Why attention? A professor recently asked me how I would handle one of his therapy clients. Based on my response, he asked, “So you see it as basically a developmental problem?” Yes. With an approach that focuses on agency and realistic possibility–other than organic brain lesions, psychosis, or drug influences, etc.–the majority of problems look like developmental problems. I see this as the basic difference between systems that base themselves in either metaphysics or reductionistic empiricism as opposed to those based on a sense of reality as emergent, actual, and potentiating. Reality potentiates. I like the idiom of attention because it is not based in particular culture-bound assumptions, perceptions, and myths. At the same time, by focusing on how we utilize our attention, we can consistently increase our agency and enjoyment individually and collectively. A corrective focus on emotions will need to change as moods and emotions change, and a corrective focus on externals will feel, well, focused on externals. Attention is a fluid and open-ended idiom that has universally been explored by every individual and culture, but I haven’t heard anyone pretend to speak exhaustively on this subject–which leaves the doors open, allows us room to play in a new intellectual space. As self-identity changes, our ability to attend changes while our ability to emote does not.
Without emotions, we would live reptilian lives. Emotions bring texture and color to our inner lives and support our aspirations. (How often do most therapists or teachers use the word “aspirations”? Enough?) While perceptions can be influenced by various methods and ideologies, and emotions can be suppressed, emotions cannot be educated. They don’t need to be educated. Emotions are a gift–they cannot be bought, earned, priced, or sold.
We can shape our moods, though, and we might cultivate responsiveness and wisdom in our feelings rather than reactivity and impulsive selfishness. I talk about emotions as those affective qualities that color fairly brief moments. Moods last longer–up to a lifetime with chronic hatred, disappointment, depression, etc. So depression is not an emotion or a “feeling”, it’s a mood. Feelings include our emotions, moods, and our interpretations and reactions to emotions and moods. For example, at this point in my life, I’ve got a good feeling towards minor dysthymic episodes because I’ve changed how I interact with them–they no longer mean what they used to, and they no longer affect me like they used to. The same is true with anger and disappointment, so I’m either in a fifteen-year lucky spell, or I may be onto something. I’d argue that, based on affecting my attention, I’ve been able to influence my moods by appreciating my emotions and intentionally addressing my feelings.
Mystics and old folks throughout the ages have repeatedly offered the ancient truism that our phenomenological experience of life changes for the better when we’re more willing to observe and relax rather than get all worked up, judgmental, and anxious. While experience may be the best teacher of this particular lesson, taking it from platitude to personal experience, it’s probably not necessary to be all that mystical or old to catch on.
Essentially, we can wait and hope for relaxation, interest, and good moods to happen to us, to affect us, or we can begin to explore the connections between intention, choice, abilities, and cause. The opposite of learned helplessness, self-efficacy (with all its supporting research), is basically the current psychological lingo for saying people are happier and more satisfied when they don’t feel worthless and incompetent. This is why I choose to see the majority of problems as developmental problems. Failure is usually temporary, even if our solutions to previous problems have a significant impact on the current problems in our situation, and even if our “solutions” for today will most likely shape tomorrow’s “problems”. That doesn’t bother me. Being bothered by that is like being frustrated that yesterday came before today. Of course it did, relax.
The interesting new material on frontal lobe development and changes in executive functioning is a relatively empirical presentation of the (now scientific) fact that humans deal in possibility. It is amusing–when distanced from the tragic effects–that our culture presents little common understanding of the developmental connection between possibility and wisdom. Without the wisdom connection, the possibilities we’ve pursued have often been incredibly destructive and often just insipid. Here’s a new truism: when self-identity is largely set and believed in before intentional development of frontal-lobe-centered abilities, real potential is actually guarded against by over-reliance on habit and lowest-common-denominator ideologies, increasing effects of temperament and environment and decreasing the influence of choice. Certain long-term goals and consistent practices will improve frontal lobe activity and increase identification with the abilities that development allows while other long-term goals and practices will improve one's sense of overall integration and flexibility. Two important points in that: 1) it is possible to knowingly develop wisdom, concentration, relaxation, flow states, harmony, and connection with a sense of the profound, and 2) certain practices are stage-specific in their effects [or they at least epitomize different stage-specific developments] while other practices will have more of an effect on integrating abilities, experiences, and understandings across various stages. This is nothing new. Essentially, I’m saying that our sense of self changes when we encounter new experiences. Some of those experiences just involve changes, and some involve different kinds of progress.
What I’m driving at is simple. Our media currently propagandizes lowest common denominator motivations, and our educational system is about a century behind cultural progress–meaning that we are being educated largely by our media and not so much by our official educational system. It is the nature of bureaucracy to eventually become entrenched, obsolete, and fall away or change. What that means is that our experience of an over-burdening and obsolete bureaucracy is too retro-cumbersome to be effective against an overwhelmingly cynical and reductionist media presentation of human nature. While religious officials molest children and other religious officials cover it up, with CEOs and government officials acting like it’s the last few moments on a sinking Titanic, fear increases, and THE END DAYS ARE COMING! Come on. Your neighbors don’t often act like the people on America’s Most Wanted, and the majority of us will probably never be offered $500 to eat a plate of worms or lie in a tank with eels or whatever else they’re doing on “reality shows”. When we actually look around, reality actually does show, and it looks different than television shows. The problem I’m poking at is that we have found a way of squeezing wisdom and proportion out of public dialogue. It’s not human nature; it’s the nature of a competitive political system influenced by the interest of exploitative investment capital expressed in the current electronic and virtual modes. It’s concentrated power having its corrupting influence. Simple. Systematic, yes, but not hard to figure out. This is what, in evolutionary terms, is called a runaway effect. In psychology , we call it self-fulfilling prophecy. Ask for the worst in people, and they may not give you their worst, but they’ll usually come up with something less than their best.
My point is that our best develops. The message that this is so and methods of how to develop our individual and collective best are not given much public space. Simple.
Here’s the next step. Our development includes intention. So if we intend not to move forward, as we grow and learn, we get stronger at refusing to mature (in which case we just grow old). No previous culture has had so many pointless distractions in which to pour attention which could otherwise be invested in appreciation and maturation. In order to avoid a second Great Depression, we began specializing in disposable garbage-toys and “convenient” consumer products. That 1950s solution, inflated by the economic boom of the 60s and 70s and popularized by the growth and conglomeration of mass media, has evolved into advertising agencies of the 21st century recognizing that aggressively marketing to kids–teaching them, as if they need education in this, to nag their parents for disposable garbage-toys–can consistently increase sales by about 30%. Exploitative investment capital. Television taught advertising executives the value of distraction. Massive corporations, the media, the new “service economy”, hi-tech and highly organized distraction, longer working hours than any other culture on the planet, and rampant political brinkmanship along with lack of political vision all add up to quite a stew. I don’t believe that there are emotional solutions to these problems. I do believe that we will have to actively learn how to pay attention or suffer the consequences of distraction. The distractors are highly organized, well-funded, and they have often separated any sense of church from the state of their affairs. This is part of why I focus on attention. When we avoid, distract ourselves, and withdraw our attention, we’re practicing learned helplessness rather than self-efficacy. One way or another, whether the devil exists or not, he is paid his due. I’d rather pay attention now than pay the prime interest rate for the rest of my life.
The solution to learned helplessness and the solution to impulsive decision-making is the same thing. No, it doesn’t involve stuttering in a Southern drawl or attacking foreign countries. Power that can be given can be taken away, but observation changes the power=corruption equation. Distraction allows; observation informs. Emotional distance is a luxury, a very high cost item.
I want to draw from Elkhonon Goldberg’s book The Wisdom Paradox for making a few points. He points out (p.116) that memories that last a lifetime are not evenly distributed across our lifespan. The preponderance of these memories are from when we are 10-30 years old. Consider what occurred in our country while Baby-Boomers and GenX-ers were 10-30 years old. 1955 to 1995. What was the Zeitgeist of these two generations? I’d say that fear of nuclear war was strong for Boomers, producing a foreshortened sense of the future. For us GenX-ers, we inherited a great deal of confusion, a sense of meaninglessness, and a general lack of direction. That’s quite a simplification, but these seem like prevalent experiences. What has lasted as a forty-year cultural message that has been consistent and strong enough to overcome the effects of these influences? Economically, we’ve got research and development along with a supposedly growing “service economy”. If you’ve also worked entry-level service jobs for over ten years, you don’t need me to tell you that such a career won’t do much for alleviating a sense of apathy and/or meaninglessness. War doesn’t do it for me either. I’m facing the neurobiological facts of my most influential decades of memory being colored in cultural meaninglessness and the media message that human beings can’t be trusted.
Lucky for me, I’ve got a real human brain. “The evolution of the brain,” writes Goldberg, “is dominated by one grand theme, a gradual transition from a ‘hard-wired’ to an ‘open-ended-open-minded’ design” (p.105). Lucky for me, lucky for us. That’s been happening over the last forty years, but it hasn’t been explicitly recognized. In fact, our culture has a fetish for youth and a phobia of age. I don’t believe the hype; I look forward to open-ended-open-minded. It’s something I can work on even while my opportunities for working in fast-food or housekeeping for rich folks keep expanding. Even while my student loans pile up and interest accrues. While I’m alive, my brain can’t be stopped. I might as well direct my self in the same direction that my brain is growing towards. When I do that, whether some soul is involved or not, whether other homo sapiens are involved or not, it feels right–I can feel the growth as I do it.
This is why an understanding of how to develop one’s ability to attend is important to individuals. But I like attention because it seems to tie seamlessly into importance for groups as well. Education, in one sense, is simply intentional adaptation. In Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald writes, "[T]he uniqueness of humanity could be said to rest not so much in language as in our capacity for rapid cultural change" (10).To some extent, our brains adapt whether we want them to or not. But we can also educate ourselves, we can CHOOSE to learn. Until now, education has presented supporting people’s ability to attend as a secondary purpose. They used to look at an inability to attend consistently not as a teaching opportunity but as a learning disability. We could go a step further towards re-evaluating ADD and say that ADD has the effect on groups of motivating them to explore.
If we look at how kids don’t fit the system, maybe we shouldn’t just blame the kids. Neither do I believe in blaming them but being patronizing and calling them "special" to cover the blaming. Our brains have been shaped by our media and our culture. But before moving on, here’s another consideration: if kids ever fit snugly into this style of classroom education, why did they used to be beaten to keep them in line? Education is intentional adaptation. Kids in school right now are either adapting to a rapid, segmented, virtual social reality and/or acting the way kids act when not under the threat of being beaten. Maybe we need to intentionally adapt the institutions. Maybe attention needs to become primary.
If we look at the history of humanity across tens of thousands of years with the perspective that education is intentional adaptation, we can see an interesting overlap between individual and human development (the brain and the cultures it supports becoming open-ended-open-minded). We may also need to describe culture in its emergent function as education in its broadest sense. Culture involves the intentional adaptations of generations past as well as current adaptations. We can see this today in all the assumptions that we pick up from our culture that are not necessarily addressed in classrooms. This is a significant point since observational learning is important, since about 90% of communication between people in the same room/space is nonverbal, and since immersion learning is the best way to learn a culture or language. We learn more by what our parents and others around us do than by what everyone says. Even if we want to be romantically sentimental about what people say, our brains are basically pragmatic about the environment around us. We notice and learn.
Education (culture) for a young humanity focused on self-valuation and survival. Because we are social animals, self-valuation involves emotions and status. That’s a good thing; we want to be loved, and when we feel loved and respected, we feel better. When we feel hated or despised, we feel worse. My point with this part of the analogy is that survival and emotional needs are basic–they are primary to other concerns, and they are always there to influence us.
Around cultural “adolescence”–which I’ll define as the time in various cultures where they developed sustainable agriculture, surpluses which allowed cities and specialization–the focus shifted to definition of the individual cultures, to what makes us better than them. We still play this game for international status. “America’s cool, but France isn’t,” or, “America isn’t cool but France is more uncool,” and vice versa. Just like our most basic motivations, these adolescent concerns for comparative status never leave us altogether–they are part of the full range of human experience. This is the relative point in development where people will fight for the ideology of their particular culture as well as just for survival or directly valuable resources. The solutions to earlier problems (freezing, starvation, predation) create the circumstances of the current problems (population size and density: possibility of plague, large-scale conquest, slavery, caste systems, purposeful widespread oppression and exploitation, etc.) As a species, we have explored this “adolescent” mentality of describing what makes us different and feeling righteous about to the point of breaking–or breakthrough. Our cultures, tribes, and nations lack progressive leadership when we do not express a more mature vision than those found at pep rallies or discussed over cigarettes in the boys’ room. I don’t believe that more positive emotional experiences provide that vision. (But I want to include more positive emotional experiences in that vision.)
Here’s another simple step. (It is simple because progress necessitates that this occur; eventually it will seem simple because it is obvious and agreed upon.) We can continue to run down the planet and run down people who are different from us or outside our group, or we can decide to look for some other mode of interaction with our fellow humans and our common environment. I don’t personally find looking for this “other mode” to be all that mystical or even special. It’s just right. Why? Most good psychology just looks commonsensical once you see it. It looks like common sense to me to look for ways to enhance our ecological environment at the same time that we look for ways to increase our appreciation of people who are different, people who know something we/I don’t. I’ll never be Ethiopian, but I’ll always appreciate Ethiopian food; I’ll never be Hungarian, but I’ll always appreciate Hungarian music; I’ll never be a woman, but it is hard to imagine a time when I don’t appreciate women. I look for ways of acting that encourage other people to say similar things about being American, I look for ways of acting that my children or the children of my friends–or the children of strangers–can say the same about my generation. One way or another, time will heal all wounds; we choose to either cultivate or protest that healing.
Education (human culture, intentional adaptation) at this point in history must shift towards familiarity and sustainability. This is similar to how individuals accept and grow into mature adulthood and parenthood. Sustainable, familiar. When we consider martial diplomacy and ecological destruction–our adolescent zeal for individual self-exploration and status–it becomes obvious that this is not a healthy neighborhood mode or global mode for raising our children. What global neighborhood do you want your children to live in?
While we made phenomenal strides in technology, travel, and communications abilities during the 20th century, we have used our advantages to compete for national or corporate status and for garnering increasing control over resources. Population expansion does not allow for an unending continuation of this mode of being. We are at a global “moment of truth” where we all democratically choose to invest our attention into either winning contests or raising families. This choice is beautiful in its simplicity and horrifying or amazing in the possible consequences. Even when we “win” destructive contests, we destroy. Is your attention on the immediate moment? on future generations? When we choose power as the power to destroy, rather than as the power to create, we are shaping our neighborhood customs and affecting the environment__ (single) in which the neighborhoods of our global community are found. Look at the effects of our actions, and choose either destructiveness or familiarity. Right now, we are stripping resources from future generations and adding agitation, even strife, to their early childhood experiences. America’s politics in the last fifty years is a great example to the world that everything we do comes home to roost. The CIA is calling this “blowback”. (Some call it karma, some call it justice, but I don’t care what the words are–I’m GenerationX.) Continuing on this blind path allows the possibilities of nuclear winter, desertification of the planet, and/or continual internecine conflict. I don’t believe in creating blowback.
Unquestioned emotional motivations along with intelligent advancement have brought us to a point where we must choose either to endeavor intentional maturation as a global group or denial of that global potential. When you deny either your own or another human’s potential, that is the denial I speak of. The proof of this potential lies in those who are best among us–not in those who are similar to us, those with the most, or those with the least. We will either shift our attention from unquestioned emotional impulsivity and intelligent comparisons of quantities to a focus on the quality of our attention, choices, and interactions, or we will continue to have crippling effects on the potential of generations yet to come. We should consider the 20th century, not repeat it.
Because of our common situation, I suggest for consideration: that we value emotions and feelings but respond in proportion; that we hold our ideals but not more closely than we hold our children; that we recognize our pride but not place it above dignity; that we pursue happiness but not to the exclusion of peace; that we apply our intelligence but not without wisdom; that we love our selves, our families, our friends, our tribes, our nations, and our cultures but not without compassion for others; and finally that we test and express both ourselves and our companions with the quality, extent, accuracy, and abundance of our vision for ourselves and our massive–if sometimes massively dysfunctional–human family.
Any individual, family, tribe, or nation that limits the potential of their future generations by maintaining exclusion and destructiveness betrays the love they were shown by parents and grandparents, betrays the spirit of love that is expressed in their own cultural values, betrays what is best in themselves. We feel this in ourselves when we are greedy, when we hate, when we turn away.
Even between generations now, the game changes, the game has changed. The ignorance my parents may be excused of is not excusable for me. I grew up in a global context. I have an obvious choice between truth or selfishness. If my parents are confused, they taught me to see. Much respect–they paved my way. Population density changes the nature of the culture game. It is no longer possible to attempt expansion without attempting conquest. We’re coming together whether we choose to or not. It’s a limited sum game now, since there’s only so much space on this earth’s surface. We choose either appreciation of ourselves or depreciation of human values. We either expand the contest or expand the heart. I am a lover and a fighter; given a choice, I’d rather love. Why attention? Because avoidance won’t cut the mustard, tolerance won’t get it done. Whether we like it or not, the bar has been raised. We appreciate difference, complexity, or we simplify by destroying potential.
Goldberg wrote, “The evolution of the brain is dominated by one grand theme, a gradual transitions from ‘hard-wired’ to an ‘open-ended-open-minded’ design.” It’s already in us; we might as well bring it out. Goldberg followed that sentence with this one: “As a result, the functional organization of the most advanced heteromodal association cortex does not resemble a quilt consisting of little regions each in charge of its narrow function. To use the technical parlance of neuroscience, it is not modular. Rather, it is highly interactive and distributed (p,.105).” Highly interactive and distributed. That describes our “heteromodal association cortex” and our sense of appreciation–basically, our brain and our social world. Avoidance and withdrawal don’t cut the mustard. Heteromodal, yes. Distributed, yes. Attentive? Most definitely.
Copyright 2007 Todd Mertz