What prevents us from focusing (on ourselves)

Psychologies: It would seem that it has long been obvious to everyone how important it is to be able to concentrate and be focused in order to solve your problems, achieve your goals … But why is it so important today to learn to control your attention, to understand its mechanisms?

Anastasia Gosteva: Daniel Goleman, in his book, quotes the Nobel laureate economist Gerber Simon, who in 1977, almost 40 years ago, said: “It is quite obvious that information absorbs. It absorbs the attention of those for whom it is intended. On the one hand, people at all times have understood how important it is to manage their attention. But the amount of information that a modern person faces is growing not just at times, but exponentially. And so today this problem is particularly acute. Western economists are increasingly saying that the information economy is over – we are moving into an attention economy. How you manage your attention from childhood depends on how you feel, how you live, how happy, harmonious and socially successful you are.

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• Daniel Goleman: “We risk losing the skill of attention management”

Alexander Orlov I agree with Anastasia that the problem is relevant, although, in my opinion, there are not many elements of novelty in this book. The author focuses on attention, but this, as we know, is only one of the higher mental functions. In fact, everything in us is connected, and it is very difficult to say: are all those problems that are discussed in the book – these are problems of attention or are they problems of something else? Like motivation?

Yakov Kochetkov Clinical psychologists have recently observed a growing wave of disorders of what is called executive function in neuropsychology, when it is very difficult for a person to control his attention, his mood arbitrarily. And this is connected not only with the boom of information, but also with our total gadgetization. Modern children from a very early age, literally from the first year of life, get used to iPads and do not part with them either at the table or in transport. And not children control gadgets, but gadgets control them, and this is a very serious problem.

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• Daniel Goleman book “Focus”

Psychologies: We really can’t get around the topic of gadgetization, Daniel Goleman himself writes a lot about this in the book. But I would like to touch on it in connection with another topic – multitasking. Today there is a lot of talk about how the key to success is the ability to do several things at the same time. Let’s say: look for information on a mobile phone while sitting in a meeting, and at the same time listen to what is being discussed there and even participate in a general discussion. Goleman argues that it is impossible to cover several areas of activity at the same time. You can only quickly switch from one object of attention to another. Why is it so hard to learn this?

Alexander Orlov: We can say: yes, the problem is that we are too scattered. Reality offers us so many channels in which we can invest our attention that there is simply not enough of it for everything. But we can look at the same problem from a different angle. And say, for example: we lack arbitrariness. We are not in a position to arbitrarily choose one thing from the buffet that is in front of us and the assortment of which is endlessly expanding. Here I am, as a university teacher, increasingly faced with a problem that is becoming typical for students. We can call it differently – information overload, depression, non-differentiation of cognitive interests. But in general, it looks like lack of motivation, passivity, inability to concentrate, procrastination. And also – a sharp drop in productivity just when, it would seem, nothing prevents these young, unused life organisms from being completely successful. They create wonderful conditions that previous generations of students could only dream of. Such an abundance of literature, such technical possibilities … But many young people, sometimes, paradoxically, the most gifted, fall almost into a coma in this situation. Why is this happening? I do not know yet.

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• Train your attention

Anastasia Gosteva: Not so long ago, American neuropsychologists studied the brains of young children. 3–4 years is the age when neural connections and the nervous system are most intensively formed. It turned out that if such children spend more than 15–20 minutes a day on gadgets, they do not form the necessary neural connections. And by the time they grow up and come to study at universities, they are already, in a sense, disabled. It’s not that they don’t want to read six pages of text in a row. They just can’t do it – they have certain connections in the brain underformed.

Yakov Kochetkov: I agree with Alexander that our psyche is a complex system. But our education system does not teach children to manage their psyche at all. The volume of information that needs to be learned is increasing, and no one explains how to handle it. And this leads to the fact that parents, immersed in a highly competitive environment, are forced to spend time trying to withstand this competition, instead of developing their children. Today I took the child to school and heard the dialogue of two mothers. “Listen, does your daughter have a strict enough tutor?” one asks. “No, you know, it seems to me that he doesn’t chase her much. She comes after class and still has the energy to play.” And we were talking about children from elementary school! A very insightful conversation. Concerned about potential success, parents do not understand one simple thing: in order for a person to achieve this success, he must first learn to manage himself, and not fill his head with a huge amount of knowledge. Children growing up with perfectionist parents, by the way, especially often use gadgets as relaxation and distraction. The life of such a child fluctuates between two poles: either I do my homework, or I passively look at my tablet. And at the same time, he has absolutely no desires of his own. He doesn’t know what he would like. Mom will decide for him.

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• Yakov Kochetkov: “We need to feel that we can influence what is happening”

Psychologies: But the good news is that in his book, Daniel Goleman likens attention to muscle work. The fact is that our brain has neuroplasticity – the ability to strengthen already existing neural circuits and form new ones in those areas that we use more often. Distractedness negates this effect, and concentration, on the contrary, enhances it. It turns out that in the same way that we pump muscles in the gym, we can also pump up the muscles of our attention. Do you agree with this?

Alexander Orlov I absolutely agree with this thesis. Attention can be trained and good progress can be made in a very limited amount of time. I teach psychology at the Higher School of Economics. And part of our classes takes place in the form of supervision: a student, a future psychologist-consultant, works with a client, and the teacher sits in the same office to give feedback to his student after the session. In order to work with a client, you need to have a high degree of concentration on the other person. But the presence of a significant person (teacher) who is watching the process scatters the student’s attention and does not allow him to concentrate on his interlocutor. But as the learning process goes on, students become more attentive to their clients. And at some point of supervision, there is a feeling that these two people are in a separate space, in a kind of mental cocoon in which there is no one else, although the supervisor continues to sit in the same room at a distance of some two meters. Indeed, our ability to concentrate, our arbitrariness is trainable. And this inspires optimism. I also know another phenomenon: when a lagging student, seemingly demotivated and apathetic, misses classes at the university, but at the same time sits in front of the monitor for hours, working on one topic of interest to him, engaging in self-education and achieving amazing results due to the highest concentration on one subject. results. Unfortunately, the old patterns set by the education system prevent us from using the results of this concentration in the scientific process, from legalizing them.

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• One in three faces: when multitasking only hurts business

Psychologies: By the way, Anastasia Gosteva is one of those specialists who help us build the “muscles” of attention. How does the practice of mindfulness work in general?

Anastasia Gosteva: The practice of mindfulness helps us to bring attention back to ourselves in a very special way. This is not taught in our civilization. Remember this wonderful anecdote: Odessa, courtyard, children are playing football. The window opens and the woman shouts: “Izya, quickly go home!” The boy raises his head and asks, “Mom, am I hungry or cold?” If we grow up from childhood in a situation where our attention is not directed to ourselves, we do not hear the signals of our body, we do not understand what we feel. I lead mindfulness practice programs for top managers of various companies. I come to mature, 40-50-year-old people who, after trainings, tell me that they experience only two emotions – anger or pleasure. And they even climb into Google to see what emotions still exist. Mindfulness practice is an umbrella term, there are so many different techniques. But the emphasis is on the fact that we learn to be in touch with ourselves, with the body, breath, with emotions, without suppressing them and without pretending that we do not feel anything. I start watching as I think. After all, few people actually realize how he thinks. This is a very important point that distinguishes the meditation practice approach from any other attention training format.

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• Respect Your Body: 8 Exercises That Will Help You Love Yourself

Psychologies: Still, for a large number of people, meditation is a concept more from the field of esotericism and mysticism than from the field of neuroscience and psychology. What is meditation in psychological and scientific terms?

Anastasia Gosteva The Tibetan word “gom”, which means meditation, can be translated as “acquaintance”. Get to know your mind at work. That is what the Buddha suggested. The difference between the spiritual and secular practices of mindfulness lies only in the fact that in the second case we confine ourselves to talking about the body, emotions, trauma, but do not go into any philosophical depths, do not talk about who a person is. The beginning of scientific interest in meditation dates back to 1979. Then a young neuroscientist Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts (USA), was faced with the fact that he had a huge number of patients with chronic physical pain, psychological problems that could not be cured with medication. Kabat-Zinn himself practiced Zen and Vipassana meditation and therefore decided to offer these practices to his patients. Empirically, he found out: meditation works. And later, when MRI scanners appeared and it became possible to see what was happening with the brain, the number of studies began to grow like a snowball. There are now more than 1000 studies worldwide examining the effects of meditation on the brain every year. This is a huge number, of course.

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• Meditate in silence

Yakov Kochetkov: The practice of voluntary attention also allows you to build up the “muscles” of attention. Ironically, part of it has to do with gadgets. There are many programs, applications, games that allow you to train your attention. Studies have shown that if you dedicate 10-15 minutes a day to such a game, after 2 months your attention span and your concentration will increase. But there is another aspect: after all, we can be very attentive, just not to what we need. If a person, for example, is under stress, his attention is focused on some negative aspects of the surrounding reality. This has been experimentally confirmed: if people in a state of stress or depression are shown 10 faces on a monitor for a fraction of a second, among which there will be 2 gloomy faces, five neutral faces, and three cheerful faces, they will definitely say: all the faces were gloomy. Because their attention is focused on negative emotions. For such problems, too, there are special gaming techniques. For example, this: out of ten gloomy or neutral faces, you must very quickly choose one cheerful one. Until you choose, you cannot move to the next level. After several days of training, it turns out that the focus of this person’s attention is changing. This is about the practice of voluntary attention. And in cognitive-behavioral therapy, a direction based on the development of awareness has appeared. It has shown high efficiency in dealing with depression, stress, and other clinical cases. Here is one of the exercises: a group of volunteers are given cereal and raisins and are asked to first look at them very carefully, smell how they smell, then chew slowly, taste them, analyzing their sensations. People come out after a 10-minute exercise dumbfounded and say: “I haven’t eaten like this in the last few years. I don’t remember what I eat at all.” This is one of the practices that are used for mindful eating and weight loss.

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Psychologies: It turns out that the gadgets that we declare war on can also be used for peaceful purposes – this is good news. And by the way, we have questions from the audience.

Question from the audience: You said that gadgets make children more distracted and inattentive. But if a child is fascinated, absorbed in the game, is this not a sign of attention? And isn’t interest in any activity the only guarantee of awakening attention?

Yakov Kochetkov: A very good question. Because it reflects a myth that is actively promoted in the culture: work only where you are interested. This position is the opposite of what we call “voluntary control of one’s attention.” For a person who wants to drink vodka, this process is also extremely interesting. Playing something, the child is captured, of course. But this is because the gadget controls his attention, and not the child controls the gadget. He cannot say to himself: I will watch for 5 minutes, and then I will turn it off and open the book. It won’t. Attention control comes both through boredom and through some discomfort, and you need to accustom yourself to enduring this discomfort. Being bored sometimes is good.

Question from the audience: There is such an idea that a minimalist lifestyle, detachment from the outside world, allows you to better focus on something. Maybe we should limit ourselves to this variety of experiences, and then we can completely immerse ourselves in ourselves and focus on one thing?

Anastasia Gosteva: There are two different ways in which we can move. Many Eastern practices that are assimilated into Western culture were once formed in a monastic environment. And they were intended for people who, indeed, lead an extremely ascetic lifestyle. Who completely left the world – and solve certain problems with the help of meditation. An example of such a practice is a Vipassana retreat: you left for 10 days, turned off all gadgets, be silent, meditate, everything is fine. But then I meet people who are returning from retreat to the world, and they are blown away. This is the pendulum effect. Here, in the world, you still go to work, communicate with people, you have a family, children. And those techniques that are aimed at deepening oneself come into conflict with the surrounding reality. To live among people, other technologies are needed. In the West, for example, the practice of loving-kindness is actively used. In fact, this is the practice of developing empathy, opening the heart to others. When everything becomes for you a part of the space with which you are in harmony. There are no more distractions. But in my opinion, between the total acceptance of everything that exists and immersion in oneself, everyone should look for their own balance, using different approaches. Meditations included.

“Attention as a resource: appreciate, train, use effectively” was the name of the meeting, which was dedicated to the publication of Daniel Goleman’s book Focus. About attention, absent-mindedness and success in life. It took place on November 27, 2015 as part of the 17th International Fair of Non/Fiction Intellectual Literature with the participation of Psychologies magazine and Corpus publishing house.