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>> Kirsten Wiley: So good afternoon and welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley. And I'm here
today to introduce and welcome Winifred Gallagher, who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft
Research Visiting Speakers Series. Winifred is here today to discuss her new book "Rapt,
Attention in the Focused Life." Your life is the creation of what you focus on and what you don't.
But what is attention exactly? In today's world of omnipresent Blackberries, sound bites, Twitter,
and an increased incidence of ADD in our children it may be time to re-examine the role of
focused attention in the modern world.
Winifred is a scientist journalist for numerous publications including: The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling
Stone and the New York Times. She's the author of three other books including the
award-winning "The Power of Place." Please join me in welcoming Winifred Gallagher. Thank
you.
>> Winifred Gallagher: Good afternoon. Thanks for coming. I was telling some of your
colleagues in the corner there before we started that yesterday the book was written up in the
science section of the New York Times, and it became the most, the single-most emailed story in
the entire paper for that day. Forget Iraq, forget economy. Attention. I'm not saying it to blow my
own horn. I'm saying it that the people in the culture know we're under siege, and in the same
way that we're having an economic crisis brought about by taking on mortgages that we couldn't
pay and running up credit card bills that we couldn't handle, we're facing a kind of an attentional
crisis, where we're just being bombarded by too much and we've got to get a grip.
So I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the research that I did on the book, starting with the title,
Rapt attention is total focus, which is the key to controlling your experience and changing your life
if you want to change your life. Your outlook, your mood, your productivity, relationships, your
health, and also to inviting that wonderful experience optimum experience that's often called flow
or peak experience.
As William James, who is my personal hero, puts it, my experience is what I agree to attend to.
Isn't that great? My experience is what I agree to attend to.
The idea that your life is the sum of the material objects and mental subjects that you focus on is
not a fanciful notion but a physiologic fact.
Let's do a little experiment. Just look for a minute at the talking rain -- I wonder what that is,
Talking Rain can in my hand. Focus on it. Look at its size, shape, color. Make some
associations with it.
Neuroscientists have now discovered that what went on in your brain when you focused on the
can is a process of selection. Attention, the basic mechanism of attention is selection. It's an
either/or process in which your brain kind of spot lights or photographs the can or the most
compelling sight or sound or thought or feeling in your internal or external world.
And suppresses the rest. So when you're looking at the can, you're not looking at the double
doors over there.
It's a one-two punch, enhancing one thing and suppressing other things. That sort of snapshot
gets stuck in your kind of mental album of reality, because the target that you focus on is depicted
as scientists say, depicted in your brain.
So it becomes part of your world. In contrast, the things that you ignore might as well not exist as
far as you're concerned. That's a big one.
Attention's great benefit is turning what would be a vast totally chaotic world into your small
pocket version of the world. And that is a great benefit back in the, when I was the age of a lot of
you in this room and there were a lot of LSD trips going on in the hippie era.
People would have bad trips because the drug removed the attentional filters and the people
were flooded with stimuli, and they seemed to go, literally go mad.
So this thing that attention does, which is to filter reality for you, is what makes it possible for you
to function. However, that little piece of reality that you zero in on is far more fragmented and
subjective than you assume.
And we'll talk more about that when we get to relationships. If you look back over your years,
you'll see that if you had paid attention to other things, if you had studied law instead of medicine,
if you had gone with this partner rather than that partner. If you had settled in Chicago instead of
Seattle, your reality, your life and yourself would be quite different.
The same dynamic applies to the future you'll create starting today. As the expression "pay
attention" suggests, you have a limited supply of this mental money. One estimate calculated by
Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the expression "flow", he says you have enough
for about 173 billion bits of information over a lifetime.
And this is now a debate in the blog on the New York Times over, no, that's not enough or no
that's too much. But the point it's a finite resource. It's cognitive cash and you have to think
about just like where you think you're going to invest your money where are you going to invest
your attention.
Your answers will help shape your brain, your world and your experience. To ensure our survival
homo sapiens evolve two ways of focusing. Involuntary bottom up attention asks: What's the
obvious thing to hone in on here? For you all, it's me. But when you're out on the street, it could
be a wailing siren, flashing red lights, smell of smoke. You don't have to decide to focus on those
things. Your bottom up attention system will lock you into them for the very good reason that if
you had to think about whether to focus on the predator that's kind of sneaking up on the trail as
we evolved, that wouldn't be very good for your survival.
So things that have consequences for your life; you don't have to kind of worry about noticing
those things often in the physical world. But voluntary top down attention asks, not what's the
obvious thing to focus on here, but what do you want to focus on here? And that is the tool that
James is talking about and that I'm talking about in Rapt. Do you want to focus on the noise on
the street, which is getting your bottom up attention? Do you want to override that and focus on
the report that you have to write? Do you want to focus on the jealous thought or the peaceful
thought.
Top down attention lets you choose where you will put your focus and thereby creating your
experience. I wrote Rapt because I got about five years ago I got a terrible case of breast cancer
with a very poor prognosis.
And within a few minutes of getting, literally within minutes of getting the biopsy results, I had one
of those moments of amazing clarity and -- at least they were amazing in my life, where it was
almost like the clouds parted, the angels were saying, "Winifred, listen up."
This message was this negative event as psychologists would call it wants to monopolize all my
focus and attention and my coping strategy for however long I had left was to move forward with
my life instead, that I wasn't going to give this thing one second more attention than I had to.
So I did all the -- I found -- I did research. I found the best oncologists, radiologist and surgeon I
could find. And I said you guys take care of my body and I'm going to move on with my life. I
have a book to deliver, I have five kids and I have a lot to do and that was my coping strategy.
Somewhat to my surprise it worked extremely well. Through seven very difficult months, and
when I started to recover, I said, "There's something to this attention stuff and I better do some
research."
And that's really how the book started, and then I just found in fact wonderful research. But when
I went through that period of time, I saw that the power to focus on one thought rather than
another is especially crucial when you're dealing with negative stuff, whether it's getting fired or
getting ill or an idea or an emotion.
We naturally pay more attention to negative emotions like fear and sadness than to pleasant
feelings because they cause pain, and there's a very good reason why they cause pain.
The pain -- we evolve to pay attention to things that cause pain so we will solve the associated
problem. If you're upset by a quarrel with a friend, your upset makes you make amends. If you're
concerned or worried about your sick child, that anxiety makes you call the doctor.
If you're angered by injustice, you protest. In these cases focusing on a negative emotion is
useful, it's serving a problem solving purpose.
Often, however, we end up stuck on painful or destructive ideas and feelings that serve no
problem solving purpose. Because our brains are always looking for negative stuff so that we
can handle the things that are important. But it's kind of overkill.
You know the sort of thoughts: It's always her. It's never me. She gets all the lucky breaks. Or
I'm never going to lose those 10 pounds. I'm never going to lose. I've tried. Three pounds and
then I'm right back. I just can't do it.
Or how about this project that the boss just gave me, this is way too hard for me. I can't do this. I
don't have the qualifications. What if I fail?
To protect your experience, you must focus away from these useless thoughts to productive
positive ideas and emotions to, instead of I'll never lose the 10 pounds, to I will lose the weight if I
go to the gym. To not I'll never be able to handle this task, but this is a challenging chore ahead
of me but I'm going to give it my best shot, and I've done things that seem too hard before.
The difference between those two thoughts is all the difference in the world. It's not just more
pleasant to pay attention to positive, productive ideas, but more practical. Because they literally
expand your world.
In research done by Barbara Frederick son at the university Of North Carolina. She sits her
subjects in front of computers shows them a visual display. The people who have been cued to
be in a positive emotional state see many more things on the screen than people who are in a
negative or neutral state.
People who are in a negative state zero in, they have kind of a tunnel vision, so all this other stuff
out here isn't even on their, in their map of reality.
This has huge implications, not just for your visual field, but for your conceptual field. Are you
able to look at the big picture, or are you stuck with a tunnel vision?
You know? Which state do you think lends itself to making better decisions? The one with lots of
options or the one with like this is the only thing that's possible in this situation.
I think we had a really tragic example of this about 10 days ago when a young man, David
Kellerman, the big executive at Freddie Mac, felt so personally distraught over the wreckage of
that mortgage enterprise, was working 24/7, only came home to change his shirt. A young man
in his 40s. Wife, beautiful little girl. Neighbors, lovely house. Friends who loved him.
His reality contracted to that negative thing so that that was the only thing in the world and he
went down to his basement and hung himself. And at this time in our country when so many
people are going through such difficulty it's so important to remember that even if you have
cancer, you also have people who love you.
You have your old dog Shep. You have Netflix and your 6:00 martini. It's so important not to let
the world contract to that one negative thing. Not just because it feels better, but because you'll
be doing a better job.
Research on neural plasticity shows that your brain and behavior can be changed by what you
attend to and experience.
My favorite example, which some of you may know, it's an older experiment but it's so practical,
London cab drivers have to navigate this incredible maze of London streets. And FMRI images of
their brains show that their hippocampus, hippocampi, actually become enlarged in reaction to -and the hippocampus is the part of the brain that handles spatial processing and memory, they
actually have a bigger one, like the old cartoons of Popeye the sailorman. They develop a bigger
hippocampus than other people who don't have their experience.
And the same thing is true in the cognitive and emotional areas of life. Not just things like cab
driving.
Attentional workouts mostly derive from meditation. These are completely secular. They
certainly can be completely secular. Can modify your brain and make you more focused,
engaged and kinder. This is research from Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin and
others.
It boils down to two basic kinds of attentional regimens have been studied. One is paying single
pointed attention to a target for a specific period of time. The familiar meditate on your breath or
mandala or mantra or clouds or waves of the beach.
Just encouraging yourself to stay focused on one thing and dismissing distractions. That kind of
practice, once when you're not practicing it, when you're going about your daily life, improves
your daily concentration.
So you're better able, if you do that practice in the morning, for the rest of the day you're better
able to stay focused on this task and then that task and then when you go home, deal with the
home and when you're at work, you're dealing with work. When you're at home you're dealing
with home, without having that sort of bleedover thing that happens when you can't stay on
target.
The other very interesting form of meditation is, it's a more effective emotional target. Buddhist
monks, many of them, lamas who have spent more than 2,000 hours in meditation, if they
meditate on a feeling of universal kindness or compassion, certain areas of their brains activate
that are not activating at least in my brain, usually.
They've actually changed their brains in response to this affective form of meditation, which
Davidson is studying.
In both cases he takes research subjects and trains them in meditation and scans their brains
before and then eight weeks later and they, too, show brain changes from the practice.
These kinds of exercises can even fine tune temperament, which is personalities, biological
foundation. Some of us are born with an upbeat disposition like Bill Clinton. He never met a
stranger. He's always up.
That temperament correlates with greater activation and certain left prefrontal brain regions.
However, others can acquire both patterns of activation and the positive focus through attentional
training.
And this is really, I think, very interesting research that is going to pick up a lot of steam. The
point here is not to try to feel happy all the time, which would be both futile and grotesque. But to
focus on what makes you feel and function well rather than poorly.
Even during a health or a financial crisis, good and beautiful things can be happening in your life,
too. And the joy and meaning you find in the rest of life and your current stressor are separate
issues, and you can attend appropriately to both.
You know, so many people think if something bad happens I have to think of -- if I get a bad
biopsy, I have to think about cancer. If I'm going through a divorce, of course, I have to think
about divorce 24/7.
But what I'm saying is once you've done the associated problem solving, you do -- I'm not saying
it's easy, but you have the ability to shift your attention to something else. I've done everything. I
have my medical team in place. I'm going to follow their advice. Now I'm going to read my book.
And as Sujay Rampushe [phonetic], a Tibetan lama and one of the University of Wisconsin
research subjects says, you may have seen his picture. About a year ago on the book of the
National Geographic, wonderful image of Sujay and his monastic robe and shaved head and
millions of plastic sensors, which was sort of like a 21st century version of a halo from a
renaissance saint or something. It's a very striking image.
He says: Whether in meditation or in daily life we try to pay attention to just being present rather
than being caught between hope and fear which is the mind's usual condition.
In daily life, rapt attention, whether to work relationships or recreation, makes the difference
between passing the time and time well spent.
Focus is essential to peak experience or flow which kicks in when you concentrate on a
challenging and enjoyable activity. All the best research and when do people feel and function
their best, when do they say, boy, life is worth living, this is great, I was born to do this? It's when
they're engaged and I love this phrase, in activities that could be characterized as just
manageable difficulty.
Just manageable difficulty. And you want to try to keep yourself on that edge as much as
possible. That's why people are happy when they go skiing, surgeons when they operate are
among the happiest campers in the culture. Surgeons when operating experience as much flow
state as those people who jump out of airplanes with parachutes. I don't know what it's called.
It's that exciting. So it's the opposite experience of coming home at night when you're exhausted
and flopping on your couch and watching HBO reruns. You want to do that. You think it's going
to feel good. Actually, if you push through the inertia and do something like practice your guitar
or play the piano or do gardening or call up a person and have a real-time phone conversation,
there's an increasingly rare experience, you will in the end feel that you've passed a much more
productive and satisfying evening than if you spend another one with Tony Soprano.
Like Barack Obama and the Dhali Lama exceptional achievers in all fields are as notable for their
intense focus as their ability. Certainly that's one thing you see across the political spectrum,
everybody with Obama is like he's so calm. How does he do it? He's handling like six or eight or
10 crisis, any one of which would have monopolized a whole other administration in the past, and
he's out there he's having burgers with Joe Biden and he's out talking to people like a normal
human being and has a young family life.
I can promise you he's a monster focuser. From nine to 10 he's on healthcare. From 10 to 11
he's on the economy. Just like that. All day long.
And you see the results of living that way. That even living in like a pressure cooker, the guy
seems to be having a great time.
Rapt attention is crucial to creativity. The little experiment we did with the tin can which was
actually devised by William James suggests that focusing on something, whether it's a tin can or
a conversation or a person's face, makes it more interesting and engaging.
Ellen Langer creativity researcher at Harvard said to me if you don't like football, watch for a
while, maybe you find something, maybe you like the way the guys' butts look was the example
she gave, you will find yourself getting involved and say, hey, football is kind of, that guy has a
cute butt, football is kind of interesting.
Whatever you engage with becomes engaging. As James tells us, this is what the genius does in
whose hand a given topic coruscates and grows. Mozart could hear the fishmonger on the street
humming a little tune and Mozart goes back and turns it into the Jupiter Symphony. He focuses
and elaborates.
Attention is as important to love as it is to work. Indeed, it is the bottom line in any relationship.
It's impossible to have a relationship with someone who will not pay attention to you.
I loved -- this was the most surprising chapter in the whole book to me, the chapter on
relationships. And I start out with an interview I did with Rodney Brooks at MIT. Some of you
may know his work. Artificial intelligence expert and an intelligent robot designer. He designed,
among other things, Roomba the vacuum cleaner that cleans your house for you and many more
sophisticated tools than that.
And it's fun to actually go on his website and look at some of the pictures of these things, and the
first thing they have to do to have an interactive robot that can work with people, they have to give
the robot a way to express that it's paying attention to you.
And they do that, they give it big -- they all have big googly eyes and they tilt their chins, they do
what we do. So the robot goes hi. Kind of like that.
And robots that do that, people will interact with them. They also program the robot so it can tell
you're paying attention to it. It's the bottom line.
And certainly even more so in our relationships. But remember the way attention works means
that that little slice of life that you zero in on is much more fragmented and subjective than you
assume. That's why, when spouses list the past week's events, trips to Blockbuster, help the kids
with the homework, make the meat loaf or sex, whatever. The percentage of a pair's agreement
is at the level of mere chance.
I just love that. I just love that. Here are people, they eat together. They sleep together. They're
joined at the hip. You would think that these people are on the same planet.
You know, sooner or later in your life somebody will say to you: What, do you live in a different
world? And the answer is: Yes.
He or she does and you do and the only way you can -- you're focusing on a different reality and
the only way to bridge that gap is communication. Those little words at the end of the day, how
was your day, hon? Very important, because if you don't tell her or him, he or she is not going to
know.
Like people, cultures have attentional differences. And this is wonderful, interesting research by
Richard Nesbitt at the University of Michigan. When they're asked to describe an underwater
scene, westerners say: Three blue fish swimming to the left. Next.
Asians say: It looked like a stream. The water was green. There were some plants that had -this bottom was sandy. There were some fish.
They looked at the same exact slide but they attended to totally different realities. The
westerners who were reared in the Greek evaluative, get in there, figure out what's important with
a view of controlling it and move on, completely disregarded the context.
The Asians, reflecting their cultural upbringing in densely populated societies where cooperation
is essential if you're going to get anything done, it was all about relationships in context.
This is really like a different world. And you can see the, when you see those stories in the front
page of the paper with the GI sitting down with the tribal people in Afghanistan or the Iraqis and
you can just imagine like the reality check that's going on there, with the American guy says we'll
drill you a well and build you a school and now we gotta get out of here it's 10:45 and the Iraqis
and Afghanis are saying what about the tea. Who are you, tell me about your family. All the
context is missing.
It's not that either way is right or wrong. The Greek evaluative way of looking at the world gave
us science. But they are different and we need to keep those differences in mind if we're going to
get along better than we do.
Everyone has a occasional attentional problems, some of which are normal. All minds wander.
Perhaps 20 percent of the time. And that's a good thing, because sometimes it's when your
mind's wandering that you get that great little light bulb goes off. Einstein didn't figure out E
equals MC squared when he was hunkered over his desk he was walking across the yard at
Princeton.
Merely by focusing on something, a new car, a pink slip, you exaggerate its importance. And no
matter how great or terrible it is, you'll soon get used to it.
The great American psychologist, American Israeli psychologist, Daniel Conoman, who I
interviewed in the book, got the Nobel Prize in economics in 2003 for figuring that out. He said,
"I'll give you my fortune cookie maxim: Nothing is as important as you think it is when you're
thinking about it."
Isn't that great? I wish I could open a fortune cookie that said that every day to remind me. I
think it's such a great insight.
We focus on our thoughts about our experience. Vacationing in foreign places is mind expansing
and occasional rather than the experience itself. God, I'd love to go to that same little cabin on
Cape Cod.
But we will very often make decisions based on the cognitive evaluation of the experience rather
than the experience itself.
We forget that you must really pay attention to that person's name or PIN number if you're going
to learn and remember it. Duh, that sounds so obvious, but, boy, how many times have I talked
to somebody at a party for 20 minutes and then my husband will say, oh, who was that person?
And I'll go, I don't know. I was too busy thinking about what I was going to say next or who was
coming in the room behind that person that I didn't lock into the name. I didn't pay attention to it.
If you don't pay attention to something, you will not learn and remember it. At least not well.
When you need to focus, avoid interruptions, because rebooting your brain takes up to 20
minutes. And I understand this research was done by some of your colleagues here at Microsoft.
Work for about 90 minutes, then do something else. So instead of if you're working on something
important, turn off your machines for 90 minutes, focus, then turn the machines on and then
return your e-mails and return your phone calls. Have a cup of coffee. It's an attention enhancer.
It works. If you're having trouble staying on the target refocus on it in a slightly different way and
try to notice new things about it.
In our age of cell phones, Blackberries and Internet, it's important to understand that multi-tasking
is a myth. It is a myth.
I was telling your colleagues in the back there, I did the NPR Marketplace show a couple weeks
ago with Kai Ryssdal. And I thought he was going to cry. He wanted me to give him tips so he
would be able to do three or four things at once.
I was saying it's not happening, Kai. He took it very hard. When you try to focus on two things at
once, or when you think you're multi-tasking, phoning while checking e-mail, you're simply
switching rapidly between them.
And research shows it makes you less efficient and more error prone and takes you longer than
had you done task one, task two, task three. We all have done it. And I'm looking out in the
audience and I see some of you are doing it right now.
Here's a classic multi-tasking error. And it can be larger and more serious circumstances. It's the
end of the day and you're going through, you're deleting e-mails and returning phone calls and
someone picks up and says hello, and you go, who is this? You forget who you called because
you were doing your e-mail.
Or my personal favorite, you're on the phone listening to the Muzak trying to make an air
reservation or something and you hit,
you're answering an email, and you hit reply instead of forward and send that really bitchy remark
to the last person in the world you wanted to receive it.
These are classic multi-tasking errors, and of course these are little minor ones. They can be
much worse, as when you're driving and talking on a phone. It should be forbidden. It should not
be allowed.
Attention researchers are totally unanimous about that. Sure, you're driving through the corn
fields in Iowa and there's not a car in sight. It seems fine. Maybe it is. But what happens if a
deer runs in front of the car? Then you're really screwed.
We have to remember that our electronics are our servants not our masters, and we can't let
them choose our focus for us. I bet -- are there any people in here who are Battle Star Galactica
fans? Yes, I just discovered Battle Star Galactica. I write sometimes for the Atlantic Month.
They do a new piece it's a cool show contemporary themes, torture and racism. I said I better
check it out. I think it's so interesting, and I love what it says about our machines.
For those who are not BSG fans, as we call it, the plot is humans have invented these super
computers that look exactly like people. You can't tell who's a person and who is a Silon, they're
called Silons. Of course they're much smarter. They're like the $6 million man. Now the Silons
have gotten so powerful they figure who needs humans; we'll take over. It's like World War III,
the humans are fleeing all over the galaxy or universe and the Silons are right behind them and
it's like that.
When a human wants to insult a Silon, N word for a Silon, he says "You're just a toaster." "You're
a toaster." And I think that's so great. Because we treat our Blackberries and our cell phones
and our laptops like they're Silons and they're only toasters.
And it's just a funny little thing to keep in mind. I gave a presentation a week or so ago at the
Smithsonian, and my interlocutor was Dr. Richard Resdak, PBS series on the brain, 18 books on
the brain. Pretty smart fellow. I said do you have a Blackberry or iPhone? I have one but I
hardly ever take it anywhere, it's an invasion of my privacy.
Interesting. He doesn't feel that obligation. On my way from New York to San Francisco, I had a
classic experience that I know a lot of you have if you travel for business.
The cab ride from my home in New York to Laguardia -- to JFK, actually, we now have television
screens mounted in the back seats of the cabs so that there are commercials blaring. It's not bad
enough to be in the back with this person who may or may not know where they're going, jostling
in the back of the cab. You have to have commercials. If you're lucky you find a space that big
that says O-F-F. But you're working on the screen to turn it off.
I get to the airport. We get on to the plane and the pilot says you've got like five minutes on your
phones and everybody's like, it's like a Sunday morning. They all have relatives in intensive
care?
I don't know about you, but a lot of my messages are things like do you want me to pick up milk
on the way home? Mom, send money. You know, the weather is damp but the hyacinths are
blooming. It's not earth-shaking stuff. He says okay now you have to turn them off so we're cold
turkey. No, we all have screens on the seats in fronts of us and the hip young kid sitting next to
me starts slamming down the shades so that we're sitting in this, for six hours I'm in this totally
black aluminum tube hurtling 35,000 miles up in space. I might as well have been on the New
York subway. Where is the blue sky, where are the white clouds, we're on an airplane, people?
How about a little daylight?
And I look at these kids next to me and they're off and they're reading a book. But the screen is
on. And the shades are down. The plane experience is now designed for the machines, not for
the people.
Regarding more serious attentional problems, scientists still don't understand exactly what ADHD
is, what causes it or how to test for it objectively. The decision to medicate is fraught but the
child's brain who is not attending to important activities is not being remodeled by experience as it
should.
And I know personally about this because one of my five kids does have a very prominent
attentional issue, and we just barely kind of squeaked him through grade school and high school.
Please, God, let him graduate.
He actually got himself into college and he now has a 3.5 average. Brain maturation is a
wonderful thing in the human male. [Laughter].
Four or five times more little boys have attention problems than little girls. And interestingly, in a
lot of cultures in the world they wouldn't even have such a thing as attention deficits because little
boys don't have to sit in a chair and move and stare at a blackboard for six hours.
But that's what we ask of kids in this culture, so we have to try to like keep them, if you want to
get them to the point where their brains mature. It takes in our case two concerned parents, a
psychologist, various tutors, private school. Medication sometimes, medication not other times.
A lot of effort, and you look at the -- you think it's basically a predominantly male problem. And
you can look a very clear line from here, I'm talking about all the kids in this culture who don't
have two parents and lots of resources in school who care, et cetera, et cetera.
You see a clear line from attention deficit to oppositional personality disorder, I think it's called
being a bad boy. And juvenile delinquency and jail.
Because they haven't been able to stay in the system. They get to a point in the classroom
where they can't keep up and they drop out and they get in trouble. I dare say that in any prison
in this country you would find that 75 or 80% of the guys in jail had ADD as a kid. I would just bet
it.
Problematic attention patterns obtained across the spectrum of mental disorders. The depressed
focus on the very negative things that make them feel hopeless and helpless. Ancient people
focus on risk and threat.
Hypochondriacs focus on physical symptoms. Cognitive behavioral therapy addresses these
skewed attentional patterns.
Since writing Rapt, I've learned that taking charge of your attention helps you to control your
experience, increases your concentration, expands your boundaries and lifts your spirits.
Most important, rapt experience, being completely absorbed in a person or a project or a sunset
simply makes life worth living. You cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be
focused which is as close as we can get. Thank you.
[applause]
>> Kirsten Wiley: Now we'll open up for questions. Do we have a question?
>>: I was going to ask about music. Sort of in the car but a lot of times I can focus better
listening to music, not necessarily paying attention to the music but music might be something
that helps me focus. Is that true? And is it true when you're doing something like driving, too, is
that multi-tasking or ->> Winifred Gallagher: No, it's different and that's a very good point. This is particularly
important for anybody who has teenage kids. Research actually shows that a lot of teenagers do
their homework better when they're listening to music. It seems to be like at least in adolescents
it helps focus.
The reason why it works to listen to music in the car but not talk on a cell phone is because it's
using different circuitry in your brain. The multi-tasking that becomes most problematic is when it
involves the sort of vertebral processing networks. Much of like what we're doing is reading and
speaking and listening, all those things are activating that circuit.
So when you try to do two of those tasks that are doing, activating that circuit, then you get in
trouble. So that's why we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can ride a bike and sing
at the same time.
But you'd have trouble reading a book and singing at the same time. So it's particularly verbal
types of things cause problems.
>>: How about listening to audio book in the car.
>> Winifred Gallagher: My favorite thing to do. I am such an audio book freak. Now, if my
husband says he wants to come with me I go, man, I have to talk instead of listening to my audio
book.
I think that's the same, because driving is a physical activity. So you're using a verbal part of your
brain, there's not a conflict there.
And you can also, as the attention research was pointed out, if you get into heavy traffic or
weather situation, you turn the audio book off. I know I do, because then it becomes a
distraction. But as long as you can keep different activities separated it seems to work much
better than if you try to overlap them.
>>: What is different [indiscernible] because it's also verbal.
>> Winifred Gallagher: We evolve to pay attention to the human voice. That's why -- I don't
know, do you all have to work in cubicles? That's so good that you don't.
I think they should be illegal. I've heard them called veal pens. And I can really see the analogy.
It's almost impossible not to pay attention to the human voice that's how we evolve, that's how we
sustain our social bonds.
You see if you have a cubicle, you can end up listening to six people around you saying -- and I
want the tuna on rye and can that be here in 20 minutes and somebody else is saying, no, mom.
You listen to all these conversations you don't want to but you almost can't help it because we're
programmed to do the voice. So in the car on the cell phone, even if someone is sitting beside
you in the car, a real passenger, if you have a weather emergency or someone swerves in front
of you can stop talking and it's hard you're talking about a second or two. If you're, as my doctor
of all things, returns his calls on his phone, and he's telling me something about some medication
I should be taking, if a car swerves in front of him, even if it takes him just a second, he has to
say, excuse me, Winifred or hang up or do something, and that can be a second between life and
death.
You really shouldn't talk on the phone when in the car. Is it really such a difficult thing to pull over
to the side of the road, people? I'm so -- I think it should be -- more importantly attention
researchers really think it should be illegal.
Any other questions?
>>: So were you able to write this book faster than your other books? [Laughter].
>> Winifred Gallagher: I have to confess. We didn't talk too much about this. There are
temperamental differences in attention. Attention is like memory or intelligence or boldness or
shyness. It's kind of a trait, a quality, that everybody has some of. Depends on where you're at
in this spectrum. I happen to be a strong attender. I'm one of those irritating people that say
things in cars like God I love to study. Everybody is shut up shut up. I can look at my computer
and look up ask say where did that three hours go. But that's just how I am.
My husband, on the other hand, has male editor's disease an adult form of ADHD. He loves
working on daily papers when there's like a crisis and he's got like six screens are blinking and
people are saying I have to have this right now. That's his favorite day of the week. He has a
different attentional style, and both are adaptive, both persist in the population because they're
adaptive. You want a certain number of people in the population like my husband, because
they're the guys who are looking around saying I think there's a predator over there, oh, look,
there's some red berries, where I'd be just kind of staring at my thumb while the woolly mammoth
bit my head off or something. But it's good to have people like me, too, who can sustain focus for
more long-term projects.
So it's not an either/or thing. It seems to take me, no matter what, two years to write a book.
So I think that sort of shows you an attentional style, and I bet -- I don't start out this way but they
all have 14 chapters and they all take two years. It's just I'm programmed that way, I guess. And
I don't think this one went any faster or slower than the others.
Anyone else? Yeah.
>>: I wasn't able to read your book. I went to buy it last night and they were sold out with
Borders in Redmond. [Laughter] but I'm curious if you talk in your book about how to pay
attention, because it's one thing to sort of be sold on the view that you're presenting here. But it's
another thing to be able to do it because you can ask somebody to pay attention to something but
that doesn't mean they actually know how to stay attendant, right?
>> Winifred Gallagher: That's a good point. In fact Ellen Langer who I mentioned earlier, a
psychologist at Harvard University, and she's done a lot of research on mindfulness, interesting
woman. She's working on creativity now. She's done all these surveys with students and
teachers in public and private schools, if you ask both the students and the teachers what does it
mean when the teacher says pay attention? They essentially say hold the object still and fixate
on it. It can be a cognitive object.
But what actually she says, how she defines true attention, which she calls mindful attention, is
very different from that. It's Jamesian. William James did this wonderful experiment where he
said -- you can all do this. It's kind of cool. Make a dot on a piece of paper and see how long you
can focus on it. Then go back to it. You'll find that it will be a couple of seconds at the most.
Your mind will wander, because it's so borrowing. And then go back to the dot and start making
associations with it. Notice like is it a big dot, a little dot, a pale gray dot, dark gray dot. Is it the
ying to the paper's yang, the individual lost in society. Just elaborate. You will find you can pay
attention to it for a really long time and that's what Ellen Langer defines as truly paying attention.
Not that static, hold it frozen thing, but looking at something and really thinking about it and kind
of like a diamond, turning it so that you can see the different facets. But that's a very good
question. Thank you.
Any other questions?
>> Kirsten Wiley: Thank you.
>> Winifred Gallagher: Thanks so much. You were a great audience.
[applause]