How To Focus Your Distracted Mind | Jim Kwik & Adam Gazzaley

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. This is your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik, and welcome to the Kwik Brain Podcast. Your question for today is a big one. This is something that's posted often in our Kwik Brain app, in our private Facebook group, which many of you are part of. If you haven't joined, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 120,000 members on Facebook there. The question is always around attention and focus. And so, in this episode, we have a special guest and we're going to talk about focusing a distracted mind. Now, this podcast for me is a long time coming. Our guest today is Adam Gazzaley. He's MD, PhD. He is the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology, and Psychiatry at UC San Francisco and the founder of Neuroscape. He's He's also the host of a nationally televised PBS special, The Distracted Mind, and the co-author of this book, which I highly recommend all our Kwik Brains get and you read this with many of our Kwik Reading students, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Adam, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Yeah, we've been talking about doing this for quite some time.

Yeah, we sure have.

You and I, amongst other things, have shared the stage. I remember years ago, I think it was 2018, we were in Sardinia at a longevity anti-aging conference.

Yeah.

I mentioned to you even back then how I wanted to get you on our show to introduce you to our listeners because they love geeking out about neuroscience. Let's, in this conversation, and I know you and I could talk for hours and maybe we'll have you back, and I highly recommend the book again. We'll put everything in our show notes at jimkwik.com/notes. When we're talking about focus, we're talking about attention, why don't we give some context? Why don't we talk about the landscape of attention? Why don't we start there before we go into strategies and tools? Because you're doing some amazing research, you're offering amazing tools also in technology and VR and gaming. Let's talk about top-down attention and also bottom-up attention. I read your book a little while ago. And it's one of the books I recommend the most on this subject. But let's maybe talk about the way you look at attention and talk about that landscape so people have some context.

So it's a good framework of top-down and bottom-up. And that's what we'll talk about for a little bit in terms of understanding the forces that command our focus in a state where we have limited resources to devote to it. And I guess it's first noting why attention exists at all. And that's because we can't put our resources, our focus everywhere at the same time. It's just not how the brain works. So there has to be selection. And attention is really about selection. And that selection process happens through 2 main forces, top-down and bottom-up. Bottom-up is the more ancient force, the more ancient draw on our attention. And that are— that is things in our environment that are either very salient, so very important or very impactful. And they are loud noises and flashes of lights and sounds and vibrations and things that were basically related to survival, things that prevent you from being killed and eaten or that help you find nutrients or things you need to stay alive. And so they're still very prevalent. All animals in the wild are Their survival really depends on bottom-up attention. It's a high sensitivity to the environment. And the other type of attention is top-down attention. That's the more evolved part, certainly in the human brain. I'd say that's a forte of our species. And that's where attention is dictated not by the relevance of stimuli in the environment, but by decisions that you make on what you want to focus on based upon your goals. And so it could actually be completely dissociated from what's important or or very driven by the environmental stimuli. One example could be you're in a restaurant, very common area where there might be a lot of bottom-up input, like loud noises and plates being rattled around.

Mm-hmm.

And your primitive brain is picking up on all that and wants to respond to that because it's, as I said, it's important for survival. But the top-down part is like, mm-mm, I don't care about that. I'm gonna suppress that and I'm gonna focus on this conversation, which might be a lot lower in volume and a lot less environmentally salient, But is important for your goal. So everything is really a balance of bottom-up and top-down.

And that's actually just happened to me recently. Yesterday, I was catching up with a friend I haven't seen pre-pandemic. So it's a very close friend, but we went to a bookstore and we were sitting in the coffee shop. And my outcome or my goal top-down was to engage, right? To listen, to be there, be supportive. But then there was all the external environmental distractions, if you were there. Music and there's food, there's all these other conversations, announcements on the PA. So, what's going on inside the brain? Is there a filtering process that we're applying? Does it also— is it changing based on our age? How does that work?

Great question. So, the act of suppression, of ignoring, is not a passive one. It doesn't I think for a long time, the scientific view was that they were just two sides of the same coin, meaning that by focusing more, you're ignoring more. So you focus on this, you ignore on that. My research almost like 15 years ago using functional brain imaging was showing that they're actually dissociable processes. In other words, we found in older adults that 60, 70 healthy older individuals were able to focus on relevant information that we presented to them in the MRI scanner like they were 20 years old. The signals in the brain associated with that were no different than younger adults, but where they were failing was in ignoring irrelevant information we were presenting. So they had what I describe as a suppression deficit. And that study found something a little further, that the degree that they failed to filter out the irrelevant information directly correlated with how well they remembered things that they were trying to remember. So it's not just like irrelevant information does nothing. It's that— so the first piece of information there is that suppression is an active process that can fail and gets worse with age.

Mm-hmm.

The other takeaway is that when you fail to suppress distraction in your environment, It creates interference and degrades the integrity of the relevant information and could decrease your memory. It could decrease your long-term and short-term memory. It could decrease your decision-making. It could decrease your performance, your ability to engage in an empathic way with someone you love. It really has numerous cascading disadvantages across your life when you take in Irrelevant information.

So it's not even like, cuz sometimes you'll hear that focus is like a spotlight and what you're focusing on and you just don't see the other stuff. But you're saying that it takes actual energy or effort to be able to suppress noise or inter— things that could interfere, uh, the distractions that could take you away from what you're trying to put your attention towards.

Yeah, 100%. That, that view of the spotlight of attention is a convenient one. It's not untrue, but unlike everything else just being in darkness, what Our data suggests, and others, is that the act of suppression is also an active one, that it's actively making it darker. And it makes sense if you think about it just mechanistically that you could create more of a differential between what's relevant and irrelevant if you didn't just increase what was relevant, but you also decrease what's irrelevant. And so it creates more of a margin and more contrast between them.

I look at it kind of like there's these external distractions in our environment. Again, like in my example of meeting my friend in the bookstore, there was noise, there was a visual thing, people walking around, there was different smells and sensations. So there's external, but then there was also this internal distraction as well.

Yeah, distraction happens both externally and internally. And as you described, external is usually associated with environmental stimuli, and the internal is associated with internal stimuli. And those internal stimuli could be really diverse. It could be physiological signals like I'm hungry or I'm in pain. Or it could be related to emotion. I'm feeling sad or happiness. Or it could be thought-related that I'm thinking about a conversation I had earlier. We call that mind wandering. But it is equally— it could be equally incapacitating for accomplishing your goals to have internal distractions or external distractions. And what's worth noting is that internal distractions could be beyond annoying, they could be debilitating and paralyzing. So you could associate internal distractions with things like PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, where a lot of that internal interference is just debilitating and pathological and prevents you from doing goal-related activities.

So has it been your experience where we could exercise and apply some kind of discipline or training with some kind of tool, mental tool, or some kind of technology to be able to enhance our ability to suppress both internal and external distraction or that noise?

I like to think that there are 2 main categories of approaches that we can take to help with that suppression of all the irrelevant things around us that we don't want to get into our brains. The first is I describe it as like the behavioral, like shaping your environment to make it easier for you, right? So if you're in a less distracting environment, like how I set up my desk here, because I don't need to have like 6 screens right now, I'm having a conversation with you. Even things that you do when you drive, like some people say, oh, I should move my phone like out of my lap because it's just too— it's too distracting to me to even know that that source of information is sitting there. You know, so there's a lot of things you can do to shape your behavior and your environment to help, just to make it easier for your brain to deal with. But that might not get rid of some of the internal distractions, and it's not always perfectly capable of being performed. And so the other goal and the other approach is how do you make your brain stronger at doing that? And one of the things that I've devoted my last decade to and continue to work on is how technology, which is often a source of distraction, as implied by my book's subtitle of Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. And largely because those bottom-up influences that we discussed, technology is the master of bottom-up influences. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, technology developers know about bottom-up and that pings and lights and flashes and notifications, I mean, that's bottom-up. That's pulling you against your goals. But, what's interesting to me as now a technology developer and a neuroscientist is how technology can be sort of flipped around and used to help improve focus. And so, I'm very interested and we have a lot of data on tools that we have created that challenge the brain to pay attention. And, because your brain has this property that I know all your listeners know about of neuroplasticity that it can change and modify itself and It's the basis of all of learning, that our brains will learn and become optimized in its function. And, if you challenge attention in a very targeted way, we've shown in numerous studies that we can improve attention outside of that particular domain that you're being challenged. And, some of these are really ancient techniques like meditation and mindfulness practices, which have been around thousands of years to do essentially what we're talking about. We're not the first— society to realize this is an issue. I mean, it's always been here. And we've just come up with some ways to make that a little bit more accessible and deliverable to people using technology. But a lot of the lessons and approaches for how you practice attentional focus have been around a long time.

And that's interesting. So you're saying that as human beings, as we evolve and we're hunter-gatherers, even back then, distraction was an issue, not so much as it is today where we're carrying the world's information like in our pocket. In Limitless, a few years when it came out ago, I was talking about like digital horsemen of the mental apocalypse. And, I take a more pro approach towards technology, so I'm definitely not anti-technology. Fire is technology.

Yeah.

It could cook your food or it could burn down your home. So, we talked about digital distraction, digital dementia. I like to Alliterate, so digital deluge, which is an overwhelm, and digital, like a deduction, where sometimes we're not thinking as much because we have algorithms that are doing the thinking for us. Now, it's interesting because it's not just distraction and attention. You talk about a cognition crisis, where there's an assault on even the things that we don't learn necessarily, like memory, creativity, imagination, decision-making, problem-solving.

Yeah, I think that these abilities of the mind, mentioned a lot of the ones that I'd bring up. I'd also add empathy and compassion onto that list and wisdom as another pinnacle aspect of the human mind. All of them are fragile and all of them are subject to a negative impact of interference and all of them take effort to develop. Now, some of that happens unwittingly or not intentionally, I should say, and that's probably true for most of them. But Maybe they should be. It's one of the things I think about that we teach our kids reading and math as focused educational goals, but what about working memory and empathy and high-level analytical decision-making? The cognition crisis idea and the concept that I've been advocating is that we have these crises in the world that we all know about, like climate change being a perfect example of of one that is highly relevant to our future on this planet. But I often say that if we don't elevate our minds across all those domains we've been talking about intentionally and effectively, we're unlikely to deal with climate change. And, you know, because it's not that we're missing information about climate change. We have lots of information and other world, you know, major problems. But in order to deal with time-delayed crises that involve an impact on others and not ourselves, you need a different way of thinking. And that really requires our minds, I would say, to be sort of leveled up.

You mentioned climate change. I gave a talk at the United Nations in 2019. It was the 50th anniversary, July 20th, of the moon landing. And they have their 17 goals to transform our world, the Sustainable Development Goals. And my talk was more on The things like mindset, the belief that this is even possible. It was on unleashing motivation, high levels of drive to get this done, but then also was on methodology. I mean, in the same level of thinking that's created the problem won't necessarily solve the problem. And I know you talk about enhancing human cognition, and I don't know if you agree, but that would come more as a lead domino for all the other things because if you could think better and solve problems, make better decisions, implement them, more clearly and accurately.

Undoubtedly, Jim. I'm so glad you said that because I even wrote about this a little bit in a piece, Cognition Crisis. I had a longer part, but I took it out because I didn't want to distract from the main goal, which was not a public advocacy position, but just really an education about our cognition on a global level. But to me, it's shocking that the goal of enhancing human cognition is not on that UN list. And I know it's not. And it's not really on It's not explicitly listed on any grand global challenge list that I can find. There are some things related to like extreme mental health crises and people that are suffering, you know, debilitating effects and suicide and addiction. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about cognition globally, even outside of the clinical side of it, that it should be a major goal of our species to just continue to advance advance how our minds function. And that even not just that we're going to live better lives and happier lives and care about each other more, which we could all use a lot of, and learn how to transmit factual information more reliably— like, all these things are really relevant— but I also think it impacts our ability to address those life-threatening events on this planet.

So I think it's, it's core and center, and I would love to see that reach the level of like That would be fun to collaborate where we deal with more of the soft skills of the processes of focus and memory and reading and critical thinking. But, to be able to accelerate that with technology. I always wear a brain on my shirt or I have pictures of you and I pointing to our brains and things like that.

Oh, yeah.

But, I think what's in your awareness going on the power of awareness and also the intention behind it What we see, we take care of, right? We see our car, our skin, our hair, our clothes, we tend to take better care of it because we're consciously aware, we're mindful of it. But, we don't see the thing that takes care of us, right?

Yeah.

The 3-pound gray matter between our ears. And so, when I posted that you and I would be having this conversation, and I know we could go on for hours and I definitely love to have you back, I encourage everyone to get their copy of The Distracted Mind. We had people asking about multitasking. I addressed this, the attention versus switching process, task switching, where we can't process 2 cognitive activities at once. Certainly, we could work out and listen to something like that, but it'd be hard for me to read and to be able to write or be able to talk to you right now and be able to answer an email, right? What are the suggestions you have for people who try to multitask? I think you believe, as I believe, it's more of a myth. And what should they be doing instead?

This is a good follow-up to what we were talking about distraction. So I tend to think of interference, goal interference, as having 2 main categories. One is distraction, one is multitasking. And I define them as different because distraction is information that you know is irrelevant, that you don't actually want to pay attention to, but it gets in anyway, just like your conversation in the bookshop the other day. All that stuff around you was clearly a distraction.

Right.

In multitasking, it's also interference. They both interfere with your goals, but in multitasking, you make the decision to try to do 2 things at the same time or more than 2 things. And so what could be a distraction could be multitasking. So if you were in the bookshop and instead of ignoring the conversation on the next table, you decided to talk with your friend and listen to that conversation, which is very unlikely to do successfully, that would be multitasking. And what our data and other people's data shows convincingly is that when you look at interference, distraction impairs Multitasking impairs it even more because you're diverting more resources with failed suppression of distraction when you're actually trying to parallel process another task. And so it's the same rules apply that I mentioned for distraction. Like the first part I would say is awareness and just being a little introspective about how your ability to engage in something that's important to you, whether it's work or play or interacting with someone you love and care about and want to give them your attention, how it's degraded when you try to split it and do something else at the same time. And then use that awareness. Obviously, awareness is not enough to change behavior, but use that as a jumping-off point to develop strategies and new habits about how you engage with the world and put those other things in their own space and practice single-tasking. I like to say single-tasking is hard, but it could become really gratifying in its own way as you get good at it and realizing that it's sort of pleasurable to do one thing at a time. Multitasking has this advantage in that our brain responds to novelty and information with a lot of dopamine and reward. So, it certainly has a driving force, but single-tasking can be really enjoyable and lead to better productivity and I think better happiness.

The challenges with trying to multitask, we lose time, right? Because it takes more time to regain our attention or focus and light up a different cognitive network. It takes energy to switch back and forth. So you could use more brain glucose. And then, people tend to make more mistakes. I mean, even just take people driving and texting, which is so dangerous to be able to switch your attention back and forth. That's something when you're doing that and being more vigilant on And filtering out that low-signal information. I did want to talk about that you do a lot with video games, and this is a personal interest of mine, video games that are FDA-approved. ADD, is it ADD or ADHD?

Mostly ADD.

I would love to hear a little bit more about some of your findings, some of the things you're excited about. How are you challenging memory, focus, and integrating potentially AR or VR in these closed-loop games?

The summary is that over the last 15 years, I've been very interested, as we discussed, in how technology can be a tool to enhance what makes us human, our cognition, especially attention, rather than only a detractor, as we know it often is. And I came up with this idea of building a video game to be able to improve attention abilities. Not that there's anything magic about video games, but we know that experience drives brain plasticity. And video games are a fun way to deliver an experience, a way that people engage deeply and people return to. And so over the last decade-plus, we've been building video games, many, many different types of games. Some involve eyes-closed meditation, other involves physical fitness and motion capture. Some take place in virtual reality environments. And then we do the research studies and we have over a dozen papers across different games now. that show that they can improve attention and other aspects of cognition. And sort of the highlight of this story, I would say, is one particular video game left my lab to a company that I co-founded and now has gone through multiple clinical trials, many of which I'm not even involved in, which culminated during COVID in 2020 with an FDA approval of this video game as a medical device to treat inattention in children with ADHD. More on the ADD side. It's actually approved for inattention or also mixed ADHD, so hypertension and hyperactivity and inattention. And right now the labeling is 8 to 12-year-olds, but we're expanding that. But what that means is right now doctors are prescribing a video game, not just Adderall and other stimulants, for kids with ADHD. So I'm super excited to have gone from an idea all the way to actual clinical product. It was 14 years, but it did happen. And it's exciting just to have options out there for parents and people that are not— that they don't want to just go the drug route.

And is this some ADD, like inattentiveness, impulsivity? How do our listeners— can they— do they have to be part of a study or trial, or is this available?

It's only very recently that I could answer that and say you don't have to be part of a trial because everything else we do is study-related. Your doctor could prescribe this, um, and it's, it's available. Uh, we could, we could put links to make it easier for people, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's prescribable for that indication. And we're, you know, we have lots of data on other conditions. There's nothing magic about ADHD in this treatment. We have data for major depressive disorder, autism, data for early Parkinson's disease, lupus. We have data being generated now for COVID fog. So it's really about attention and improving it using this.

Mm-hmm.

Adaptive, which is what the closed loop means, adaptive interactive experience that you download on your own devices.

Yeah, you must collect amazing, amazing data also, which is exciting to be able to help affect transformation.

I think there's lots of really exciting opportunities with having a digital medicine, which is what we're talking about, as opposed to a molecular medicine. One of the ways is that our medicine is a data collection loop. So unlike a pill where you don't know if it's working or how it's working, our medicine itself is feeding back data. And, you know, the other thing is like monitoring compliance, preventing overdose. All these things with a digital therapeutic can be much more easily accomplished than a molecule as medicine. But I have to tell you, you know, it's quite a paradigm shift to move to thinking about medicine as not just a drug, but medicine as these interactive game experiences. So there's still a lot of work to do for us, but getting through the FDA was definitely an Congratulations. Thank you.

And it's engaging, and also it's fun, right?

It's core to our development process because once you're engaging with something that's more than popping a pill in your mouth, but you're asking people, especially young people, to come back and play for 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week, which is what our treatment is, having fun and engagement, enjoyment is critical. I will point out our game is hard, and it is frustrating. It has to be. Changing the brain is not an easy process. It's like, you know, similar to going to the gym, there's only so easy it can be and still work. But we do surround it by a lot of other delightful type of reward systems and other types of, you know, gameplay mechanisms that hopefully make the medicine a little tastier.

Well, we'll definitely get the links and put it in our show notes again at jimkwik.com/notes for people who want to connect with their doctor and get a prescription and move forward on that, as well as a lot of your talks and your book. And one question that we also got And maybe we can end with this because you were mentioning going to the gym and working out and applying effort. Do you have any favorite practices for your own cognitive performance and fitness outside of the technology that you've created?

Most of it is outside of the technology I've created. It's still very much in development, the technology, and we're going to get there, but it takes a long time to do it rigorously and to reach the level of evidence that I would support many of it. I mean, the only thing that we actually promote now is that one game, which had a 14-year development cycle. But so outside of that and all the new things that we're creating that hopefully will be available over the coming years is approaches to living a better, healthier life for your brain, which I know is a key goal of your platform and what you try to share with your listeners. And I don't fancy myself as someone that gives advice on this. So the way that I do that is just to tell people what I do. So One thing is that I do, I exercise daily. It's a habit. I'm not necessarily telling people to do that. It's a lot, but I need to physically move my body. It doesn't necessarily have to be hardcore workout every day. Even a long walk, like a couple mile walk with my family is something that I'll count. You know, if I can't go to the gym and do weight training and go on the elliptical and do those things, I need to at least be moving every day. And I think that's core to healthy body, healthy brain as we get older. I'd also put in there stress management. Now, I'm always very particular here because having no stress at all is not good for our brain. The brain responds to challenge, the body responds to challenge. You lay on the couch and do nothing and your brain will just melt, right? It needs, it needs challenge. So there's a healthy level of challenge and stress, and then there is like the helpless, hopeless one that actually could degrade your brain. And so You know, where that line is, is something that everyone has to find, and it's sort of obvious in the extremes, but keeping your brain challenged is also key to being healthy. One thing that it would almost be irresponsible to not talk about with all the data that came out, even though it's not my own area of research, is sleep. I have a little kid now, so sleep is like the hardest thing attainable, but, you know, trying to get just actual restorative, healthy sleep.

Yeah.

sleep in a good solid amount is, is a worthy goal for anyone. And its relationship to not just stress and mood, but memory is becoming clearer and clearer.

I love it. Uh, movement and exercise, stress management, and prioritizing, prioritizing your sleep. These are things that anybody could do. They're widely available. They're at zero cost, you know, always, always learning because we have Unfeathered access to YouTube and podcasts and things like this.

Yeah, those are my favorite advice, is the ones that like are just part of what I think living a healthy life is, and they don't cost anything. And they only get more important as you get older. Also, as we get older, all of these systems are taxed, and leading a life that keeps those systems as healthy as possible will only serve you well. So Yes. I really do treat those as a priority, like I would eating. Like no one just says, oh, I forgot to eat today. Like no one does that, right? And, you know, I think these should be put up there with that.

Amazing. Adam, thank you so much for joining us on the Kwik Brain Podcast. How do people connect with you either on social media or your website?

Yeah, I have— I'm on most of the social media platforms and I also have a website kazali.com, which is sort of the aggregate of all the things I do, and it has a contact on there.

Amazing. And we'll put again links to your website, to your socials on jimkwik.com/notes. And also make sure you get a copy of The Distracted Mind. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you. I enjoyed it as well. Thank you.