Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Page 28
a traffic incident or argument. This of course then interferes with
R-mode processing, and you’re back to working with half a brain
again.
You might hear yourself often saying, “I’d love to, but I don’t have
the time.” Or some new task comes up at work, and you think you
just don’t have the time to attend to it. It’s not really time that’s the
issue. As noted earlier (in Section 6.3, Create a Pragmatic Invest-
ment Plan, on page 164), time is just something you allocate. It’s
not that we’re out of time; we’re out of attention. So instead of say-
ing you don’t have time, it’s probably more accurate to say you
don’t have the bandwidth. When you overload your bandwidth—
your attentional resources—you’ll miss things. You won’t learn,
you won’t perform your work well, and your family will begin to
think maybe you have a brain tumor or something.
If you’re paying attention—really paying attention—you can accom-
plish marvelous things. Paul Graham, in his book Hackers and
Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age [Gra04], suggests that “a
navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb aircraft at 140mph on a pitching
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INCREASE FOCUS AND ATTENTION
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carrier deck at night more safely than the average teenager can cut
a bagel.”
Having been a teenager once, I can easily recall what was on my
mind as I stood patiently in front of the toaster. And it had noth-
ing to do with English muffins, bagels, toast, jam, or the buzzing
appliance in front of me. The teenager’s mind is easily distracted,
and that doesn’t seem to be one of those things that gets any better
as you age.
The pilot, on the other hand, is really, seriously focused. In that
situation, a moment of indecision or error, and you’re spectacu-
larly dead. We need to develop that sort of concentrated focus but
without the inherent risk of incineration.
Relaxed, Concentrated Focus
Here’s a simple thing to try. Sit down and take a moment. Don’t
think about the mistakes you made yesterday or worry about prob-
lems that might come up tomorrow. Focus on now. This one instant
in time. Right here.
No distractions.
No chatter.
I’ll wait.
It’s not easy, is it? Much of meditation, yoga, and similar practices
aim for the same goal: to offer some relief from that gibbering L-
mode monkey voice in your head, to live in the moment, and to
not divide your mental energy unnecessarily. The internal chatter
knocks us off our game.
A study published in the Public Library of Science-Biology2 showed
that training in meditation could improve a subject’s ability to pay
attention throughout the day.
Their testing gauged how well subjects could allocate cognitive
resources when presented with multiple stimuli, all competing for
their attention at once. Sounds like a normal day at the office....
Folks who had been given substantial training in meditative tech-
niques fared better than those who had been given only minimal
2.
Learning to Pay Attention [Jon07].
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training. But, most interestingly, nobody was meditating during
the test itself. As the article concludes:
“So these results indicate that intensive mental training can pro-
duce lasting and significant improvements in the efficient distri-
bution of attentional resources among competing stimuli, even
when individuals are not actively using the techniques they have
learned.”
In other words, the benefits are with you
See benefits 24x7.
all day long, not just when you’re meditat-
ing or explicitly “paying attention.” This is
a huge benefit: just as with physical exercise, working out provides
greater capacity and long-lasting health benefits.
TIP 39
Learn to pay attention.
If you want to more efficiently allocate your “attentional resources”
throughout the day, you need to learn the basics of meditation.
How to Meditate
There are many forms of what we might loosely call meditation,
ranging from the secular to the religious. We’ll look at a particular
form here that ought to do the trick. It originates from a Buddhist
tradition, but you don’t need to be a Buddhist—or anything else in
particular—to use it effectively.3
What you want to attain here is not a
Aim for relaxed
trance or to fall asleep or to relax or to
awareness.
contemplate the Great Mystery or any of
that (there are other forms of meditation
for those particular activities). Instead, what you want is to sink
into a sort of relaxed awareness where you can be aware of your-
self and your environment without rendering judgment or making
responses. This is known as Vipassana meditation. You want to
catch that moment of bare attention where you first notice some-
thing but do not give it any additional thought. Let it go.
3.
Meditation is a common theme, even if it’s not explicitly stated as such. The Judeo-Christian Bible advises that we should “Be still and know that I am God.” It’s that “being still” part that proves difficult, regardless of one’s beliefs.
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In this style of meditation, “all” you have to do is pay attention
to your breath. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but it does have the
advantage of not requiring any props or special equipment. Here’s
what you do:
• Find a quiet spot, free from distraction or interruption. This
might be the hardest part.
• Sit in a comfortable, alert posture, with a straight back. Let
your body hang off your spine like a rag doll. Take a moment
to become aware of any tension that you might be holding in
your body and let it go.
• Close your eyes, and focus your awareness on your breath—
that small point where the air enters your body and where it
exits.
• Be aware of the rhythm of your breath, the length and qual-
ities of the inhale, the brief pause at the top of the cycle, the
qualities of the exhale, and the brief pause at the bottom.
Don’t try to change it; just be aware of it.
• Keep your mind focused on the breath. Do not use words.
Do not verbalize the breath or any thoughts you have. Do not
begin a conversation with yourself. This is the other hard part.
• You may find yourself thinking about some topic or carry-
ing on
a conversation with yourself. Whenever your attention
wanders off, just let those thoughts go and gently bring your
focus back to the breath.
• Even if your mind is wandering often, the exercise of noticing
that you have wandered and bringing yourself back each time
is helpful.
Just as with the drawing exercise in Section 4.2, Draw on the Right
Side, on page 87, you want to shut down the chatter. In this case,
you are explicitly focusing on your breathing. In the drawing exer-
cise, you were trying to block any words from coming. In this exer-
cise, words can come—but you’ll just let them go. Just be aware;
don’t judge or think. Words, feelings, thoughts, and whatever, will
come up, and you’ll just let them go and return your attention to
the breath.
It’s important to approach this exercise with the idea that you’re
not going to sleep. You want to relax your body and quiet your
mind, but remain alert—in fact, you want to be very alert but to
focus that awareness.
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After spending some time like this, you can try deliberately control-
ling your breath. The segmented breath approach goes like this.
Consider the breath to be made of air traveling in three distinct
segments:
• The lower belly and abdomen
• The chest and rib cage
• The very upper chest and collar bones (but not into the throat)
Exhale fully. On the inhale, fill the lower belly first, pause ever
so slightly, then fill the chest, and finally fill ’er up all the way to
the collar bones. Keep your throat open and jaw relaxed. Nothing
should tense up.
Pause briefly at the top, and then exhale normally.
Pause at the bottom, and then repeat.
You can also turn this around and inhale naturally and then exhale
in a segmented fashion, or do both. In any case, you want to main-
tain awareness of the breath and the feeling of air in your lungs
and then let other thoughts just slide on by.
Of course, if any of these manipulated breath activities make you
anxious, short of breath, or uncomfortable in any way, return to
a natural breath immediately. No one is grading or judging you on
your performance; you want to do what works for you. Don’t overdo
it; try it for just a couple of minutes at first (say, three minutes).
The benefits of meditation have been widely studied. Recently,4
researchers showed that even children—middle-school students—
could benefit. Students who participated in a one-year study were
found to have an increased state of restful alertness; improve-
ment in skills indicative of emotional intelligence (self-control, self-
reflection/awareness, and flexibility in emotional response); and
improvement in academic performance. That’s not a bad return on
investment for sitting around and breathing.
Meditation might sound trivial. It’s not. I strongly suggest you give
it a try for awhile; paying attention is a critical skill.
4.
The Experience of Transcendental Meditation in Middle School Students: A Qualitative Report [RB06].
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Next Actions
! Experiment with meditation on a regular basis. Start by tak-
ing three deep relaxing “meditative” breaths at memorable
times during the day: waking, at lunch, dinner, or before
meetings.
! Try to build up to a set period of twenty minutes or so every
day, preferably at the same time. Can you begin to quiet your
inner thoughts?
Try this before reading the next section.. . .
STOP
You need to stop reading now and try this; otherwise you’ll be
breathing funny while trying to read, and you won’t be paying
attention to the next section, which, oddly enough, is about delib-
erately not paying attention.
8.2 Defocus to Focus
Some problems yield only to a less conscious approach. And that
brings up an interesting question. What counts as “work” or as
“effort”?
Are you “cooking” when you’re letting something marinate for
twelve hours? Are you “working” when you’re sitting around think-
ing about a problem?
Yes, is the short answer. Creativity does not function on a time
clock and does not generally yield results when pressured. In fact,
the situation is quite the opposite: you need to let go of the problem
with your conscious mind and let the problem sit in the marinade
of thought for a while.
Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing: A His-
tory of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and
Don’t do something.
Bums in America [Lut06], says, “It’s very
clear that for a lot of people the creative process includes an enor-
mous amount of sitting around doing nothing.” But to try to clarify
that position, it’s not the idea of not doing anything; it’s the idea of
not doing something.
Now this might present a problem in a post-industrial society. This
kind of critical “thinking time” is generally unrecognized and un-
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rewarded in most corporations. There’s a widespread misconcep-
tion that as a programmer (or other knowledge worker), if you’re
not typing on a keyboard, then you’re not working.5
Handing work over to the unconscious works only if you have some
data to work on. You first need to “fill up,” as it were, with what
facts you have.
Lutz goes on to say that everyone has their own version of the
“marinade,” that is, some way of letting their thoughts stew (I’ve
always been fond of mowing the grass, for instance). We’ve talked
about how the R-mode needs a chance to work on the material, but
there’s a related idea that comes from the “multiple drafts” model
of consciousness.
In Consciousness Explained [Den93], Dr. Daniel Dennett proposes
an interesting model of consciousness. Consider that at any given
moment, you have multiple rough drafts of events, thoughts, plans,
and so on, constructed in your mind. Dennett defines “conscious-
ness” as the single draft that has the most brain cells or processing
activity in the brain at a single moment.
Think of the multiple drafts like different clouds of lightning
bugs scattered throughout the brain.6 Most of the different
groups/clouds flash indiscriminately; a few flash together as a
whole cloud. When several of the clouds flash in sync with each
other, they in essence take over the brain for a brief moment. That
>
is consciousness.
Suppose your senses register some new
Multiple drafts form
event. Dr. Dennett says, “Once a partic-
consciousness.
ular observation of some feature has been
made by a specialized, localized portion of
the brain, the information content thus fixed does not have to
be sent somewhere else to be rediscriminated by some ‘master’
discriminator...these spatially and temporally distributed content-
fixations in the brain are precisely locatable in both space and time,
but their onsets do not mark the onset of consciousness of their
content.”
5.
As with many issues, this one may expose some generational bias as well; Millennials seem to have less of a problem with this than Boomers, for instance.
6.
Thanks to Steph Thompson for suggesting this metaphor.
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Procrastination vs. Marinating
How can you tell the difference between stewing thoughts
in a marinade vs. time-sucking procrastination?
I’ve always referred to procrastination as “making paper
dolls.” A close friend (who shall remain nameless) had a
major college exam coming up the next day. But instead
of studying the night before, she was just sitting on the
couch, cutting out long chains of paper dolls. That always
seemed to me to be the epitome of procrastination: an
unrelated, unproductive activity that blocks the real work
you need to do.
But maybe I was wrong. Perhaps that wasn’t procrastina-
tion at all. It was a highly tactile experience; perhaps it was
her version of the marinade after all. She passed the test
and went on to graduate with honors.
If the task is something you really just don’t want to do, then
it’s likely that any diversions are simply procrastination. If
you’re still interested in it but feel “stuck,” then the ideas
are still stewing, and it’s OK.
In other words, recognition has not yet reached a conscious level.
He continues, “This stream of contents is only rather like a nar-
rative because of its multiplicity; at any point in time there are
multiple ’drafts’ of narrative fragments at various stages of editing
in various places in the brain.” This flow from draft to draft creates