Moving Your Mind From Wandering Mess To Laser Focused By Regulating Attention | Flow Research Collective Radio

What I kind of was able to connect the dots doing in my own lab is like, okay, the biggest vulnerability that we're seeing with regard to attention in high stress groups over high stress intervals is that they're getting hijacked away from the here and the now. They are actually rewinding the mind as minds can do, but their attention when it's in the past, rewound if you will, they're not just productively reflecting on these past experiences, they're just looping in these ruminative loops over and over again, or even when they're fast-forwarding to, you know, usually we might use our fast-forwarding capacity of mental time travel to pay attention to some created reality about the future, to plan for it. But under stressful circumstances, we end up catastrophizing and worrying. So this is what I mean by attention gets hijacked out of this present moment to the past or the future.

Hey there. If you are a a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them. Which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

What does it take to do the impossible?

What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again.

Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with the Flow Research Collective, and welcome Welcome to today's episode with Dr. Amishi Jha, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the director of contemplative neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. And she received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Dr. Amishi's work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and even the Pentagon. And she's received coverage in The New York Times, NPR, Time, Forbes, and more. And what we really dove into in this episode was her new groundbreaking book, Peak Mind, which teaches you how to train your brain to pay attention differently. And that was the key first topic that we talked about was attention and the different elements of attention and how it functions neurobiologically, which was a really great topic to talk about. We went into it in depth with lots of really practical takeaways that I think you're going to enjoy. We also talked about her TED Talk on how to improve focus and tame the wandering mind. And she gave us a synopsis of all the most practical things you can do to do that so that you can maximize your focus and access flow. You're going to really enjoy hearing Amishi's deep, deep, deep expertise on this topic. It comes through immediately and also her ability to make it practical and real so that you can leave today's episode with some new things you can do to better manage your attention and tame that wandering mind. All righty. I hope you enjoy and all the best. Dr. Amishi, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's absolutely great to have you here. It's been really fun preparing for this conversation and I'm excited to have your attention today to talk about attention as one of the things that we'll dive event too.

Great pleasure to be here.

Super. So your TED Talk, How to Tame Your Wandering Mind, got over 5 million views and went viral, which is really impressive, especially for a science-based talk. What do you think it was that caused that talk to go so viral and be so popular and impactful?

I think it's the collective moment that we all are experiencing, which is this notion of our crisis of attention. None of us would probably say, oh yeah, attention, I've got that, you know, my attention is awesome. So I think I was just speaking to what many of us are experiencing in this particular moment. And I think that unfortunately with the global pandemic, it further degraded this already fragile capacity that we all have.

One of the common descriptions of attention that we hear a lot that our clients are familiar with is that your awareness is like a fog lamp that is emitting a broad, imprecise beam, and your attention is like a spotlight that highlights information with more precision. Is that an accurate description?

Yeah.

Yeah, I would love to hear your breakdown on what attention is fundamentally also.

Sure. No, I would definitely. So I'd say the broadest thing to say about attention is it's about privileging some information over other information. And so absolutely it would be the case. And I use that term very similar to the spotlight. I just say flashlight because with a flashlight, very much like a spotlight, you can laser in, you can be quite a narrow beam, or it can be a little bit more broad, but it's still pretty clear. And very much like an actual flashlight, wherever we pay attention, we actually get better, crisper, clearer information from that particular experienced focus. But the other things that it has in common with a flashlight is that it can be directed. We can actually point it somewhere, and it can be yanked, meaning it can be pulled by things. So that's sort of why I like the handy tool, the metaphor of the flashlight, just because it seems like We can imagine if we're in a darkened path, we point it toward where we want to go. But then if we hear rustling around us, well, rustling and rustling around us, we would just move the flashlight to wherever we heard the sound. So it kind of captures both of those aspects. But that system, that focusing aspect, I would say is only one way in which we experience attention. I'd just love to tell you a little bit more about the other two aspects that are almost— one of them is very much related to what you were saying about the fog lamp. Whereas this system, this first system of flashlight, or what you called spotlight, we would formally call the brain's orienting system. It's about directing and privileging certain kinds of information based on the content of the information. So it could be the part of space or a particular line of thought or a memory you want to call up, a particular body sensation. So it's selective and specific. Directing it to the external environment or this internal environment of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and even body sensations. But the next system is actually the exact opposite of that. And it too privileges something, but it's not privileging based on content, it's privileging based on time. So the second system, which we call the alerting system, is about what's happening right now in this particular moment, what is going on. And you actually want to do the exact opposite of the flashlight. You don't want to narrow and constrain. You want to keep it broad and receptive. So it's very much like that fog lamp or fog light you were describing. It is diffused. It is very, very broad. But the most important quality is it's keying in on what is occurring right now with this broad receptive stance. So if you're driving down the road and you see or even walking and you see like a flashing yellow light, maybe by a construction site or a school zone or something like that, we experience this brain system at that moment. Like, oh, pay attention. But it's this sort of broad diffuse thing. You don't know what particularly might occur, right? Some equipment comes into the road and weird traffic pattern, children may be walking by, but you are prepared in the now for whatever may happen. And that's why we call it being alert, the alerting system. So it does relate to, I think, what you were describing describing as awareness, but it has this other quality of privileging the now. And then the third system actually works with both of those, and it's really regarding privileging information tied to our goals. What do we want to accomplish in this moment? And that's something we call executive control. So executive control is really regarding holding the goals in mind and ensuring that our actions align with the goals. And when things get in the way, we can inhibit those, Don't do that right now, do this instead. Or we can incorporate new information and update our goals, or we can shift our goals. So all of that has to do with executive control. And I like to use this metaphor of like a juggler because the executive system's job isn't to do a lot of different things, but it's to manage everything, to make sure that the entire enterprise is running smoothly, just sort of like an executive of a company. We never expect the executive to do every job within an organization. But they are ultimately responsible for ensuring that all of the actions of all of the employees, for example, align with and support the goals of the organization. So I hope that that kind of rounds it out. This notion of selecting based on information, selecting based on time, and selecting based on goals is really the broader sense of what I mean when I use the term attention.

Yeah, that's really helpful. Thanks for that breakdown. How do you conceptualize attention span? Is it simply the ability to privilege one source of information over another for a prolonged period of time?

Yeah, attention span isn't really something we formally talk about within the field of cognitive neuroscience of attention. We'll talk about something called— that's related— working memory. And working memory is almost a close cousin of attention and even executive control. The job of working memory is to maintain and manipulate information over just a few seconds, maybe a minute to the max. I like to think about it as like your mind's internal scratch space or even like a whiteboard in your mind. And what you're doing there in the timeframe, it goes to your question regarding time, whatever you put in working memory. So if I tell you, "Please remember this phone number," and you're going to repeat it to yourself until you can get to your phone and plug it in to call whomever I want you to call, that basically meant that as soon as I told you the numbers, you put them on your internal whiteboard and then you were kind of holding them there. Until you got to your phone, and then you don't need them anymore. You don't need to keep holding them in this working memory scratch space, but they're critical. The cool thing about this particular scratch space and even how we use the term memory is that it has— it's like if you think about it as a whiteboard, it's like a whiteboard with disappearing ink. So after about a few seconds, like I said, up to a minute, that ink's just going to disappear. So if you don't keep rewriting it, it will vanish. And that may seem like a design flaw or something, but it's actually really, really important. We don't want to be saving everything we experience and that we might even be able to and need to use in the moment over the long term. So think about what we do when we think. We have a concept, or even when we're having a conversation. Like even right now, you're listening to me and you're probably formulating thoughts, maybe about what you want to ask me next, or you have some tangential thought related to what I'm saying. You're holding all of that in your working memory. And then whatever you say next is queued up in your working memory to be able to deploy into the conversation. But when we think about attention span, what we're really talking about is this capacity to hold information for that short period of time. It's not really considered in any other way formally. I think people use it colloquially to probably mean, like, I can't stay focused. But from the scientific point of view, we never expect people to stay focused. It's about refocusing over and over again because attention will move around. Just, that's its nature.

It's a great breakdown. Yeah, we talk about cognitive load a lot, which is obviously very heavily related to working memory. You gave a presentation to the U.S. Army War College. I think, um, the group or the event was called War Room, and it was titled Driven to Distraction: What Senior Leaders Can Do to Improve Their Focus. So I'm curious what some of the key tools that you shared at that event or presentation were.

I think that was just a podcast, but I did give a— not just a podcast. Podcasts are very important and beneficial. What I meant is it wasn't a live briefing, which I actually did with about, I don't know, a couple hundred. But the point is just knowing this, knowing about these three various systems of attention One of the things that we discovered, which I found troubling, is that— well, let me back up. One of the things that we know about attention with regard to all three of these systems is that they literally recalibrate, adjust, modify the way information processing happens in the brain. And that's on purpose. That's why we could even say evolved to have an attention system. We couldn't get full access to all the information that we're experiencing in any moment. Fully. So we've got to subsample. That's what I mean by privilege some information over others. And when we subsample in these different ways that we just talked about based on content or time or goals, that's the point. But when we do that kind of subsampling, information processing is privileging whatever we're focusing on. So sights and sounds are crisp and brighter when we focus in on them. Trains of thoughts, whatever we're focusing in on is going to be highlighted. Goals that we keep in mind are going to be more salient to us. So that's what I mean by it's changing information processing, a very, very powerful brain system. And so given that, what we learned was actually troubling, which is that though it may be quite powerful, it has this fragility to it. It can fall apart pretty quickly. And the kinds of circumstances that really do degrade or deplete attention are things like stress and threat and poor mood. And one of the conversation points that I really brought up in the conversation you were just describing was this is not just an annoyance of life. Like for most of us, we all experience stress, threat, and poor mood, but for certain kinds of professions, including military service members, for example, or even first responders, emergency physicians, I mean, you can go on and on with the kind of professions that have this. We collectively, humanity, require or ask or expect that people in certain professions should be able to perform at their best under circumstances that are, for most of us, likely to result in stress, threat, and poor mood. So emergency situations, chaotic situations, ambiguous situations. So given that, given that certain professions like military service members are called to best action under circumstances that will deplete and degrade attention, Well, first, letting everybody know that, look, you are going to be vulnerable just with the nature of the context in which you must operate. And knowing that, the next motivation I had is, okay, so how do we train against that? How do we train to protect attention so it's not so vulnerable? How do we kind of bulletproof or provide some kind of mental armor to ready people so that even under those circumstances, they're not as prone to declining? And then, yeah, then the conversation really was around, my research and what we found is effective.

What were some of the things that your research found most effective?

We've studied so many different things, but the one thing that really stuck, meaning it was the one form of training that consistently protected against decline over a multi-week, high-demand, high-stress interval, was something that surprised me: mindfulness meditation. And The reason it surprised me is probably because I was quite a skeptic with regard to mindfulness and meditation when I started this work almost 2 decades ago with regard to offering mental training for people in high-stress contexts. And part of that is just because we didn't know much about it. It's this ancient practice that comes from the world's wisdom tradition. Mindfulness in particular has roots in Buddhism, but meditation itself has been around through literally every major spiritual religious tradition as a form of training really, even though it's probably not described that way, but engaging in these specific practices to cultivate specific mental qualities. And what I kind of was able to connect the dots doing in my own lab is like, okay, the biggest vulnerability that we're seeing with regard to attention in high stress groups over high stress intervals is that they're getting hijacked away from the here and the now. They are actually rewinding the mind as minds can do, but their attention, when it gets, you know, when it's in the past, rewound, if you will, they're not just productively reflecting on these past experiences. They're just looping in these ruminative loops over and over again. Or even when they're fast forwarding to, you know, usually we might use our fast forwarding capacity of mental time travel to pay attention to some created reality about the future to plan for But under stressful circumstances, we end up catastrophizing and worrying. So this is what I mean by attention gets hijacked out of this present moment to the past or the future. So what we needed is a solution that would train people to, first of all, be aware of where their attention is moment by moment. So you can kind of check in like, oh, look at that. I'm in the past, but I'm stuck here. Or I'm in the future and it's not productive to be catastrophizing instead of planning. So notice where your attention is. But then train your mind to get it back to the present moment because the action, the decision-making, the data gathering is happening in the here and the now. And that's true for all of us, frankly. So the practices that we tested, we offered and then tested were mindfulness meditation practices. And we can talk about those, but they end up being a suite of things that are training all three of those systems of attention through a variety of different techniques. And, you know, we've been at this, offering this for quite some time. So the reason I wanted to describe it in my recent book was because I wanted to take it out of the lab. I wanted to make it accessible for everybody, especially in the, hopefully, the tail end of a global pandemic, because all of us are experiencing that sort of cognitive fog of an unrelenting, ambiguous, uncertain, complex couple of years. So that's just to give you a sense of the, the kind of domain that we use to, to offer people.

That's a great breakdown. I appreciate that. One of the things we get asked about quite a lot, and that is a buzzword within the sort of pop neuroscience territory at the moment, is the idea of dopamine detoxing, which from a neurobiological perspective I think makes most neuroscientists cringe because you can't, you know, necessarily detox from, from from dopamine, from a neurotransmitter. But I think under the frame of the idea that dopamine desensitization is some sort of a loss of dopamine receptors in parts of the brain's reward systems, which can cause a decline in normal dopamine signaling, there may be some true mechanism there under the idea of dopamine desensitization rather than dopamine detoxing. So I'm curious if you see there being legitimacy to that notion and is how you see the role of activities and habits and forms of social media that are often classified as hijacking our dopamine systems, how you see the role of those things in regulating or damaging our attention.

Yeah, I'm glad you foreshadowed the— you can't see my face, but I am cringing. And partly it's because any complex behavior we know is not going to be tied to the functioning of any one neurotransmitter system. That's usually why we're Neuroscientists scratch their heads like, "Huh?" But I think that it very much relates to the topic. So I would say forget about dopamine. First of all, we have no idea. Nobody's been put in a scanner and asked to— looking at their spectroscopy regarding only dopamine receptors and asked to scroll on Instagram. I don't know those studies that have specified that it's actually dopamine. These are theoretical arguments that I think are interesting, but probably not. This story is going to be much more complicated. But here's what I do know. As it relates to attention. The attention system that we have was developed over the course of human evolution to do a lot of really useful things that privileged our survival. If we go back to that flashlight of attention I was talking about, it's really helpful to be able to point it in various places. But if all we had was that ability to select and direct attention, without any kind of variability in that, probably you'd be at some watering hole enjoying your refreshing water and you'd get eaten because you wouldn't notice the rustling nearby and the predator that was going to eat you. So the notion of an intrinsic distractibility is also built into the way the brain functions. We need some kind of attentional cycling. We need to be able to move away from the present moment with our attention to do things like we were talking about a moment ago, reflect on the past or plan for the future. So it's both the capacity to select willfully like we were talking about, whether it's based on content or time or goals, but to also have this variability in where attention stays is very useful as sort of the noise around the signal, if you will. And that happens not just with our scanning of the external environment, but also the internal environment. So when we think about something like mind wandering, right, having off-task thoughts during an ongoing activity, that is a natural function of generating spontaneous thoughts. Sometimes it distracts us away and hijacks us away from the moment, and it can become problematic. But the fact that it exists is just the nature of the mind. There's nothing wrong with our mind that we, we are distractible. So I think that's a really important point, that the brain is distractible. There will not be a time when you can clear your mind and not have distraction, so to speak, internal or external. So just, that's one point. The second point is actually that the same system that we can direct willfully can get pulled. And the things that pull it are the, again, the things that are evolution advantaged. So attention will be captured by things like threatening information, fear-inducing information, anything self-related, You know, you might even put in the category of, you know, what you were saying is dopamine-related—sex, drugs, rock and roll—things that feel good that you might want, that you want to keep wanting. All of those capture attention because, again, attention's function is to give us information about the environment so we can act upon it. So it would make sense that, you know, if just like we were talking about a little while ago, you're walking down a darkened path, you've got this flashlight directing to make sure you don't trip over anything in front of you. But if you hear something, it's going to get pulled by that. This is what I think social media is doing. It's capitalizing on this aspect of our attention. And now you'll notice every social media feed you've got asks you for your name, your photograph. The self-related aspects are highlighted. The kind of information we tend to get pulled by, whether it be notifications on our phone or whatever ends up on our feed, have these qualities. And frankly, that's not by accident. Any kind of social media engagement where we're not paying for it, what is the product that's part of the transaction there? It's our attention. Our attention is being pulled, it's being mined, it's being lured. So I really see it as a functioning, healthy system, so well-functioning in fact that complex algorithms can predict exactly what we're going to do and they can keep feeding us. Information that will be particularly tuned for our own capturing of attention. So I mean, I think that the reason that I am so interested in this topic is that if we know this is the case, that attention is healthy and functioning, yet we're in this situation where we're constantly feeling pulled and yanked around and we have no idea what's happening to us. It's like a few hours and you're like a zombie scrolling on various, whether it's TikTok or whatever it is. What do you do about it? I don't think breaking up with your phone is probably a good strategy. And you can't really detox from this in some sense because it's like food. We need it to live in a modern world. And so I have other solutions that I would recommend where you're not going to war with the technological milieu that we live in. And frankly, the solutions are going to be the same whether the distraction is internal or external. Hey there, just going to interrupt.

If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done.

Like, it never occurred to me to do that.

It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that, and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those. It allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com. Pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. A quote that you reminded me of that Dr. Adam Gazali, who's a neuroscientist at UCSF, said once that really had a big impact on my understanding of peak performance was that suppression is an active process, which I think relates in a way to what you're mentioning. It also relates to your point about attention simply being about privileging some information over other information. The act of privileging some information over other information is an active process. And so when people think that there's no harm done by having their phone notifications blowing up right in front of them while they're trying to do deep work and write, in reality, they're having to actively work to suppress that information and privilege the focus on writing over the focus on those notifications. Or at least I believe that's the case.

I mean, Adam's great. I know Adam. I think we're probably around the same age too. I don't know. But we knew each other from back in postdoc years for me. But yeah, what he's saying is absolutely the case, right? That suppression is an active process. What we're dealing with here when it comes to our social media and technology use is not— it is for sure requiring us to suppress, but it's also requiring us to constantly task switch. So remember that system we talked about, the executive control? Executive control is essentially on a goal. Now all of a sudden the alerting system is realizing, oh my gosh, I'm not— what's going on? Where am I? Oh, I'm over here. Now the executive system says, oh, we're not on the goal. All right, time to redirect. So we gotta get back on track. The suppression act, the inhibition act is actually an active process of taking that flashlight and having to redirect it back. Over and over and over again. And task switching ends up being one of the most cognitively costly and energetically depleting things we can do. You know, usually people talk about this as multitasking, but there's not multiple flashlights. We're putting it one place and we're moving it to another place, then we're bringing it back again. And that is resulting in a depletion of our, of our attention.

That makes sense. And it's cool that you know Adam as well. In terms of mutual friends or contacts, at least you were on Joe Rogan, I believe a week ago, or at least it aired a week ago. And there's a clip that also has gone semi-viral about you talking about the ADD state of mind with Joe. So I'm curious, first off, how was your experience on the Joe Rogan Experience? Congrats on that. It's a big show to be on. And I know a lot of people find it to be an interesting experience going on it. So I'm curious how that was. And the second question is, if you could give us a breakdown of what the ADD state of mind is.

Yeah, oh, it was great. It was a wonderful experience. Definitely, he's got great attention, very engaging conversation. He likes to travel with his attention, so I'm traveling with him sometimes and sometimes making him return to neighborhoods I wanted to go to. So it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. And then when it comes to ADD, you know, that's the thing. I mean, I think his question was something like, is this a real thing? And The first thing I'd say is all of these systems of attention that we talked about, they work together in a coordinated manner. They've gotta each do their own thing. In some sense, they're mutually inhibitory. You can't be both very focused and very receptive at the same time. And that makes sense. Oftentimes when we think of ADD, it's essentially a dysregulation in either the functioning of each of those individual systems. So you're either, let's just take this kind of orienting system, either hyper-focused, like your flashlight is just so laser pointed and you never move it away, or you're moving it all over the place and it's not staying stable. Both of those are problematic. There has to be a particular range in which it's probably comfortable to be most productive and most sort of functional, frankly. And all of us can tip into too much focus or too little focus, frankly. That's the other thing to say. Is that what we call ADD is actually, I mean, I kind of think of it like a mixing board. You know, you've got like 3 different levers and you've gotta basically put them somewhere and sometimes they're, one's up too high and one's too low and you gotta kind of reset. And there's a particular profile that each of us have of where each of those levers are set for each of the 3 systems. I don't know if that metaphor kind of makes sense, but under ADD, something's up. One of the settings is completely off and it's affecting functioning. So either you are too focused or not focused enough, or that broad receptive alerting system is on overdrive. Everything you see is like a flashing yellow construction, you know, like danger sign. That can lead to things like hypervigilance where you're just, you're on edge in some sense. And it can also be tied to things like anxiety and PTSD, or you actually cannot keep control over the, or keep in mind the goals. You're just losing what the goal is so that you can never guide behavior based on it. That would be where the executive functioning system is, if you think of it as a juggler, it's just dropping all the balls. It can't keep 'em all up in the air. So in some sense, it's to say there is diversity in how each system functions. We have a range of how we function within those. And then sometimes people are outside of that range for potentially too long and it can cause functional impairments, basically a hard time living. And then it can really cause psychological problems too, because when you can't grab ahold of your attention, when there's anxiety, like, "I'm gonna lose this thought, then how am I gonna get back on track?" It can just amplify the whole problematic scenario. But in addition to each of the systems potentially being problematic or any one of them, it's also the coordination between them that could be problematic. So that gives you the landscape of what we're talking about with regard to attention. Not only for things like ADD, but actually psychological disorders. So oftentimes we can think of something like depression, not only as a mood disorder, but as an attentional disorder where that flashlight of attention is getting lured by negative content and then it's just being stuck there, hyperfixated on it. So it can't pull away even if you want to. In some sense, it's magnetically drawn. So, you know, when we start thinking of attention as really a fuel for all of these things we do, thinking, feeling, regulating our mood, connecting with other people, we start understanding why it's so important to take care of the system and pay attention to it itself. Have you seen any research on the relationship between ADD and flow state? No. I know I'm on the Flow Research Collective, so it was on my mind, but I can imagine, and maybe you're going to tell me this, that there are certain people that might say they're much more easily able to get into a flow state with this, again, certain set points on these various three systems. But is there something in particular that was interesting to you on that?

I'm just curious what you're— you know, sometimes you hear about people with certain variations of ADD who are able to focus incredibly, incredibly well when a form of stimulus engages them. And then the challenge with sort of centralizing their attention is when they're basically disengaged by the stimulus, but they have kind of this hyperfocus that can occur. And that sometimes is associated with increased flow state. And then obviously it can also— the flip side of that coin is that access to flow can also be more challenging, even though the upside when it does occur can be greater. So I'm just curious if you have any thoughts irrespective of the empirical research on just the mechanics that may be contributing.

I mean, I think that if you think of flow as an absorptive, hyper-focused state, right, that actually allows you to have this kind of fluidity of your action and your awareness. I don't know, does that describe what you would call flow states?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, absorption is a key characteristic of flow, for sure.

And that, you know, it's— if you think about it just from the way that you use the terms for flow, like absorptive, hyper-focused, action and awareness are coordinated, There's a sense of control. Maybe there's even a reward element of like, the more I do, the more control I continue to feel. It does feel like it's a particular set point on each 3 of these systems. And it may be that you're punching up on the focus side, that you're really in the focus. There's a broad receptive stance toward what's happening. And then there's this kind of fluidity between action and execution. I think it's probably quite wonderful. I certainly think I've had my moments of that experience. The thing that I would say is also interesting regarding the relationship between ADD and flow, maybe this is what you were suggesting, is oftentimes, I mean, this is again as an outsider to the central expertise in flow, there's this aspect of a loss of self-reflective qualities or what I would call meta-awareness. So if meta-awareness, from my point of view, and is this a term you've ever talked about on this podcast?

I don't believe we have talked about it on the podcast specifically.

So yeah, it'd be great to break down that term. Meta meaning having to do with itself, awareness is really this notion of broad conscious experience. Meta-awareness is the awareness we have moment by moment of the contents and processes of our conscious experience, but it's the awareness that we have of it ourselves. That's the key part. So right now, I'm meta-aware. I'm aware that I'm trying to really explain this concept to you. It's happening right now. Different from metacognition. Metacognition is more like we tend to know our cognitive orientation or cognitive style. Like, I tend to be a maximizer. I tend to make decisions exhaustively or whatever it is regarding our cognition. We have a sense of it. Meta-awareness is not about this general sense we might have, but really the in-the-moment awareness of what's happening, bordering probably in some sense on the self-consciousness sort of— I would say a dysfunctional aspect of it would be self-consciousness in that kind of lay sense of like, I'm so aware of what I'm doing. And oftentimes people will— you probably could say much more about this than anyone I can, but just in talking to professional athletes about these I think that Simone Biles talked about it as like the twisties, or golfers talk about it as the yips. Sometimes pitchers have this where they just can't pitch anymore, where somehow this very automatic, potentially flow-inducing process in their performance now all of a sudden is glitchy. And it has something to do with an overrepresentation of that, the presence of it within your conscious experience, almost like self-consciousness regarding it. Does any of that resonate with you in terms of problems that arise that deter flow? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

I think the loss of self-consciousness is one of the things people most like about flow. Exactly.

So the self issue, we could get deep pretty fast. The notion of meta-awareness actually isn't tied to some kind of egoic sense of self. It's not like, a me, she is, you know, me as an entity with my ego is feeling this right now. It's more this embodied phenomenology of this is occurring right now. It's like a data gathering mode. Meta-awareness is more like an understanding of the data that currently exists moment by moment than any kind of characterization of me or what I'm experiencing. I hope that— it's a subtle point, but I think it's important. So anyway, oftentimes, and going back to ADD, oftentimes in ADD, people do have this sort of hyperfixating capacity. And we did a study once with adults with ADD and offering them mindfulness training because our thoughts were, if we offer them a training that allows them to be more focused, more able to notice where their attention is and then redirect it when they're off task, that could potentially be helpful to people. And in addition to kind of exercising all three of those systems of attention, the other thing that mindfulness training does is cultivate meta-awareness, really kind of taking that metaphor of, you know, broad— what did you call it— fog light, but now you add consciousness to that, like, oh, I'm aware of what's appearing right now in my present moment experience with the content and processes at play. So what we did was we said, don't worry about your medication, take whatever medication you normally take, They went through this program we offered in a very specific way for people that have ADD. And then afterwards, I was able to talk to some of the participants in terms of like, well, what changed? What did you feel was different? You know, we have our objective data, but what was the subjective experience? And, you know, one of the things that I found very striking was like, oh, well, I still take my stimulant medication. I can't remember at that point if it was more Adderall or probably more Ritalin, 'cause this was several years ago. And now when I take it, I don't just play video games all day. I'll actually have the awareness to say, what do I want to be doing right now? What am I doing right now? Is there a matchup? So we could see examples from their descriptions of more and more and more meta-awareness coming online. And that seemed to really support them kind of course correcting on their own. So that this hyper— this is just raw capacity. Hyperfocus is just process that gets engaged. But if you now can divert that to using that same core focusing ability to study or do something else, maybe that could help you, especially in the context of, you know, some of the graduate students that were having difficulty. So we know this even from just general studies with patients with ADD, is that oftentimes, even if they have core attentional challenges, if they also happen to have good meta-awareness, this knowing of where their mind is moment by moment, they tend to not suffer as many kind of performance problems and functioning problems.

I absolutely love the phrase hyperfixating capacity. It's definitely something I want to aspire to. That's great. That's a breakdown. So we're coming up on the end here, um, Mishi, and I wanted to ask you the question, one of the questions we always wrap with, which is a question about a question. We call the research genie question. And the question is, if you could click your fingers and immediately have all the research be conducted to fully legitimately answer any question that you have, what would that question be?

How does the brain work? And how does consciousness work? That's a good one.

That's, that's my personal one. We get, we get that one every now and then. Yeah, people, I think people underestimate the extent to which that question is unanswered also outside of academic circles. So that's a great one. Yeah. Do you want to give a little bit of a breakdown as to why that would be your question?

Well, I mean, you know, we're going to be bound by the fact that we're human beings looking at ourselves. Then there's even deeper questions. I, in my line of work, I work with a lot of people that have worldviews that are not from this sort of materialistic they would call reductionist orientation of consciousness being basically created by this machinery called the brain. You know, I mean, from the neuroscience point of view, that's not even something we debate. Is consciousness something the brain does? Yes, it's the creator of consciousness. It will stop once you're no longer alive. So, you know, is the brain the machine for consciousness, or is it the antenna for consciousness? And that would be more of this sort of other worldview that, no, this is something that is exists and we're just picking it up and it's utilizing the hardware of the brain in a particular way to experience it, but it's not generated within the brain. I mean, this is now getting in a totally different territory. And it sounds like, well, you know, what does that even mean to have consciousness exist and then we're just going to be the antenna for it? But how do you even answer a question like that? How do you say, no, that's absolutely ridiculous. No, you can't know this. It takes an understanding of even the fundamental question initially, which is, well, how does it get created in the brain? We don't know. I mean, there's a lot of great work being done, but these are not things that are answered. And I don't know if we ever will, but if you had a magic genie, research genie, that could get me there, I'd be all up for it.

Yeah, it'd be definitely fun to have one of those. As a final question, Amishi, and feel free to elaborate or go into some depth here if you'd like to, If you had someone in a room for 15 to 30 minutes and you were able to give them 1 to 3 key changes that they should make in their daily way of operating, their habits, their systems, their processes, what would the 1 to 3 key changes be that you would have someone make if your goal and their goal was to have them improve their focus, achieve peak performance, access flow more consistently, et cetera?

I mean, in some ways I think that is what I'm doing. I am actually pursuing a whole line of work that is exactly that. I would say that it begins most broadly with paying attention to this thing called attention, just understanding that it exists, its nature, and understanding its vulnerabilities and then its trainability. But concretely, it would begin with describing some core practices like the ones I've laid out in my book that really come from many decades of research in my own lab and others, and frankly, millennia of human beings practicing these things to be able to pay better attention and live more fulfilling lives. So we'd start with sort of the fundamentals. And in my book, I describe these as sort of 12-minute-a-day practices, which we found is the minimum effective dose for high-stress groups. For these specific mindfulness practices. So one would be introducing this person to the practice, a set of practices. I don't think a one-shot 15 to 30 minutes is going to do much except maybe some kind of temporary mood induction, because really what we want to achieve is neuroplasticity that'll change sort of the default capacities so that we can on demand be able to be in a certain present-centered orientation. But I'd also say other things like, try to be aware of when you're defaulting to multitasking and see if you can monotask instead. So it'd be more like guidance. And even going back to what we were talking about before, and maybe this is too off track with the question you're asking, but our social media use and our feeling of a crisis of attention, apply this to even your everyday encounters with your phone. So being aware moment by moment of where your attention is. So you're sitting at your desk, you hear the phone ping, like notice the pull of your attention from that ping. Notice you potentially even ballistically without your knowledge, but at some point you will be brought into awareness, you've moved your arm to grab your phone. Now you've probably used your face to unlock the phone and now you're going to click on some app that the notification came from. What happens if you just bring your awareness and your moment-to-moment attention to all of those processes, including now more meta-awareness about what am I aiming to achieve from this engagement with my phone? Is it to get information? I gotta go pick up my kid somewhere. Is it to look something up? Is it a response I've been waiting for? But to be very aware and to bring it to the front of your mind, what is going on and and why. We're up against such a huge technological load with the algorithms that are predicting our every move. We need to arm ourselves. So for that person, for the 15 to 30 minutes, I'd want to make my case that mindfulness and meta-awareness are the way to go to live a more productive life as a human being in the modern world.

Nice. Thank you for that breakdown, Amishi. And I want to highly recommend that people check out your book, which is called Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day. Love the invest 12 minutes a day part of the subtitle. And to check out your website, you've got a great domain, by the way. It's amishi.com, A-M-I-S-H-I.com. And there's a great picture of you, by the way, which it looks like is with the Dalai Lama. I'm assuming it's the Dalai Lama, although it doesn't confirm. Was that with the Dalai Lama?

Yeah, I've had the honor of speaking to him, gosh, 4 times now. Amazing. Wow.

What was it like to meet him and spend time with him?

It was wonderful. He truly has trained his mind and heart to have a peak mind. And the thing about him that is so cool is that he really is a student of science and wanted to know everything about our research. So that was a lot of fun to be able to talk to him about it.

Nice, nice. That's super cool. Yes, definitely, definitely recommend people check out those resources. And is there anything else you would like to mention for folks before we close out here?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the great opportunity with the kind of audience you have here is, you know, I think that people already know when you're thinking about flow in terms of physical excellence that you need to train for that. So there is an automaticity there in terms of peak performance. And we know as a culture that we need to exercise our bodies daily for optimizing our physical health. And what I hope that something about what I've described in our conversation and in reading the book will allow for people to understand and even shift to culture change is the notion that the mind is no different than the rest of the body. The mind, the brain, they need training daily to optimize wellness and performance. And some of the things that we've found in my lab to be beneficial ways to train daily, I'm offering in the book. So I guess my final thought would be don't forget about the mind, and just like the body, it needs daily activity, daily exercise to stay fit.

Super. Well, thank you so much, Misha. It's been a pleasure. If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, thank you. Please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.