The One Thing You Can Control Might Be Your Attention

 

You've probably noticed how few things in life you can actually control. What happens in the world around you? Nope, there's new evidence against that every day. What happens in your own life? No, the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" come for us all. What your spouse does, or your kids? Good luck with that. Well, how about your own behavior? You can control what you do and how you react to events, right? 

Well, maybe. Two Minds Theory suggests that behavior is not under your conscious control. In the original theory diagram, notice that any new environmental event sets off a reaction going down two tracks -- the Narrative Mind on top, the Intuitive Mind on the bottom -- but the tracks never rejoin at the end. Only the lower track, the Intuitive Mind, has an arrow leading to behavior. Unlike Leventhal's model, where both the cognitive and the emotional track have arrows pointing to the endpoint of the diagram, in Two Minds Theory just the Intuitive Mind gets a say. There are some "control gates" in my original diagram that cross the line between the Narrative and the Intuitive Mind, which is how we were playing with the idea of "under some circumstances" at the time of the original paper. But at this point I think those circumstances amount to an influence over later events instead of any kind of input into behavior in the moment when it occurs. All decision-making is therefore much more Intuitive than it is Narrative, a feature of Two Minds Theory that we have now confirmed in studies of people with type 1 diabetes, people with HIV, and emergency room nurses under conditions of fatigue. In a recent study of talk therapy, we could actually see the Narrative levels of the brain becoming less active and the Intuitive-mind parts of the brain picking up their activity at the time when therapeutic change occurred. TMT's hypothesis that you are not directly in control of your behavior is therefore supported by several sources of evidence.

Going back to the original TMT diagram, though, there is one place before the end where the Narrative mind has a chance to affect behavior. On the left-hand side of the diagram is one of those "conditional gate" symbols, just after the environmental stimulus, connecting two constructs labeled "registrations" (at the Intuitive-Mind level) and "judgments" (at the Narrative-mind level). This language comes from philosophers of mind who talk about the more-conscious and less-conscious aspects of paying attention, and the gate between the two constructs is in fact labeled "attention (limited resource)." So, paying attention to something may be another key that opens Narrative-level control over our own behavior.

The idea that attention is a limited resource comes from both philosophical observation and empirical research. You can also probably see this feature of attention in your own experiences. For example, it's harder to pay attention when you are tired, which is a classic Narrative-mind limitation. Human attention is also limited by our relatively small capacity for working memory, traditionally characterized by psychologists as "7 bits of information, plus or minus 2." A seven-digit phone number is about the limit of our ability when it comes to random digits, although it's possible to improve working memory through practice, just as we can also improve our capacity to pay attention. 

In the 2009 book Distracted, Maggie Jackson worries that we might be losing our attentional capacity through lack of practice (and back in 2009 she hadn't seen anything yet!). She suggests that there are three components of attention, each with partially separate neural underpinnings, and that we can work to develop each one of them:

• Awareness is the lowest level of attention, similar to what I called "registration" in the TMT diagram. If you are aware of something, then it exists in your mental world. This might also be called "an "alerting" function on the brain. In many cases, your mind will automatically orient you to what's going on around you through a brain subsystem called the Dorsal Attention Network (DAN). The DAN is constantly monitoring outside of your awareness, and clicks your attention in quickly on something that might be important, such as a movement near your foot (evolution has made the DAN particularly sensitive to sideways movements that look like snakes), a rapidly approaching object (jump out of the way!), or the sound of your own name in a noisy room (because we also evolved to be very sensitive to social threats or rewards). But you can also practice awareness, e.g. through meditation exercises like paying attention to the position of your tongue in your mouth, or the feeling of the soles of your feet against the ground. These practices bring things into your awareness that seemingly didn't exist before -- where was your tongue when you weren't thinking about it?
• Focus is the next level of attention in Jackson's framework, and seems closest to what I meant by the word "attention" on the gate crossing the line between Narrative and Intuitive Minds in my TMT diagram. To focus on something requires conscious control, using the brain's Central Executive Network (closely linked to the Narrative Mind) to pick something out of the continuous stream of your other experiences. This might also be called the "orienting" function of the brain, which is more deliberate than the automatic "alerting" function. You can try this with a deliberate search task: Look up from this screen, and find something in your environment that is the color green. Or try to pay attention to the background sound of your environment, whether that's an electric hum or a road noise or the sound of wind. Focus is connected to awareness, but it is more deliberately chosen. Over time, the things that we choose to focus on may come more readily to mind even when we aren't specifically looking for them, an example of the Narrative Mind's capability to train the Intuitive Mind so that a behavior goes from deliberate to habitual. Focus is the part of attention that is probably the most draining, that depletes our blood glucose, and that we can't keep up for long. It involves deliberately translating sensory data into working memory, which as we have seen is a very limited resource for humans.
• Judgment is the "highest" level of attention in Jackson's framework, and clearly corresponds to the activities of the Narrative Mind. In this case, Jackson and I even used the same word. Judgment involves what we think about something, a meta-level of attention in which we can put our thoughts into words, evaluate the meaning of an event, and talk about how we'd like to respond. In contrast to Jackson, I don't think judgments are nearly so useful as awareness and focus, because they stay at the level of the Narrative Mind, and can only affect later behaviors indirectly. If we want to change our reactions in the moment, we would be much better advised to practice focus and awareness, so that our Intuitive Minds react in the ways we'd prefer the next time around.

Jackson offers some suggestions for developing our attention capacities. One is to deliberately focus on things that other people are attending to -- a practice of "joint attention" that helps to develop empathy and social connections. Another is to pay more deliberate attention to people themselves, e.g. by repeating what they are saying in our minds or using reflective listening techniques to respond out loud. But multitasking -- the thing that we all do constantly -- is probably degrading our ability to pay focused attention, because it sensitizes us to the alerting/awareness system instead. The latest alarm or chime draws our attention away from what we are attempting to attend to. Jackson suggests that we need fewer of those alerts (some can be turned off), and less background noise (e.g., not leaving the TV on in the background, unless we actually are sitting down to watch something specific on TV). Reading promotes better focus than video -- maybe an actual book, without the information-scroll that's often present at the margin of a screen. On the far end of the spectrum, she suggests a retreat in a quiet place with no electronics, where you have to talk to other people who are there with you. We might be able to build these practices into everyday life by setting aside times that are distraction-free, like family dinner or Sunday church. And during the workday, consider turning off background email or other notifications -- it takes you more time to re-orient each time you get interrupted, and you lose some of your limited attentional capacity for the day, so you will be able to do more work in less time if you set aside specific blocks of time for email checking and responding.

One take-home message of Jackson's book is that our world is profoundly distracting. And when we become distracted, there are more opportunities to get derailed by our Intuitive-Mind reactions to each new piece of information that pops up. One of the key implications of Two Minds Theory is that just telling ourselves to do something different in everyday life, or wanting a different behavioral outcome, is unlikely to succeed as a strategy for self-management. But attention is an area in which -- unlike behavior -- we may actually have some conscious control. Deliberately deploying our attention throughout the day, and practicing the skill of focusing over time to build a stronger "attention muscle," may help us to better manage ourselves in ways that align with our long-term goals.