The Oscillation of Attention

I found a number of fascinating ideas in Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind. I am going to simply list a number of quotes from the chapter on “The Neuroscience” then add some thoughts around them.

“[Marcus] Raichle had noticed that several areas in the brain exhibited heightened activity precisely when his subjects were doing nothing mentally. This was the brain’s “default mode,” the network of brain structures that light up with activity when there are no demands on our attention and we have no mental task to perform. Put another way, Raichle had discovered the place where our minds go to wander – to daydream, ruminate, travel in time, reflect on ourselves, and worry. It may be through these very structures that the stream of our consciousness flows.

The default network stands in a kind of seesaw relationship with the attentional networks that wake up whenever the outside world demands our attention; when one is active, the other goes quiet, and vice versa.”

“…working at a remove from our sensory processing of the outside world, the default mode is most active when we are engaged in higher-level “metacognitive” processes, such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions (such as the self or ego), moral reasoning, and “theory of mind” – the ability to attribute mental states to others, as when we try to imagine “what it is like” to be someone else.”

 “ ‘The brain is a hierarchical system’ [Robin] Carhart-Harris explained in one of our interviews. ‘The highest-level parts’ – those developed late in our evolution, typically located in the cortex – ‘exert an inhibitory influence on the lower-level [and older] parts, like emotion and memory.’ ”

 “…the default mode network appears to play a role in the creation of mental constructs or projections, the most important of which is the construct we call the self, or ego….Nodes in the default network are thought to be responsible for autobiographical memory, the material from which we compose the story of who we are, by linking our past experiences with what happens to us and with projections of our future goals.”

 “Taken as a whole, the default mode network exerts in inhibitory influence on other parts of the brain, notably including the limbic regions involved in emotion and memory, in much the same way Freud conceived of the ego keeping the anarchic forces of the unconscious id in check.”

It appears to me that what is being offered in these quotes is that the inhibitory nature of the default mode network (DMN) both suppresses the immediate appetites of the Id, and allows us to distinguish a “self” out of all the incoming data streaming from our immediate sensings. When the outside world does not demand our attention, our attention goes to “…composing the story of who we are…”

In talking about the DMN, Pollan also adds “If not for the brain’s filtering mechanisms, the torrent of information the senses make available to our brains at any given moment might prove difficult to process – as indeed is sometimes the case during the psychedelic experience.” I can attest to this torrent from my own experiences with hallucinogens when I was young. The rate at which that torrent flowed was often much too fast for any assessment, descriptions or meaning-making to occur, which would, on occasion, be unsettling.  The suppression of that torrent is apparently how the ego arose and so it seems to be fundamental to self-reflective awareness.  Remember that this suppression comes from ‘The highest-level parts’ [of the brain] – those developed late in our evolution, typically located in the cortex”, which makes sense.

I’ll now jump to Episode 4 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis of John Verveake’s YouTube series. In this lecture he points out that there are two sides to our attention. First, you can direct your attention, which then makes the object of your attention salient in that moment. And secondly, your attention can be “caught”. He goes on to point out that that which is salient to us is more apt to capture our attention, which makes it more salient, thus drawing more attention and thereby creating a vicious cycle.

The result of these cycles is that you tend to lose your capacity to notice other things. This is, he says, how you can “bullshit yourself”. In a Q&A on Future Thinkers  that I listened to, Vervaeke described this as self-deception. This looks like how the DMN operates. It solidifies the ego and, it would seem, everything else that we pay the most attention to.

Back to Pollan, he says “Along with the default mode network, ‘a coherent sense of self or ‘ego’ emerges and, with that the human capacity for self-reflection and reason…Borrowing from Freud, he calls this evolved mode of cognition ‘secondary consciousness.’ Secondary consciousness ‘pays deference to reality and diligently seeks to represent the world as precisely as possible’ in order to minimize ‘surprise and uncertainty (i.e. entropy).” 

Alan Watts once said that “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.” So he too seemed to be pointing out that what we attend to, in some way, is what we consider ourselves to be.  The vicious cycle that Vervaeke points to is exactly what holds our ego, our identities, in place.  So it appears that what we attend to becomes more orderly, more solid, more fixed in place and what we do not continue to attend to begins to decohere in our experience via natural entropy. If we are to experience an orderly world, we need the focus of our attention to bring coherence to it – held in the structures of the DMN – by suppressing the vast amount of input that our world is generating. Without that suppression, without the coherence that comes into focus by it, we as we know ourselves would not be. This would also seem to indicate that, with regards to our identities, an interruption of Vervaeks’s cycle could, in some instances, be a threat to the survival of some portion of that identity.

It seems logical that this should also be reflected in collective attention. As I have pointed out before, when any group of people focus their attention, there is an energetic mass associated with that communal attention. In physics, mass generates gravity – and as Einstein showed mass is energy – and the more there is, the more capacity it has to attract and to hold. I used a federal bureaucracy as an example of how collective intent generates enough mass attention that altering its flow is incredibly difficult. So just as our focused attention holds our identities in place, group attention holds collective attention, such as a culture or subculture, in place. Vervaeke’s cycle pattern applies and you thus have the gravity of enculturation, familial patterning and “group-think” with any collection of human beings.

I once heard Ken Wilber say that you have to have a healthy ego before you start to let go of it. What comes to me is that the focusing and letting go of attention, the narrowing and opening of the aperture of attention, is one expression of the natural oscillation, or flow, of Becoming and Being. You might think of it like a magnifying glass focusing sunlight. The narrower the beam created by the lens, the more intense the impact at the point of focus. The wider the beam, the broader the viewing area and the more generally illuminating the sunshine seems. In my experience of energy, the wider the aperture opens, the longer the wavelength and the more expansive the view, much like our short trip around the Sun lies within the Sun’s long trip around the center of the galaxy. This human fluctuation is expressed in the cycle of focusing to create, then letting go and allowing to Be (to enjoy) whether it is individual or in a group. We do appear to have become a bit too stuck within Vervaeke’s vicious cycles and thus practices of letting go seem critical to the lubrication that will free up that cycle and increase the wavelength of that opening/closing oscillation.

Re-phrasing Watts, we are, in part, the oscillating flow of Being’s attention, focusing and unfocusing. As the frequency of this oscillation lengthens in our experience, it broadens our view and thereby ramps up the scale of our individual and collective development as we let go into new spaces. We then quite naturally re-cohere our identities by describing the new terrain that has come into view.  As a result of this flow, we and our worldview have evolved. This essay itself is an example of this oscillation.

Lastly, from this perspective, what Vervaeke calls self-deception is a negative label attached to a natural mechanism without which we would not have an identity. Even as we traverse the Spiral of Don Beck, we need to “cohere” or collect “ourselves” in the next vaster space using this mechanism. A wide variety of practices allow us to extricate ourselves from whatever current narratives we happen to be living in and thereby momentarily loosen the boundaries that we have created in order to operate in this place and in this moment of time. It might be useful not to denigrate that mechanism with such a label, as that kind of naming has an energy and gravity of its own. It’s not likely to be going anywhere, at least as long as we are here.