#380 — The Roots of Attention

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0:44Today I'm speaking with Amishi Jha. Amishi is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and she serves as the director of contemplative neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and did postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Amishi's work has been featured at NATO and the World Economic Forum and the Pentagon. on. She's been covered in the New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, Forbes, etc. And her TED Talk, titled How to Tame Your Wandering Mind, has been viewed over 5 million times.

1:27And she's the author of the book Peak Mind. We focus mostly on attention and the brain. We discuss how attention is studied, the failure of brain training games, the relationship between attention and awareness, mindfulness as an intrinsic mental capacity, the neurological implications of different types of training and meditation, the neural correlates of attention and distraction, the prospects of self-transcendence, the link between thought and emotion, the difference between dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness, how we might study non-dual awareness in the lab, the influence of smartphones, the value of mind wandering, and other topics.

2:10And I bring you Amishi Jha.

2:18I am here with Amishi Jha. Amishi, thanks for joining me. Very happy to be here, Sam. So tell our audience what you have focused on scientifically and academically up to now. Sure. So I am a, like you, a neuroscientist. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. And the work I do in my lab is focused on understanding how the brain's attention system functions, what makes it fail and makes it vulnerable. And as it relates to mental training and mindfulness, what we can do to strengthen it. So a lot of our effort has been kind of shifting over the years from more of the basic mechanisms of how attention operates to understanding the factors that we must consider in trying to strengthen it and protect it, especially for groups for whom attention can be a matter of life and death.

3:15I mean, in some sense, that's all of us. But particular professions like emergency services folks, military service members, medical and nursing professionals, truly their lapses could mean grave consequences for others. Yeah. Yeah. So what tools do you use to study attention at the level of the brain? Yeah. So we use functional MRI and EEG, as well as with most of our work sort of out in the field, so to speak, we're doing behavioral measures with various cognitive tasks, as well as a whole battery of sort of subjective or self-report metrics. Let's bring in your interest in mindfulness and meditation.

3:52How did you come by that and what has been your level of exploration there personally and what teachers or traditions have been important to you? Right. So the answer is sort of in two parts, the personal journey and the professional or actually research-related journey. And of course, they intersect at multiple points. As I mentioned, most of my training as a cognitive neuroscientist was really in the basic mechanism. So just figure out, which is not a simple thing, but figure out how it works. And I started getting a little bit antsy around this because what we were finding repeatedly that my advisors had already known was that this system of the brain is extremely powerful.

4:34So much so that I'll refer to it as the brain's boss because we know that wherever it is that we devote our attention will modify almost the entirety of the computational functioning of the brain. It can bias it in very, very profound ways. So if it is this boss, I started getting excited in my early years as an assistant professor, that was at the University of Pennsylvania, on what we could do to perturb attention. And that meant doing all kinds of fun things in the lab, like bringing in undergrads and having them do intentionally demanding tasks and then sort of messing with them in kind and IRB approved ways.

5:06So either negative mood inductions or psychosocial threat, telling them that they're not doing as well as other folks, stressing them out in various ways. And repeatedly and reliably, we saw that their attention failed them. So we started getting a picture of all the ways in which you could perturb attention. And that, of course, led to devastating consequences for the normal ways in which attention could bias information processing. And that's what, from the laboratory perspective, got me extremely curious, and I would say desperate to find some way in which we might train attention. So this was the early 2000s.

5:42And at that point, sort of two things were happening. In the cognitive neuroscience literature, there was a proliferation of studies on brain training approaches, right? So these simple brain, simple behavioral tasks that people play as games and seeing if we can actually strengthen functioning. And even at that point now, it's sort of been very much clarified that this is a problematic approach because you get better at the game, but not much else. There's many, I think, very well-intentioned enterprises that have, and then many researchers that have tried to do this in their laboratories. but the problem was you'd get better and better at the game, but then when you shifted even the most subtle aspects of the perceptual input or the task demands, you were kind of back to square one.

6:24So we weren't seeing that there's some core strengthening of attention as a general resource. And so we tried other things like light and sound or technology facilitated things. And now people have gotten much more sophisticated with direct current stimulation, et cetera. Nothing was really working. I was not finding that anything was able to, in a sustained way, benefit attentional functioning. So that's sort of happening in my lab, in my pursuit of trying to understand how to strengthen attention in the face of these sort of potent kryptonite factors that disable it. In my personal life as a young assistant professor who had just had her first kid, I was battling a lot of what can happen with a multitude of demands and trying to be the best I could be in all the roles that I played in my life.

7:10And I found that I just could not keep hold of my own attention. And it was this very sort of ironic realization. It's like, this is all I study. This is what I do in the lab. Yet I am just all over the place. I'm not aware of what's happening. And it got to the point, especially as it related to my family, that I felt like it was unacceptable. And there's one moment that I remember trying to read my then toddler, a book. And at some point in the middle of, there's a book I read, and you have children, right? I mean, just read the same book over and over and over again, to the point where I could tell you the words on the next page.

7:49But at some point he is, so we've read this book multiple times. It's a bedtime story. And at some point in the middle of the story one night, he sort of stops me. And he asks me something about what's on the page. And I had absolutely no idea. It's like I was completely going through the motions. And that made me very, very, I don't know. I felt very tender about it. Like this is him as a toddler. I mean, if I'm starting to miss things now, what about when he really, really needs me? And it was a wake-up call in my life of like, I got to figure out how to pay better attention. And so I went sort of on a personal hunt, trying to see if there's anything in the literature, in the scientific literature of like, okay, look, maybe there's something I missed, right?

8:26These brain training games we know aren't really working or technology solutions aren't working. There's not really a lot of evidence that there's anything. And through a series of sort of fortuitous events, one having to do with Richie Davidson visiting Penn at that same period of time, spring of the semester, I was having all these things. And he gave a talk sort of in his standard affective neuroscience talk, because this was so early on in the whole mindfulness, I don't know, explosion of literature. he didn't even talk about or mention anything about the meditation work he was doing. But at the end of his talk, he showed this kind of now very often seen image, but at that point, it was pretty novel.

9:03A brain that had been induced to be in a negative state and showing this sort of functional MRI brain activation profile. And right next to it, one that was induced to be in a positive state. And he did this basically by having people remember autobiographical memories that were either positive or negative. And what was his point was essentially, look, how distinct these are, that we can put the brain in these affective states and they're different from each other. But given what was going on in my life, at the end of the talk, I raised my hand and I basically was like, how do you get that brain pointed to the negative one to look like that brain, the positive one?

9:36And he almost a little bit in a flippant way said meditation. And that was sort of the close of the session. And I was sort of like, what? I'd never ever heard anybody use that term in a context like that. And what's your background, Amishi? I was just going to tell you. So my background is as an Indian woman. Of course, I'd heard about meditation. I mean, it was like my earliest memories are my parents meditating. So this is something I knew very much as part of the cultural landscape of my personal life. But frankly, for a lot of reasons, which we can choose to go into if we want, I had completely rejected it to shorthand it.

10:15Essentially, I was not interested in anything at that point that I thought was not serious, like a serious endeavor that could have some basis in science. But the second part was that the culture itself, I felt had a lot of sexism and other things that I didn't feel were welcoming to me and who I was. And so I just kind of rejected the whole thing outright. So in some sense, I had already had a thing against meditation from my personal background. And then here is this affective neuroscientist who I admire and I really respect. And he's saying this term and I couldn't kind of square the two. So at some point later on in his visit, we had a chance to sit down and talk about what he'd been up to.

10:52And that opened me up a bit. Like, okay, given what he's starting to find with the adept monastics regarding some of the structural and functional changes they were seeing, I opened up my curiosity and took a walk down to the Penn bookstore and started kind of browsing through the section on meditation. And I got very, very fortunate that the book I ended up picking was Jack Kornfield's Meditation for Beginners. And committed to kind of checking it out and reading it and started doing some of the practices. It came at that point with the CD, which my children don't even know what that is. But, you know, it really started making a difference.

11:26And it was a real aha moment where I realized that, oh, my goodness, the thing that I've been doing in these practices quietly by myself every day, which is essentially a foundational, one of the things was essentially a mindfulness of the breath practice of focus your attention on breath-related sensations. Notice when the mind wanders, and when you do return it back, that this activity was very much tied to what I was desperately looking for within my lab, an approach that may help to protect and strengthen attention. So after maybe six months, I said, that's it. I'm going to try to figure out what's going on here and bring these tools that I'm personally practicing, put them to a strong test and wrote my first NIH grant on exploring the effect of mindfulness meditation on attention.

12:13And then I've sort of haven't stopped since. So that sort of brings together the journey of the personal and the professional. Nice, nice. And so when did you first start publishing on mindfulness and attention? 2007. So your interest in all of this, it's perhaps surprising to realize that all of this precedes what the smartphone has done to everybody's life, right? I mean, it's amazing. When we think about a crisis of attention now and a war being fought for our attention, I think the first thing people think of now, I mean, really the front lines of this battle is the computer they're carrying around in their pockets.

12:53But obviously, this has been a problem for thousands of years, and everything the Buddha recommended was appropriate to a scattered human mind 2 ,500 years ago. But let's define a few terms. How do you define attention? How would you differentiate it from mindfulness? And how do you think about both of those things in relation to consciousness or awareness, which I use as synonyms. All three? Yeah. So you go for attention, mindfulness, and just the basic faculty of consciousness slash awareness slash sentience. Yeah. Well, I definitely want to dig in on how that relates to what I'll tell you in my view of attention.

13:36So the main thing about attention is that it really, if we think about it, sort of evolutionary purpose, right? Or how it became something that we all possess in our own minds to solve a big computational problem that the brain suffered from, that there was just far more information in the environment than could be fully processed in any one moment. So the notion of selecting a subset of what is experiencing for full interrogation using the full computational power of the brain, you know, whether it's in much less sophisticated organisms than the human brain, makes sense to me. And from the kind of standard cognitive neuroscience perspective, attention and its selection ability isn't one thing, but at least three things.

14:17And we could probably laundry list even more, but the three ways in which we pay attention really guide and connect to your second part of your question regarding mindfulness. So the first system of attention is really regarding sort of selective focus or selection, content-based privileging of some information at the exclusion of other information. And that prioritizing and privileging in the brain, we know, shows up as biased information processing in favor of what we pay attention to. So this would be something like the brain's orienting system, as well as aspects of what executive functioning does.

14:52But the core thing here is some things matter and are advantaged and other things are not. So I refer to this in this kind of metaphor of a flashlight. So if you're in a darkened room, this aspect of attention would be like having a flashlight privilege wherever it is that you're directing it toward. And the holding of the flashlight is its sort of endogenous or control capability that you can move around and guide what you need to do on a sort of piece by piece basis to put together, you know, making your way out of the room if you're in a darkened room. So the features of this kind of attention are really narrow, constrained, high signal to noise ratio.

15:27But if we move away from that system and kind of talk about the next aspect of attention, It's almost the exact opposite. And it might even tie into what you were describing as awareness, which is formerly the brain's alerting system. So this we could think of as privileging, not the content like the flashlight, but the moment. Because really, when you think about being alert, it's about what is happening, the full spectrum of what is happening right now. You can't save up being alert for later. Low signal to noise ratio, broad, receptive. And sometimes I'll refer to this as sort of a floodlight.

15:57Just everything that is happening without a selectivity is illuminated in this moment. for your full conscious access. So narrow, directed, broad, and receptive. And then the third aspect of attention, which of course, all of these interact with each other in some way and are supported by distinct brain systems. The third aspect is really regarding goal-related selection. So it's not based on the particular content or the moment, like the first two, but what are my goals in this moment? What do I want to be doing? And then ensuring that our actions align with our goals. So something called executive functioning and this system's job, or you might call it attentional control, this system's job is to ensure that goals and actions are aligned and to course correct when they're not.

16:40And I like the metaphor here of a juggler. So you're kind of keeping all the balls in the air. You're not trying to do every single individual task, but you're overseeing and coordinating. So all three of these in my mind very much relate to mindfulness and mindfulness practice, which I'm happy to talk about next, but just want to pause. Is there anything else you wanted to ask me about? Yeah. So just to frame that just slightly differently, but give it an experiential sense for people. So people are obviously listening to us now and trying to pay attention to the thread of this conversation, but they might be doing other things simultaneously.

17:15They might be taking a walk or driving and paying attention to other things. And so there's this kind of spotlight function of awareness that can select a subset of experience, however momentarily, is constantly doing that, right? So they get distracted from the flow of this conversation by something in the environment. They might suddenly notice that might, quote, demand their attention. And all of that competition is happening in the context of this wider field of awareness that you just described as a kind of floodlight. It's the wider space of experience from which things can get promoted to focus, where the background can suddenly become foreground.

18:02So you can take this in one sensory channel, right? So if you're looking in your visual field, you can focus on a single object, and you can attempt to focus on that thing to the exclusion of everything else, and yet you still notice that you see more than that object. There's stuff in your peripheral field that might suddenly capture your attention. You know, if someone suddenly just steps into the room, you're going to notice and turn your head and engage that person, right? Yeah. Yeah, by the way, this, I'm sorry, finish your thought. Yeah, so there's this kind of foreground-background dynamic we can see in what we notice in awareness and it can be ever-changing and so you know that that really grabs two of the concepts i mentioned at the outset which is attention this narrow focus and awareness or consciousness which admits of a much wider field of contents and now we're bringing in mindfulness to the picture which is this export from buddhism explicitly although it has analogs and other traditions, which is a way of training the mind to pay attention in a very specific way.

19:16Yeah. So no, I mean, she bring in mindfulness. How do you think about it? Yeah. So, I mean, I think that just to go back to what you said a second ago, right? The broader field of the unfolding of what occurs in our experience, some of which we have conscious access to, and the spotlighting of information. So I would say in some sense, if the spotlighting can happen in all three ways that I described. The spotlight can literally be like a spotlight where you're highlighting some part of space and not other part of space, or it can be spotlighting in quotes of this moment relative to other things that are happening in your past or something about the future, which would be more like alerting.

19:53Or the spotlighting can be relative to the goals I'm holding right now. And that can be both in terms of how we relate to the external environment, like we were talking about the flashlight being pointed toward a part of space, as well as the internal environment. And part of the reason I really like that flashlight approach is it's like, and I will get to mindfulness in a second. I just did want to kind of mention this because it relates to the full scope of what mindfulness I think will help with. The flashlight metaphor is useful because we can hold a flashlight. We have that agency and control, but if we are walking down a darkened path and we're pointing the flashlight toward where we want to walk it, it's goal-directed attention, right?

20:32So sort of executive control and this kind of capacity to select are working together. If you hear a rustling, what's going to happen? You're going to get captured by it. The flashlight, even without much preparation, is going to be pointing to something else, probably where you thought you heard the noise come from. So not only is it endogenous or controlled, but it can be exogenous and captured by things that are happening in our environment. And this flashlight can be pointed to internal mental content and can also be captured by internal mental content. So if I ask you to remember what you had for dinner last night.

21:02In some sense, what you're doing is recalling the episode of last night's events, pointing the flashlight to the granular time period of dinner, maybe even visualizing what you had and pulling that out so you have more access to that information. Or it could be captured by a thought, like, oh shoot, did I leave my faucet running or whatever it might be. So I think that the internal external domain, as well as this multiplicity of how we spotlight information is important to think about. Now, the excitement for me regarding mindfulness is that it seemed to cover a lot of this terrain. And the way that I would describe mindfulness sort of most broadly is that it's a mental mode, a way of making the mind.

21:41It's an intrinsic capacity. You don't get mindful only by practicing mindfulness meditation. You hold this in what you possess in your mind. And that mental mode is characterized by this sort of purposeful attention to our present moment experience with these qualities of non-elaboration and non-reactivity. So we're doing our best when we are in a mindful mode of getting the raw data, not an editorialized version, but the raw data of our present moment experience that has both to do with what's happening sort of externally and internally. Yeah. So again, just to take another pass over that same ground with slightly different words, what mindfulness is is as you say it's not some artifice you're that you're adding to your experience you're invoking a capacity of the mind that you already have it is in fact attention it is noticing what you notice in each moment but it is doing it in a non-discursive and one could argue ultimately non-conceptual way which is that you're you know insofar as possible to make contact with the raw data of experience in all your sensory channels and in your mind, it is attempting to do that, and it's also attempting to do it in a way that is not reactive to what is pleasant and unpleasant, because our habitual mode is to notice that much of our experience is valenced, and sometimes quite strongly valenced, positively or negatively.

23:11So things taste really good, or they taste really bad, they feel really good or they feel really bad. We like the way certain ideas and thoughts feel, their implications, and we have strong emotional reactions to them. And all of that reactivity is what mindfulness as a practice is designed to bypass and ultimately quiet. The goal of mindfulness is not merely to be mindful from the point of view of Buddhist practice, it's to achieve a kind of equanimity in the mind where the mind is no longer reacting to the pleasant and unpleasant in the usual ways and where a kind of native tranquility and well-being can be found in the present moment really orthogonal to anything that's happening, right?

24:04So your happiness, if the practice succeeds, your sense of well-being and fulfillment and happiness is no longer contingent upon the changing winds of experience, right? It's not, your happiness is no longer predicated on, can I secure this next thing that I just thought to desire? Rather, you're noticing something about the native capacity, the mind, to be open and relaxed. And, you know, we can talk about this, but even positively valenced in a way that is not reaching forward into experience in a grasping, anticipatory, greedy way, but is actually just positively valenced based on the fact that it's no longer contracting, it's no longer reacting, it's no longer at war with experience inside or outside, but it's just open.

24:57And so mindfulness as a practice is a way of invoking that kind of attention and training it to the point where it becomes a kind of default. You know, that takes some practice, but that's the goal of the practice. Absolutely. And I love the way you put it regarding the sort of naturally emerging equanimity and positive-leaning mind, right? So you're not contriving anything. Because again, when you're contriving, you're elaborating or you're conceptually constraining in some rigid way. And the thing that becomes interesting from the brain training perspective is, well, what do you do to get there?

25:35So if we all have this mode, why do we need to bother practicing mindfulness and mindfulness exercises or mindfulness practices? And what are the factors that deter us from holding that mental mode more often? And this gets into what I would sometimes refer to as sort of the dark matter of cognition, or also known as distractibility or mind-wandering, having off-task thoughts during an ongoing task or activity. And so one of the ways that I like to describe mindfulness is using this sort of metaphor of an MP3 player and thinking about our capacity, our intrinsic capacity for mental time travel.

26:11There's a lot of chatter happening and we're filled with that chatter. And oftentimes that chatter takes us to the past so that we can reflect on it, or it takes us to the future so we can plan for it. But oftentimes, especially for the kinds of populations that my lab works with, under high stress circumstances, especially when those periods are protracted, you're rewinding and fast forwarding in very unproductive ways. So that now when you're rewinding, the chatter may be a lot of rumination and you're kind of that flashlight is yanked to the past and almost stuck there. Or you are forecasting a doom filled catastrophic scenario in the future, which you just made up in your mind.

26:50And in some sense, this is what we're kind of jockeying between, rumination and catastrophizing. And so when we think about what mindfulness is, it's keeping the button on play so that you are actually experiencing the moment-to-moment unfolding of what is transpiring of your life, frankly. And so this also, I think, makes it very kind of accessible. Like, okay, I get that. I get that there's a need for me to do something because I can imagine the tendency of my mind, and we know what the data says about 50 % of our waking moments, we're not here. We're in the past or the future, and kind of rapidly going back and forth between those.