Wander This World

consider the following statement: human beings only use 10 percentof their brain capacity. well, as a neuroscientist, i can tell you that while morgan freemandelivered this line with the gravitasthat makes him a great actor, this statement is entirely false. (laughter) the truth is, human beings use 100 percentof their brain capacity. the brain is a highly efficient,energy-demanding organ

that gets fully utilized and even though it isat full capacity being used, it suffers from a problemof information overload. there's far too much in the environmentthan it can fully process. so to solve this problem of overload, evolution devised a solution, which is the brain's attention system. attention allows us to notice, select and directthe brain's computational resources

to a subset of all that's available. we can think of attentionas the leader of the brain. wherever attention goes,the rest of the brain follows. in some sense, it's your brain's boss. and over the last 15 years, i've been studyingthe human brain's attention system. in all of our studies,i've been very interested in one question. if it is indeed the casethat our attention is the brain's boss, is it a good boss?

does it actually guide us well? and to dig in on this big question,i wanted to know three things. first, how does attentioncontrol our perception? second, why does it fail us, often leaving us feelingfoggy and distracted? and third, can we do anythingabout this fogginess, can we train our brainto pay better attention? to have more strong and stable attentionin the work that we do in our lives. so i wanted to give you a brief glimpse

into how we're going to look at this. a very poignant example of how our attentionends up getting utilized. and i want to do it using the exampleof somebody that i know quite well. he ends up being part of a very largegroup of people that we work with, for whom attentionis a matter of life and death. think of medical professionals or firefighters or soldiers or marines.

this is the story of a marine captain,captain jeff davis. and the scene that i'm going to sharewith you, as you can see, is not about his time in the battlefield. he was actually on a bridge, in florida. but instead of lookingat the scenery around him, seeing the beautiful vistas and noticing the cool ocean breezes, he was driving fast and contemplatingdriving off that bridge. and he would later tell me that it tookall of everything he had not to do so.

you see, he'd just returned from iraq. and while his body was on that bridge, his mind, his attention,was thousands of miles away. he was gripped with suffering. his mind was worried and preoccupied and had stressful memoriesand, really, dread for his future. and i'm really gladthat he didn't take his life. because he, as a leader,knew that he wasn't the only one that was probably suffering;

many of his fellow marinesprobably were, too. and in the year 2008, he partnered with mein the first-of-its-kind project that actually allowed us to test and offersomething called mindfulness training to active-duty military personnel. but before i tell you aboutwhat mindfulness training is, or the results of that study, i think it's important to understandhow attention works in the brain. so what we do in the laboratory is that many of our studies of attentioninvolve brain-wave recordings.

in these brain wave recordings,people wear funny-looking caps that are sort of like swimming caps,that have electrodes embedded in them. these electrodes pick upthe ongoing brain electrical activity. and they do it with millisecondtemporal precision. so we can see these small yet detectablevoltage fluctuations over time. and doing this, we can very preciselyplot the timing of the brain's activity. about 170 milliseconds after we show our research participantsa face on the screen, we see a very reliable,detectable brain signature.

it happens right at the back of the scalp, above the regions of the brainthat are involved in face processing. now, this happens so reliablyand so on cue, as the brain's face detector, that we've even giventhis brain-wave component a name. we call it the n170 component. and we use this componentin many of our studies. it allows us to see the impactthat attention may have on our perception. i'm going to give you a senseof the kind of experiments

that we actually do in the lab. we would show participantsimages like this one. you should see a face and a sceneoverlaid on each other. and what we do is we ask our participants as they're viewing a seriesof these types of overlaid images, to do something with their attention. on some trials, we'll ask themto pay attention to the face. and to make sure they're doing that, we ask them to tell us,by pressing a button,

if the face appeared to be male or female. on other trials, we ask them to tell what the scene was --was it indoor or outdoor? and in this way,we can manipulate attention and confirm that the participantswere actually doing what we said. our hypotheses about attentionwere as follows: if attention is indeed doing its joband affecting perception, maybe it works like an amplifier. and what i mean by this

is that when we directattention to the face, it becomes clearer and more salient, it's easier to see. but when we direct it to the scene,the face becomes barely perceptible as we process the scene information. so what we wanted to do is look at this brain-wave componentof face detection, the n170, and see if it changed at all as a function of where our participantswere paying attention --

to the scene or the face. and here's what we found. we found that when they paidattention to the face, the n170 was larger. and when they paid attention to the scene,as you can see in red, it was smaller. and that gap you seebetween the blue and red lines is pretty powerful. what it tells us is that attention, which is really the onlything that changed,

since the images they viewedwere identical in both cases -- attention changes perception. and it does so very fast. within 170 millisecondsof actually seeing a face. in our follow-up studies,we wanted to see what would happen, how could we perturbor diminish this effect. and our hunch was that if you put peoplein a very stressful environment, if you distract them with disturbing,negative images, images of suffering and violence --

sort of like what you might seeon the news, unfortunately -- that doing this mightactually affect their attention. and that's indeed what we found. if we present stressful imageswhile they're doing this experiment, this gap of attention shrinks,its power diminishes. so in some of our other studies, we wanted to see, ok, great -- not great, actually, bad newsthat stress does this to the brain -- but if it is the case that stresshas this powerful influence on attention

through external distraction, what if we don't needexternal distraction, what if we distract ourselves? and to do this, we had to basically come upwith an experiment in which we could have peoplegenerate their own mind-wandering. this is having off-task thoughts while we're engagedin an ongoing task of some sort. and the trick to mind-wanderingis that essentially, you bore people.

so hopefully there's not a lotof mind-wandering happening right now. when we bore people, people happily generate all kindsof internal content to occupy themselves. so we devised what might be considered one of the world'smost boring experiments. all the participants sawwere a series of faces on the screen, one after another. they pressed the buttonevery time they saw the face. that was pretty much it.

well, one trick was that sometimes,the face would be upside down, and it would happen very infrequently. on those trials they were toldjust to withhold the response. pretty soon, we could tell thatthey were successfully mind-wandering, because they pressed the buttonwhen that face was upside down. even though it's quite plain to seethat it was upside down. so we wanted to know what happenswhen people have mind-wandering. and what we found was that, very similar to external stress

and external distractionin the environment, internal distraction,our own mind wandering, also shrinks the gap of attention. it diminishes attention's power. so what do all of these studies tell us? they tell us that attentionis very powerful in terms of affecting our perception. even though it's so powerful,it's also fragile and vulnerable. and things like stressand mind-wandering diminish its power.

but that's all in the context of thesevery controlled laboratory settings. what about in the real world? what about in our actual day-to-day life? what about now? where is your attention right now? to kind of bring it back, i'd like to make a predictionabout your attention for the remainder of my talk. are you up for it?

here's the prediction. you will be unaware of what i'm sayingfor four out of the next eight minutes. it's a challenge,so pay attention, please. now, why am i saying this? i'm surely going to assumethat you're going to remain seated and, you know, graciously keepyour eyes on me as i speak. but a growing body of literature suggeststhat we mind-wander, we take our mind awayfrom the task at hand, about 50 percent of our waking moments.

these might be small,little trips that we take away, private thoughts that we have. and when this mind-wandering happens, it can be problematic. now i don't think there will beany dire consequences with you all sitting here today, but imagine a military leader missingfour minutes of a military briefing, or a judge missingfour minutes of testimony. or a surgeon or firefightermissing any time.

the consequencesin those cases could be dire. so we might ask why do we do this? why do we mind-wander so much? well, part of the answer is that our mindis an exquisite time-traveling master. it can actually time travel very easily. if we think of the mind as the metaphorof the music player, we see this. we can rewind the mind to the past to reflect on eventsthat have already happened, right? or we can go and fast-future, to planfor the next thing that we want to do.

and we land in this mentaltime-travel mode of the past or the future very frequently. and we land there oftenwithout our awareness, most times without our awareness, even if we want to be paying attention. think of just the last timeyou were trying to read a book, got to the bottom of the pagewith no idea what the words were saying. this happens to us. and when this happens, when we mind-wanderwithout an awareness that we're doing it,

there are consequences. we make errors. we miss critical information, sometimes. and we have difficulty making decisions. what's worse is when we experience stress. when we're in a moment of overwhelm. we don't just reflecton the past when we rewind, we end up being in the pastruminating, reliving or regretting events that have already happened.

or under stress, we fast-forward the mind. not just to productively plan. but we end up catastrophizing or worrying about events that haven't happened yet and frankly may never happen. so at this point, you might bethinking to yourself, ok, mind-wandering's happening a lot. often, it happens without our awareness. and under stress, it's even worse --

we mind-wander more powerfullyand more often. is there anythingwe can possibly do about this? and i'm happy to say the answer is yes. from our work, we're learning that the opposite of a stressedand wandering mind is a mindful one. mindfulness has to dowith paying attention to our present-moment experiencewith awareness. and without any kind of emotionalreactivity of what's happening. it's about keepingthat button right on play

to experience the moment-to-momentunfolding of our lives. and mindfulness is not just a concept. it's more like practice, you have to embody this mindfulmode of being to have any benefits. and a lot of the work that we're doing,we're offering people programs that give our participantsa suite of exercises that they should do daily in order to cultivate more momentsof mindfulness in their life. and for many of the groupsthat we work with, high-stress groups,

like i said -- soldiers,medical professionals -- for them, as we know,mind-wandering can be really dire. so we want to make surewe offer them very accessible, low time constraintsto optimize the training, so they can benefit from it. and when we do this, what we can dois track to see what happens, not just in their regular lives but in the most demandingcircumstances that they may have. why do we want to do this?

well, we want to, for example, give itto students right around finals season. or we want to give the trainingto accountants during tax season. or soldiers and marineswhile they're deploying. why is that? because those are the moments in which their attentionis most likely to be vulnerable, because of stress and mind-wandering. and those are also the moments in which we want their attentionto be in peak shape

so they can perform well. so what we do in our research is we have them takea series of attention tests. we track their attention at the beginningof some kind of high-stress interval, and then two months later,we track them again, and we want to seeif there's a difference. is there any benefit of offering themmindfulness training? can we protect againstthe lapses in attention that might arise over high stress?

so here's what we find. over a high-stress interval, unfortunately, the reality isif we don't do anything at all, attention declines, people are worse at the endof this high-stress interval than before. but if we offer mindfulness training,we can protect against this. they stay stable, even thoughjust like the other groups, they were experiencing high stress. and perhaps even more impressive

is that if peopletake our training programs over, let's say, eight weeks, and they fully committo doing the daily mindfulness exercises that allow them to learnhow to be in the present moment, well, they actually get better over time,even though they're in high stress. and this last pointis actually important to realize, because of what it suggests to us is that mindfulness exercisesare very much like physical exercise: if you don't do it, you don't benefit.

but if you do engagein mindfulness practice, the more you do, the more you benefit. and i want to just bring it backto captain jeff davis. as i mentioned to you at the beginning, his marines were involvedin the very first project that we ever did,offering mindfulness training. and they showed this exact pattern,which was very heartening. we had offered themthe mindfulness training right before they were deployed to iraq.

and upon their return,captain davis shared with us what he was feelingwas the benefit of this program. he said that unlike last time, after this deployment,they were much more present. they were discerning. they were not as reactive. and in some cases,they were really more compassionate with the people they wereengaging with and each other. he said in many ways,

he felt that the mindfulnesstraining program we offered gave them a really important tool to protect against developingpost-traumatic stress disorder and even allowing it to turninto post-traumatic growth. to us, this was very compelling. and it ended upthat captain davis and i -- you know, this was abouta decade ago, in 2008 -- we've kept in touch all these years. and he himself has gone onto continue practicing mindfulness

in a daily way. he was promoted to major, he actually then ended up retiringfrom the marine corps. he went on to get a divorce,to get remarried, to have a child, to get an mba. and through all of these challengesand transitions and joys of his life, he kept up with his mindfulness practice. and as fate would have it,just a few months ago, captain davis suffered a massiveheart attack, at the age of 46.

and he ended up calling mea few weeks ago. and he said, "i wantto tell you something. i know that the doctorswho worked on me, they saved my heart, but mindfulness saved my life. the presence of mind i hadto stop the ambulance that ended up taking meto the hospital," -- himself, the clarity of mind he had to noticewhen there was fear and anxiety happening but not be gripped by it -- he said, "for me, thesewere the gifts of mindfulness."

and i was so relievedto hear that he was ok. but really heartened to seethat he had transformed his own attention. he went from having a really bad boss -- an attention systemthat nearly drove him off a bridge -- to one that was an exquisiteleader and guide, and saved his life. so i want to actually end by sharingmy call to action to all of you. and here it is. pay attention to your attention.

alright? pay attention to your attention and incorporate mindfulness trainingas part of your daily wellness toolkit, in order to tame your own wandering mind and to allow your attentionto be a trusted guide in your own life. thank you. (applause)

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