The Ways of Attending

There’s a story of a wise old fish swimming along and sees two young fish swimming toward him. “Hello boys,” he calls out. “How’s the water?”

The two young fish look at each other and say “Water? What’s water?”

We all tend to be stuck in narrow focus, what I call the emergency mode of attending. We have paid attention this way for so long, that, just like the two young fish, we don’t realize it. And we don’t realize there are other ways of paying attention, that can make us feel very different.

We are stuck in narrow focus because we have been taught to always be watching the world around us – look out for cars, pay attention to your homework or your teacher, watch out for this and that. We also spend time in this narrow objective attention because it helps us tamp down unpleasant feelings that happen to us as we grow up. Unfortunately they don’t go away -- they just stay in our mind and body, taking a toll on our physical and emotional life.

Here are the other ways of attending I have identified, and a little bit about them. Learning about them and learning to access them is fairly easy and can help us solve a great many problems in our lives, from anxiety to pain to impaired performance at work, on the playing field or on stage.
Narrow objective attention, is the one style we favor the most. It is a hyper-focus that engages the brain’s high frequencies. It is attention directed toward one or two things and which makes everything else background. Narrow focus isn’t just a way of attending visually. We can chronically narrow focus on any sensation, thought, a serious problem or a deadline, to the exclusion of almost everything else, which can cause worry and anxiety. Extreme narrow focus can be crippling, when it is overused or chronic, bringing on anxiety, panic and worry. It is the enemy of a smooth, fluid performance. A golfer, for example, who suffers what is known as the yips – uncontrollable muscle movements when putting – is hyper-focused, and the muscles are tense and in spasm.

Diffuse attention is the opposite of narrow and just what it sounds like– a softer, more inclusive view of the world, not attending to any one object or thing, as in narrow, but opening to everything, equally and simultaneously. It takes in a figure, but also includes the background. Think of attention as a beam of light. On a camping trip someone might hear a bear in a tree. Adjust the light so the beam is narrow, and nearly all of the light will focus on the bear. That’s narrow focus. But if we don’t know which tree the animal is in, we can broaden the scope of the flashlight beam so it illuminates more of the forest, as well as the bear, and not just one tree. That’s diffuse.

Diffuse brings on a multi-sensory experience, not just thinking and seeing, which are the senses that dominate in narrow focus. Walking through the forest and being simultaneously aware of birds singing, the smell of flowers, the feel of a breeze, the view of the trees and the space and the silence in which these sensory experiences occur is diffuse.

Objective attention, which we habitually combine with narrow, emotionally distances us from the object of our awareness. The combination of narrow and objective is energized and fast paced, favors the rational and linear processing skills of the brain’s left hemisphere. It emphasizes thinking and seeing, and diminishes the role of the other senses, including emotions. It tends to be organized in the left hemisphere.

Immersed or absorbed attention is characteristic of someone who enters into a union with an object or process and forgets themselves. It is usually pleasurable, and takes place in low brainwave frequencies. The effortlessness of a creative artist or performing athlete in a well learned behavior -- a dancer so immersed in her body, movement and music she loses a sense of self or where she is, for example -- is immersed attention. Both diffuse and immersed attention favor the right hemisphere of the brain.

There is also a combination of narrow and immersed attention, which is associated with a combination of low and high frequencies. Immersed is a way of attending that allows us to savor and intensify an experience. The main draw for a fisherman who forgets himself for hours as he watches a fly intently and sees nothing else as he waits for a fish to rise, is partly the physiological release that comes from immersed attention.