A Strong Mind And A Fully Experienced Life: The New Science Of Attention
“You are missing 50% of your life“, the author says.
“What does that even mean“, I think. It sounds like a big claim.
On further reading, it looks like the author can back this up. She is a neuroscientist who researches about attention. To paraphrase her notes: You’re missing half of your life in the sense that, at any given moment, your mind isn’t right here. You’re either half-thinking of a task, you are bothered by something, or you’re thinking about something unrelated. You’re mentally checked out.
But, she clarifies, this is a feature of your brain, not a bug. You’re not meant to attend to everything. There is too much information in your immediate environment. Attention serves as a filter of information. One problem is that your attention can be easily hijacked. And when it is distracted, a lapse of judgment could be as simple as a forgotten thought, or something as big as consequences in law enforcement or in the military.
Your attention is important. If left untrained, it’s as if you’re simply at the whims of whatever grabs your attention next. Instead, you want to be able to notice and monitor your conscious experience. The author calls this “meta-awareness”. She prescribes “Mindfulness Meditation” as a form of mental training to help strengthen this.
Meditation, as a term, carries some baggage; like it doesn’t belong on a scientific inquiry. The good thing is that, now, this can be tested in a lab – instead of just a collection of self-reported notes. And that’s what the author and her team of researchers did.
What’s interesting is that they also tested other strategies and common advice like: “Think positive. Set goals and visualize. Suppress bad thoughts.” They found that these strategies are ineffective in high stress and high-pressure periods because they take up more cognitive resources. On the other hand, Mindfulness Meditation instructed on anchoring your attention in the present moment and to experience it without judgment.
As part of the conclusion, the author wrote, “Having a peak mind means living fully in the face of everything we have to deal with as human beings. Through stress, grief, joy and tragedy.” […] “The battle for your attention is the battle for the resources to live your life.” Your attention affects how you create memories, how you accomplish goals, how you play out emotions. It affects your relationships, and your general worldview.
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