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**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right, but I would say that part of that is relative to this sense of curiosity. What's gonna happen? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Completion. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right? I even think of horror movies; we all know when watching horror movies, like "Don't. Go. There. Don't go behind, in the back garage!" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. The bad thing's there. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** But we're apt towards discovery, and being like "I'm just curious. I just wanna find out what happens." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's terrible about that too is there's times where our curiosity pays off... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...and there's times when our curiosity leads us down a road of distraction. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And maybe finding a way to distinct those two is the key. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Well, and this is why -- we talk a lot with some things we know and more of the things that we don't know, or things that are generally true versus the specifics, which apply to an individual or the context of them and their situation... But attention as a construct or as a function of the... |
Attention, ironically, is actually a function of our brain; it is generally related to our prefrontal cortex, so that front part, your forehead, right behind there. The prefrontal cortex is part of the frontal lobe, which is related to this system of executive function. Executive function involves set shifting, how qui... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:20\] Yeah. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** I've talked about this phenomenologically, when you buy a new car, and then all of a sudden you go out and you drive and you go "There's one! And there's one! And there's another!" Right? And nothing really changed, other than your attention. And maybe I can even substitute the word awaren... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think awareness is a keyword, because 1) there's a book around it, and we can point to that; it's a great book. We've mentioned that one before. But definitely, what is in your awareness has got your attention. I can think of when I -- I don't like to do this, but every once in a while when I driv... |
So that's why driving and looking at your phone could be really bad... Because it's got your full awareness, and you might be trying to drive... I use this as an example because it's so easy to get distracted, and that's the point I'm trying to make here - it's so easy for our awareness to (as you say) domino-effect in... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah, it does... And I love this; Kitty Chisholm - hopefully I didn't massacre her name, but she did this TEDx talk on attention, and she says it's a very competitive environment when it comes to attention. Attention is this mechanism through which the brain focuses its resources on some t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I wanna say real quick that's why I love podcasting... Because podcasting -- listener, who's listening to my words right now, you opted into this. We didn't put a banner out there, we didn't put this flower out, we didn't email you... Well, we may have emailed you, because you opted into that, too..... |
You've said before, Mireille, that when you can participate in your choices, it's so much easier to be involved and to be committed to those choices because you played a key role in that choice. That's why I love podcasting - you opted in. We didn't distract you to get you to listen to this. You're listening to this on... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah, but even what you're talking about, Adam, I appreciate so much, because it's exactly what the old philosophers were talking about, in that it involves an aspect of the will. So I have options. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. When you have options... You have options. You have choices. What exactly is the will though? Because we talked about that being a finite resource... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** \[08:02\] Right, it is, but it doesn't mean it can't grow, it can't change. And this is why I love talking about the brain and really doing what I do - neuroplasticity, so the brain's flexibility, willingness, ability to adapt is alive and real, and it doesn't matter what age you are. You ... |
So attention isn't a sort of one thing, it's multi-faceted. And I don't know how much we've talked about this, but it's really important to get that the brain is never as simple as we'd like it to be, and we're always discovering more... But we process information from the bottom up, so think brain stem up, to more of ... |
Studies talk about bottom-up features of perception, which is this degree to which our sensory systems are taxed or loaded upon, and that influences how much attention we can devote to a task. Say for example -- I think about this, like my office staff, or anybody in admin, where phones are ringing perpetually... This ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Constant. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah. And you have people coming up to the front window... So you're seeing things, you're hearing things, your senses are on overdrive, while you also then have to do other tasks, like writing things down... And it's not like all of the internal processing stops. So that's the other compo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, a meaningful way might be suddenly I feel this sensation in my fingers. Oh, that sensation is fire. Suddenly, my full attention is now to the fact that I'm being burned. Or something -- I've put my hand on the stove, or made a mistake while cooking, whatever it is; I've got attention on the re... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** But see how that's evolutionarily adaptive? We need to be able to register sensory data live; it's happening in the moment, so that that takes precedence. That's why it's a bottom-up, so it comes to that brain stem, which our brains fundamentally -- the foundation of what our brains are al... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's so cool, honestly... "Just don't die." Every choice we make is about not dying. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right. It's this competing system. So if I'm taking in information bottom-up, my senses tell me one thing - think VR - and then my higher cognitive functions tell me another thing, like "That's not real, even though your brain it's telling you is real." Oh gosh, now how do I respond, and w... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:08\] Yes. That's a constant battle. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** It is, because attention really sort of blows things up, so that then colors all of what you see... I see this a lot in the work that I do, in just the way that people have been trained, so to speak, by their experience, to go "This is what I expect in relationship. Here's the way that peo... |
We can look at it with even any work things that you do. Say you always get stuck in this same place on a work project, or in a sport. "I always get to that final race, and then I just blow it, at the end." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. The ten-yard line fail. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right. So here we go, I can't talk about attention without talking about emotion... Because emotion is gonna create hiccups in and around what I can pay attention to. Because if I take in sensory data, that it's like, okay, I'm running a race, or I'm riding a bike, or I'm working on a proj... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Now I've got this inner disruption in my attention, and going like "Oh, how do I do this task in front of me? ...like, live live, while I also have this chatter that's competing for my attention, that tells me what the outcome is already gonna be?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And that's hard to -- and I don't even know how, so maybe you have some awareness of how to not let that be such an occurrence... Because as we've said before, emotion, curiosity - if we put those two in the same kind of bucket, there's times when following our intuition, our emotion, our gut or our... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There's time when those things pay off, and there's times when they don't. How do you discern that? Discernment is probably a key aspect to train. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** It is, it is. Imagine that you have to learn how to translate your own experience of fear. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** There's a lot of talk nowadays about fear and people struggling with anxiety, and I want our listeners to understand and recognize, fear is adaptive. The purpose is never to eliminate fear, because fear is a signal. It's just a feedback. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** But if I don't know how to interpret the signals that fear is sending me, I'm gonna struggle, because fear - it could be that it is an actual threat. I mean, it could be around a loss, or it could be an act of violence, it could be performance anxiety in that way... But how do you begin to... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:14\] We're still int his new year aspect; it's still January barely... And people are still transitioning to and determining their goals for the year, if that's what you do; not so much that it's a new year's thing, but just something that people tend to do because it's a new year, a new beginn... |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** In the case where you just said, there's times when fear is an indicator, it's feedback, and to not minimize it or reduce it to nothing, but to use it to your advantage. |
**Mireille B. Reece, Psy.D:** Yeah, I've heard this example in people within the martial arts field, and for the sake of my experience in conversation and awareness as a woman, not learning to trust intuition, which fear is a signal of something that has the potential for harm... And researchers and experts in that fie... |
Think, for example - they have this analogy of somebody pressing the emergency stop on the elevator. Say I'm in an elevator with only one other person, and they hit the emergency stop. Do you think that that is cause for my brain to signal alarm? Probably. |
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