The Mechanics of Attention
Are you paying attention?
In a few minutes, your attention might jump somewhere else.
To understand why that happens, let’s look at how attention works.
Types of Attention
“The untrained mind is afflicted with attention deficits and hyperactivity; it is dysfunctional.” – Alan Wallace, PhD
There is no evolutionary reason for unwavering focus. In fact, just the opposite. We naturally scan for novel information, which used to indicate potential threats, prey, and other useful cues. As a result, your attention spotlight is a filter that gets weaker about 4x per second.[1]
Picture your hominid ancestor walking peacefully in the forest. Attending to a slithering motion on the ground meant life or death. As a result, that’s the type of attention we inherited through evolution: jittery and roaming.
There are two main types of attention:
Selective Attention involves voluntarily choosing what to pay attention to.
A good example of this is the “cocktail party effect.” That’s when you’re at a party and suddenly your ears perk up, detecting your name in another conversation.
Your ears were unconsciously picking up other sounds and suddenly alerted you to an important bit of information.
Taking deliberate control of your attention deploys parts of your Upstairs Brain, including the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) and lateral frontal cortex.
In a famous experiment on Selective Attention, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris created a skit called the Monkey Business Illusion. If you haven’t seen the video, check it out before I ruin the ending in the next sentence.
About half of individuals fail to see the gorilla, meaning that their selective attention appropriately filters out the irrelevant info.
Experienced meditators show an increased ability to tune down the “noise” so they can perceive more “signal,” the object they intend to pay attention to.[2] In other words, meditation enhances your ability to avoid distractions.
Sustained Attention involves maintaining constant attention toward an object.
The problem is that attention is normally an unconscious mental faculty.
When you encounter something novel, like a stick that could be a snake, the reticular activating system (RAS) in your most primitive Downstairs Brain alerts your Upstairs Brain to something that might be of interest.
Our brains evolved such that the RAS gets habituated to an object of attention that it no longer deems interesting, allowing the mind to then wander off toward the next useful item.
In other words, your RAS gets bored and begins to filter out redundant information. This habituation process explains why you can’t stay interested in one object for long before craving something new.
Studies have confirmed that meditation trains your ability to not get habituated, developing unwavering vigilance.[2]
As you stabilize your attention, it becomes clear that nothing is inherently boring. Rather, boredom is habituation due to a lack of sustained attentional strength.
In fact, if you develop single-pointed attention, whatever your attention rests on can become interesting.
Now that we’ve covered how attention works, let’s talk about how to train it.
Training Attention in Meditation
In 1890, legendary American psychologist William James wrote:
“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”
Yet James didn’t realize that education had existed for thousands of years in certain eastern mind training systems.
Every major tradition of mind training—including Yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism—teaches some form of attentional development as a pillar of mental fitness.
Sure, these methods are situated within religious belief systems, but they also show a deep understanding of how the mind works.
You'll use three main skills to develop strong attention muscles. Each is analogous to an area of physical fitness.
Directing—Can you avoid distractions and focus exclusively on one object, like the breath? This is like stability.
Intensifying—Can you closely observe subtle details of the object? This is like strength.
Monitoring—Can you maintain focus on the object over time? This is like endurance.
Let's go into them one at a time.
First, directing.
Directing means voluntarily bringing your attention to a chosen object. In doing so, you’ll exercise the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral frontal cortex (LFC) areas of your brain.
Out of the many items that could capture your attention—thoughts, sensations, smells, tastes, sounds, sights—we want to filter it all out so that only your object of meditation remains.
Directing means picking out the signal amidst all the noise.
The second is intensifying.
Your intensifying “muscles" involve a complex neural pathway to block irrelevant sensory data from coming through your thalamus.
This highlights a key fact: it’s not that your beam of attention is getting stronger, but rather you’re getting better at filtering out everything else. Attention on the object is growing relatively stronger as it learns to recognize only breath-related inputs.
Directing and intensifying both relate to selective attention.
Finally, the third skill is monitoring.
How long can you stay on your object of meditation before the mind slips off into daydream mode? To avoid distractions (mostly thoughts), you’ll exercise meta-awareness, the ability to recognize what’s happening in your mind.
Monitoring relates to sustained attention, allowing you to stay on track.
You can build attention muscles just like an athlete in the gym. But, like physical muscles, your attention muscles will atrophy unless you repeatedly exercise them.
Even if you’re practicing objectless forms of meditation (e.g., open awareness or glimpse practices), it's helpful to train your attention often and apply daily mindfulness.
P.S. — If you’re serious about starting or deepening your meditation practice, check out the FitMind meditation app.
Sources:
[1] Fiebelkorn, Ian C., and Sabine Kastner. "A rhythmic theory of attention." Trends in cognitive sciences 23.2 (2019): 87-101.
[2] Davidson, Goleman; Altered Traits, p. 130, Richie’s dissertation research
[3] Elena Antonova et al., "More meditation, less habituation? The effect of mindfulness practice on the acoustic startle reflex," PLoS One 10.5 (2015): e0123512.