Can you think and not think at the same time? Whenever I read advice suggesting thinking gets in the way of creativity or even productivity, I feel unsettled. So I enjoyed reading a credible new book combining scientific and personal insights about focus, thinking, and attention.
"Good attention is controlled attention that is guided by good choices," writes Joseph Cardillo in Can I Have Your Attention? How To Think Fast, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Concentration. What does that mean and what does it have to do with not thinking? (Or with the title of this post?)
Cardillo, a health and mind-body-spirit educator and writer (and PT blogger) who is versed in the martial arts, expresses some major ideas with shorthand terms perhaps less familiar to Western audiences. For instance, mushin is a Japanese word for a state of mind that means "no mind." The idea is that if you "think a lot less," your thinking will be faster and more efficient, undistracted by lots of unnecessary thoughts.
And then there's "beginner's mind," a Zen concept in which you attempt to replicate the empty mind and simple attention of an infant. Ideally, explains Cardillo (I'm paraphrasing a lot and possibly shortchanging such complex ideas), you would use the tool of mushin to drop into beginner's mind when you want or need to. When people say not to think, I now understand that they're talking about allowing different kinds of thought processes to take precedence over the usual distracted ones. Rather than being stuck in one kind of thinking, often a state of sensory and informational overload, we can learn to toggle from the big picture to the local, immediate task. Focus on a task, do it, and then empty your mind so it's free to face the next task without baggage.
"The first step in entering the world of high-speed, accurate perception is to see attention as it is," writes Cardillo, "a fetching system that everyone is born with, collecting data from a river of information flowing through your brain at the tune of 11 million bits per second."
How your brain divides its attention is obviously complicated. You can become aware, though, of when your mind is fighting so hard to focus that focus becomes even less likely. Once again, I'm going to use the term flow to mean a state in which you're highly focused, and no longer struggling to stick with the task at hand. It feels effortless, and you're much less likely to have your attention pulled away by every passing irrelevant detail.
Cardillo's full discussion, including how emotions affect attention and how to self-regulate for effective focus, is enjoyably anecdotal and readable. And all I meant by the title is that attention spans tend to be so short that many of us don't read all the way to the ends of anything. We mean to be selective in our choices, but often we simply drift away if things aren't exciting enough. And that can have serious consequences. More on that soon.
* My next post will discuss a number of more specific ways to fight distraction, especially when you're trying to be creative. Stay tuned.
