After reading this little article called The Benefits of Distraction I picked up one of the books it mentioned titled Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the topic of attention and focus, but the book makes a few interesting points that are helping me come to terms with my confusion about the subject.

Basically, I see a lot of talk about attention and a lot of it seems to contradict itself:

• Our brains can only give attention to one thing at a time; multi-tasking is really just the process of shifting your attention between multiple things.
• Our brains can’t pay attention to any one thing for very long without a lot of effort.  Meditation is one way of honing this skill.
• Yet, meditation isn’t about focusing on any one topic or subject, it’s about letting your attention diffuse across all things, paying attention to no one thing in particular.
• Flow, as described by the book of the same name, is an ideal state, often referred to as a peak experience, and it is the state of immersion in a task, becoming one with the task, and losing your sense of self.  It’s goal-oriented, but loses a sense of time or effort.

See why I get confused?  What exactly are people talking about when they talk about attention, and what is the right skill to hone: the ability to focus, or the ability to not focus?  The ability to stay on a single subject, to take in all subjects, or to immerse oneself in an experience?

I personally think that “flow” is the correct state to seek.  It’s a creative state, not a willful state.  It is open to the unexpected, and highly adaptive to new inputs from outside.  It can have elements of multi-tasking, as it’s not all about the conscious mind doing one thing after another… it could involve several tasks at the same time (for example, in the case of a soccer player, taking in the location of teammates while also maneuvering the ball, being aware of the clock, your own skills, the chance of scoring, etc).

Being “rapt” is potentially the same as “flow”.  I think that’s what she’s trying to get at, at least.  And yet, her description of the state of being in rapt attention is very top-down.  Deliberately paying attention to the things you want to pay attention to.  Focusing on your iPod’s song instead of the dirty bus you’re on.  Focusing on the positive rather than the negative.  Her premise is captured in the opening quote by William James, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” It’s a very Type-A activity.

What I learned

The part that triggered something for me, though, was in the dichotomy she’s created between bottom-up attention and top-down attention.  Bottom-up is the attention that is experiential, immersive, open to all incoming stimuli, reactive, and often prone to whatever your subconscious believes is the most important current input.  Top-down attention is goal-oriented, controlled, and pragmatic.

Bottom-up attention helps you navigate through traffic while top-down attention helps you notice the right off-ramp to get to where you want to go.

And so, to me, it’s obvious that the two should be balanced, never to bottom-up that you forget where you’re going on what you’re doing, and never so top-down that you drive through the tree in order to get to the forest.

This entry was posted by Buster on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 7:16 pm. It is filed under Responses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.