into the nuts and bolts of attention, concentration, and focus, but suggestions about how we might tighten our own as well.

In “How to Get Your Brain to Focus,” the TED Talk at the top of the post, Hyperfocus author Chris Bailey relates how his own life devolved into a morning-noon-night “series of screens,” and what resulted when he did away with some of those screens and the distractions they unceasingly presented him — or rather, the overstimulation they inflicted on him: “We think that our brains are distracted,” he says, “but they’re overstimulated.”

Reducing his own level of stimulation further still, he deliberately engaged in such low-stimulation (more commonly known as “boring”) practices as reading iTunes’ entire terms-and-conditions document (and not in graphic-novel form), waiting on hold with Air Canada’s baggage department, counting the zeroes in pi, and finally just watching a clock.

Bailey found that, absent the frequent dopamine hits provided by his screens, his attention span grew and more ideas, plans, and thoughts about the future came to him. “We think that we need to fit more in,” he says, but in reality “we’re doing too much, so much that our mind never wanders.” When we have nothing in particular to focus on, our mind finds its way into new territories: hence, he says, the fact that we so often get our best ideas in the shower. He references data indicating that these mental wanderings take us back into the past 12 percent of the time and remain in the present 28 percent of the time, but most often fast-forward into the future, a habit also explored by neuroscientist Amishi Jha in the TED Talk just above, “How to Tame Your Wandering Mind.”

“Our mind is an exquisite time-traveling master,” says Jha, “and we land in this mental time-travel mode of the past or the future very frequently. “And when this happens, when we mind-wander without an awareness that we’re doing it, there are consequences. We make errors. We miss critical information, sometimes. And we have difficulty making decisions.” In Jha’s view, a wandering mind can be dangerous: she labels its “internal distraction” as one of the three factors, alongside external stress and distraction in the environment, that “diminishes attention’s power.” Her laboratory research has brought her to endorse the solution of “mindfulness practice,” which “has to do with paying attention to our present-moment experience with awareness. And without any kind of emotional reactivity of what’s happening,” keeping our finger on the “play” button “to experience the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives.”

As a mindfulness practice, meditation does the trick for many, although precision shooting champion Christina Bengtsson recommends staring at leaves. “I focused on a beautiful autumn leaf playing in the wind,” she says of her decisive shot in her TED Talk above. “Suddenly I am completely calm, and the world champion title was mine.” That leaf, she says, “relieved me of distracting thoughts and made me focus,” and the experience led her to come up with a broader theory. “We need to learn to notice disturbing thoughts and to distinguish them from not-disturbing thoughts,” she says, a not-disturbing thought being one that “knocks out all the disturbing and worrying thoughts.” In this framework, the thought of a leaf can drain the distracting power from all those nagging what-ifs about our goals and the future ahead.

“Focus is not about becoming something new or something better, but simply about functioning exactly as well as we already are,” says Bengtsson, “and understanding that this is enough for both general happiness and great achievements.” Among her other, non-leaf-related recommendations is to create a “not-to-do list,” a form suited to a world “no longer about prioritizing, but about prioritizing away.” The not-to-do list also gets a strong endorsement in “How to Focus Intensely,” the Freedom in Thought animated video just above. After opening with an elaborate analogy about robots, boxes, and factory fires, it goes on to break down the key tradeoff of attention: on one side directed focus, “providing undivided attention while ignoring environmental stimuli,” and on the other generalized focus, which does the opposite.

We human beings often don’t make that tradeoff adeptly, and the reasons cited here include stress, engagement in tasks we dislike because they aren’t inherently pleasurable (even when they promise pleasures later on, since the arrival of those pleasures can be uncertain), and the habit of short-term pleasure-seeking. Along with meditation and the not-to-do list come other featured strategies like actively placing boundaries on your media consumption, structuring your day with “blocks” of work separated by short breaks, and drawing up a priority list, all while adhering to the general ratio of spending 80 percent of your time on “activities that produce long-term pleasure” and 20 percent on “activities that produce short-term pleasure.”

The Freedom in Thought video also recommends something called “deep work,” a set of techniques defined by computer scientist Cal Newport in his book of the same name. But to do deep work as Newport himself does it requires that you take a step that may sound radical at first: quit social media. That imperative provides the title of Newport’s TED Talk above, which explains the whys and hows of doing just that. He also deals with the common objections to the notion of quitting social media, framing social media itself as just another slot machine-like form of entertainment — with all the attendant psychological harms — that, because of its sheer commonness and easiness, can hardly be as vital to success in the 21st-century economy as it’s so often claimed to be.

Newport explains that “what the market dismisses, for the most part, are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value,” i.e. what most of us spend our days doing on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. “It’s instead going to reward the deep, concentrated work required to build real skills and apply those skills to produce things, like a craftsman, that are rare and are valuable.” If you treat your attention with respect, he says, “when it comes time to work, you can actually do one thing after another, and do it with intensity, and intensity can be traded for time.” When you train your mind away from distraction, in other words, you actually end up with more time to work with — an asset that even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, both of whom famously credit their own success to focus, can’t buy for themselves.

The Case for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valuable “Deep Work” Instead, According to Prof. Cal Newport

The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and How to Overcome It

Alan Watts Presents a 15-Minute Guided Meditation: A Time-Tested Way to Stop Thinking About Thinking

Listen to Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention by Ken McLeod

How to Take Advantage of Boredom, the Secret Ingredient of Creativity

Lynda Barry on How the Smartphone Is Endangering Three Ingredients of Creativity: Loneliness, Uncertainty & Boredom

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Is Higher Consciousness?: How We Can Transcend Our Petty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deeper Wisdom

The Benefits of Boredom: How to Stop Distracting Yourself and Get Creative Ideas Again

The Morals That Determine Whether We’re Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian

Why Time Seems to Fly By As You Get Older, and How to Slow It Down: A Scientific Explanation by Neuroscientist David Eagleman

Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

Meditation for Beginners: Buddhist Monks & Teachers Explain the Basics

Aldous Huxley Trips on Acid; Talks About Cats & the Secret of Life (1962)

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Concentration

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