Stolen Focus — Chapter no 5

5

Cause Five: The Disruption of Mind-

Wandering

For more than one hundred years, there has been one image – a metaphor – that has, above all others, dominated how experts think about attention. Picture the Hollywood Bowl, crammed with tens of thousands of people, with all the laughing and jostling and yelling that takes place as people saunter in and wait for the show. Then, suddenly, the lights go down, and on the stage, a spotlight appears.

It lights up one individual: Beyoncé. Or Britney. Or Bieber. Suddenly all the chatter and clatter cease, and the focus of that room narrows to one person and their awesome power. In 1890 the founder of modern American psychology, William James, wrote – in the most influential text ever (in the Western world, at least) on this subject – that ‘everyone knows what attention is’. Attention, he said, is a spotlight. To put it in our terms, it’s the moment Beyoncé appears, alone, on the stage, and everyone else around you seems to vanish.

James himself offered other images at the time too, and psychologists have tried other ways of thinking about it – but ever since, the study of attention has primarily been the study of the spotlight. This image, I realised when I stopped to think about it, dominated how I thought about attention too. Attention is usually

defined as a person’s ability to selectively attend to something in the environment. So when I said I was distracted, I meant that I couldn’t narrow the spotlight of my attention down to the one thing I want to focus on. I want to read a book, but the light of my attention won’t fade from my phone, or from the people talking in the street outside, or from my anxieties about work. There’s a lot of truth in this way of thinking about attention – but I learned that, in fact, this is only one form of attention that you need in order to function fully. It exists alongside other forms of attention that are just as essential for you to be able to think coherently – and those forms are under even greater threat right now than your spotlight.

In my life before I fled to Cape Cod, I lived in a tornado of mental stimulation. I would never go for a walk without listening to a podcast or talking on the phone. I would never wait two minutes in a store without looking at my phone or reading a book. The idea of not filling every minute with stimulation panicked me, and I found it weird when I saw other people not doing it. On long train or bus journeys, whenever I would see somebody just sit there for six hours, doing nothing but stare out of the window, I would feel an urge to lean over to them and say, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s none of my business, but I just wanted to check – you do realise that you have a limited amount of time in which to be alive, and the clock counting down towards death is constantly ticking, and you’ll never get back these six hours you are spending doing nothing at all? And when you are dead, you’ll be dead forever? You know that, right?’ (I never did this, as you can tell from the fact I am not writing this book from a psychiatric institution, but it crossed my mind.) So I thought that in Provincetown, stripped of distractions, I would gain one benefit – I would be able to be even more stimulated, for even longer periods, and retain even more of what I inhaled. I can

listen to longer podcasts! I can read longer books! That did happen – but it occurred alongside something else, something I didn’t see coming. One day I left my iPod at home, and I decided to simply go for a walk along the beach. I walked for two hours, and I let my thoughts float, without my spotlight settling on anything. I felt my mind roam – from looking at the little crabs on the beach, to memories of my childhood, to ideas for books I might write years from now, to the shapes of the men sunning themselves in Speedos.

My consciousness drifted like the boats I could see bobbing on the horizon.

At first I felt guilty. You came here to focus, I said to myself, and to learn about focus. But what you are indulging in is its opposite – a mental detumescence. But I continued. Before long, I was doing this every day, and my periods of meandering started to stretch to three, four, sometimes even five hours. This would have been unthinkable to me in my normal life. But in that time, I felt more creative than I had since I was a child. Ideas started spinning out of my head. When I would get home and write them down, I realised I was having more creative ideas – and making more connections – in a single three- hour walk than I usually had in a month. I started to let smaller moments of mind-wandering in too. When I finished reading a book, I would just lie there for twenty minutes, thinking about it, staring out to sea.

Weirdly, it seemed like letting my spotlight disappear entirely was improving my ability to think and to focus in some way I couldn’t articulate. How could that be? I only began to understand what was happening when I learned that over the past thirty years, there has been a sudden bubbling up of research into this very topic: mind- wandering.

In the 1950s, in the small town of Aberdeen in Washington state, a high-school chemistry teacher named Mr Smith had a problem with one of his students, a teenage boy named Marcus Raichle. He called in the boy’s parents and explained sternly that he was doing something bad. ‘Your son has a habit of daydreaming,’ he said. We all know this is one of the worst things you can do at school.

Thirty years later, their son helped to make a breakthrough on this very topic – one that Mr Smith would not have approved of. Marcus became a prominent neuroscientist and won the Kavli Prize, a leading honour in the field. In the 1980s, a whole new way of seeing what was happening in people’s brains – the PET (positron emission tomography) scan – evolved right outside his office, where the technology was being applied for the first time, by him and his colleagues. I stood on that very spot, in the Washington School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, when I went to interview him. He was one of the first scientists who was able to use this new tool, and when he switched it on with a patient inside, he was able to see into a living human brain in a way almost nobody ever had before.

Back in his medical training, Marcus had been confidently told that we know what’s happening inside your head in the moments when you are not focusing. Your brain is ‘lying there dormant, quiet, doing nothing, like muscles do until you start to move them’, he was told.

But one day Marcus noticed something odd. He had some patients strapped in for a PET scan, and those patients were waiting for him to give them a task and just letting their minds wander. As he got the task ready, he glanced at the machine, and he was puzzled. Their brains, it seemed, were not inactive, as his med-school tutors had said they should be. Activity had shifted from one part of the brain to another – but the brain was still highly active. Surprised, he began to study this in detail. He named the region of the brain that becomes more active when you think you’re not doing much ‘the default mode network’ – and as he studied this more, analysing what people’s brains do when they seem to be doing nothing, he could physically

see this region light up on the brain scans. As he looked at them, Marcus said, ‘God, there she was. The whole thing. It was just stunning.’ It was a paradigm shift in what scientists thought happens inside our brains, and it triggered an explosion of scientific research into dozens of topics all over the world. One of them was a sudden surge of interest in the science of mind-wandering, asking: what happens when our thoughts float freely, without any immediate focus to anchor them? We can see something is happening – but what? As the debate developed over decades, some scientists came to think that the default mode network is the part of the brain that becomes most active during mind-wandering, and others strongly disagreed – it’s an ongoing debate. But Marcus’s findings led to a rush of scientific research into why our minds wander at all, and what benefits it might produce.

To understand this better, I went to Montreal in Quebec to interview Nathan Spreng, who is a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University, and to York in England to interview Jonathan Smallwood, who is a professor of psychology at the university there. They are two of the people who have studied this question in most depth. It is a relatively new field of science, so some of its basic ideas are still quite contested, and more will become clear in the coming decades. But in their dozens of scientific studies, they had discovered – it seemed to me – three crucial things that are happening during mind-wandering.

Firstly, you are slowly making sense of the world. Jonathan gave me an example. When you read a book – as you are doing now – you obviously focus on the individual words and sentences, but there’s always a little bit of your mind that is wandering. You are thinking about how these words relate to your own life. You are thinking about how these sentences relate to what I said in previous chapters. You are thinking about what I might say next. You are wondering if what I am saying is full of contradictions, or whether it

will all come together in the end. Suddenly you picture a memory from your childhood, or from what you saw on TV last week. ‘You draw together the different parts of the book in order to make sense of the key theme,’ he said. This isn’t a flaw in your reading. This is reading. If you weren’t letting your mind wander a little bit right now, you wouldn’t really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you. Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book.

This isn’t just true of reading. It is true of life. Some mind- wandering is essential for things to make sense. ‘If you couldn’t do it,’ Jonathan told me, ‘so many other things would go out of the window.’ He has found that the more you let your mind wander, the better you are at having organised personal goals, being creative, and making patient, long-term decisions. You will be able to do these things better if you let your mind drift, and slowly, unconsciously, make sense of your life.

Secondly, when your mind wanders, it starts to make new connections between things – which often produces a solution to your problems. As Nathan put it to me, ‘I think what’s happening is that, when there’s unresolved issues, the brain tries to make things fit,’ if it’s just given the space to do it. He gave me a famous example: the nineteenth-century French mathematician Henri Poincaré was wrestling with one of the hardest problems in maths, and he had narrowed his spotlight down onto every squiggle of it for ages, and he was getting nowhere. Then one day when he was away on a trip, suddenly, as he was stepping into a bus, the solution came to him in a flash. It was only when he turned off the spotlight of his focus, and let his mind wander on its own, that he could connect the pieces, and finally answer the problem. In fact, when you look back over the history of science and engineering, many great breakthroughs don’t happen during periods of focus – they happen during mind-wandering.

‘Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain,’ Nathan told me. ‘It’s a new association between two things that were already there.’ Mind-wandering allows ‘more extended trains of thought to unfold, which allows for more associations to be made.’ Henri Poincaré couldn’t have come up with his solution if he had remained narrowly focused on the math problem he was trying to solve, or if he had been totally distracted. It took mind-wandering to get him there.

Thirdly, during mind-wandering, your mind will – Nathan said – engage in ‘mental time-travel’, where it roams over the past and tries to predict the future. Freed from the pressures of thinking narrowly about what’s right in front of you, your mind will start to think about what might come next – and so it will help to prepare you for it.

Up until I met these scientists, I thought that mind-wandering – what I was doing in Provincetown so much, and so pleasurably – was the opposite of attention, and that’s why I felt guilty about doing it. I realised I was wrong. It is actually a different form of attention – and a necessary one. Nathan told me that when we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes ‘a certain amount of bandwidth’, and when we turn off the spotlight, ‘we still have the same bandwidth – it’s just we can allocate more of those resources’ towards other ways of thinking. ‘So it’s not like attention necessarily goes down – it just shifts,’ to other, crucial forms of thinking.

This, I realised, is quite challenging to the whole way I had been raised to think about productivity. I feel instinctively like I’ve done a good hard day of work when I have been sitting at my laptop, spotlight-focused on tapping out words – at the end of it, I feel a little Puritan rush of pride at my productivity. Our whole culture is built around this belief. Your boss wants to see you sitting at your desk every hour of the day; this is what she thinks work is. This way of thinking is implanted in us from a very young age when, like Marcus Raichle, we are told off at school for daydreaming. That’s why, on the

days I spent simply wandering aimlessly on the beaches of Provincetown, I didn’t feel productive. I thought I was slacking, being lazy, indulging myself.

But Nathan – after studying all this – had found that to be productive, you can’t aim simply to narrow your spotlight as much as possible. He said: ‘I try to go for a walk every day and just let my mind kind of sort things out… I don’t think our full conscious control of our thoughts is necessarily our most productive way of thinking. I think loose patterns of association can lead to unique insight.’ Marcus agreed. Focusing on what’s right in front of you, he told me, gives you ‘some of the raw material that has to be digested, but at some point, you need to stand back from that’. He warned: ‘If we’re just frantically running around focusing on the external world exclusively, we miss the opportunity to let the brain digest what’s been going on.’ As he said this, I thought about the people I had looked at on the train, staring out the window for hours. I had been silently judging them for their lack of productivity – but now I realised they may have been more meaningfully productive than me, as I frantically took notes on one book after another, without taking time to sit back and digest. The kid in the class who is staring out of the window mind- wandering might be doing the most useful thinking.

I thought back over all the scientific studies I had read about how we spend our time rapidly switching between tasks, and I realised that in our current culture, most of the time we’re not focusing, but we’re not mind-wandering either. We’re constantly skimming, in an unsatisfying whirr. Nathan nodded when I asked about this, and told me he is constantly trying to figure out how to get his phone to stop sending him notifications for things he doesn’t want to know. All this frenetic digital interruption is ‘pulling our attention away from our thoughts’, and ‘suppressing your default mode network… I think we’re almost in this constant stimulus-driven, stimulus-bound environment, moving from one distraction to the next.’ If you don’t

remove yourself from that, it will ‘suppress whatever train of thought you had’.

So we aren’t just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus – we are facing a crisis of lost mind-wandering. Together they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world – and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.

When I interviewed him, Marcus Raichle – who made the breakthrough that opened up this whole area of science – had just given up playing in a symphony orchestra, at the age of eighty. He was an oboe player, and his favourite piece to perform was Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony. If you want to think about thinking itself, he told me, you should see it as like a symphony. ‘You’ve got two violin sections, violas, cellos, basses, woodwinds, brass, percussion – but it operates as a whole. It has rhythms.’ You need space in your life for the spotlight of focus – but alone, it would be like a solo oboe player on a bare stage, trying to play Beethoven. You need mind-wandering to activate the other instruments and to make the sweetest music. I thought I had come to Provincetown to learn to focus. I realised that, in fact, I was learning to think – and that required much more than the spotlight of focus.

On the long walks I try to go on now without any devices at all, I spend a lot of time reflecting on Marcus’s metaphor. A few days ago, I wondered if it could be taken further. If thinking is like a symphony that requires all these different kinds of thought, right now, the stage has been invaded. One of those heavy-metal bands who bite the heads off bats and spit them at the audience has charged the stage, and they are standing in front of the orchestra, screaming.

And yet, as I dug deeper into the research on mind-wandering, I learned there is an exception to what I just explained – and it’s a big one. In fact, it is one you have probably experienced.

In 2010 the Harvard scientists Professor Dan Gilbert and Dr Matthew Killingsworth developed a web app to study how people feel when they do all sorts of everyday things, from commuting to watching TV to exercising. People would get random prompts from the app that would ask: ‘What are you doing now?’ They would then be asked to rank how they felt. One of the things Dan and Matthew tracked was how often people found themselves mind-wandering – and what they discovered was surprising, given everything I had just learned. In general, when people are mind-wandering in our culture, they rank themselves as less happy than when they are doing almost any other activity. Even housework, for example, is associated with higher levels of happiness. They concluded: ‘A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.’ I thought about this a lot. Given that mind-wandering has been shown to have so many positive effects, why does it so often make us feel bad? There is a reason for this. Mind-wandering can easily descend into rumination. Most of us have had that feeling at some point or another – if you stop focusing and let your mind drift, you become jammed up with stressful thoughts. I thought back to my life at many points before Provincetown. When I was sitting on those trains, clucking in my own mind at the people who could sit staring out of the window while I manically worked and worked and worked, what was my mental state? Often, I saw now, I was loaded with stress and anxiety. Any attempt to relax my thinking would have let those bad feelings flood in. In Provincetown, by contrast, I had no stresses, and I felt safe – so my mind-wandering could float freely and do its positive work.

In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.

On the beach in the centre of Provincetown, just off the long strip of Commercial Street, there is a comically large blue wooden chair that faces the ocean. It must be eight feet tall, as if it is waiting for a giant.

I would often sit on that chair, looking tiny as darkness fell, talking with people I had befriended around the town. Sometimes we would be silent, and simply watch the light change. The light in Provincetown is unlike the light anywhere else I have ever been. You are on a thin, narrow sandbar in the middle of the ocean, and as you sit on that beach, you are facing east. The sun is setting behind you in the west – but its light is flowing forward, onto the water in front of you, and reflecting back into your face. You seem to be flooded with the waning light of two sunsets. I watched it with the people I met, and I felt radically open, to them, and to the sun, and to the ocean.

One day, about ten weeks into my time in Provincetown, I was sitting alone in my friend Andrew’s house with one of his dogs, Bowie, at my feet. I was reading a novel and occasionally looking out towards the ocean, when I noticed that Andrew had left his laptop on a chair, open and glowing. On its screen, there was an internet browser. It had no password. There was the World Wide Web, glowing at me.

You could look at the internet now, I thought to myself. You could look at anything you want – your social media, your email, the news.

The thought made me feel heavy, and I made myself leave Andrew’s house.

But the clock kept running down, and before long, I realised I had only two weeks left. I knew I had to go online to book a hotel for

when I went back to Boston. In the Provincetown Library, there is a small bank of six computers that are open to the public. I had walked past them many times and I always averted my gaze, as if they were a toilet stall somebody had accidentally left open. I logged on and booked the hotel in two minutes, and then opened my email. I thought I knew what was about to happen. I spend around half an hour a day dealing with email in my normal life, spread from morning to night (and sometimes it’s drastically more). So I calculated that in the time I had been away, I had clocked up thirty-five hours’ worth of emails that I would now have to plough through over the next few months, scrambling to catch up. (When I had gone away, I left an auto-reply saying I was totally uncontactable.) I didn’t want it. I felt exhausted just thinking about it.

But then something strange happened. I opened my inbox nervously and skimmed through my emails – and there was hardly anything there. In two hours, I had seen everything. The world had accepted my absence with a shrug. I realised that email breeds email, and if you just stop, it stops. I would like to say I felt calmed and soothed by this. In truth, I felt affronted – like my ego had been poked with a knitting needle. All this mania, all these demands on my time, I realised, made me feel important. I wanted in a sudden rush to send emails in order to get emails back – to feel needed again. I clicked over to my Twitter feed. I had precisely the same number of Twitter followers that I had when I left. My absence had been entirely unnoticed. I wandered away from the library and returned to the things that had given me nourishment in Provincetown – long passages of writing flowed from me; the ocean washed over my feet; my friends sat with me and talked all night. I tried to forget the wound to my ego.

On my last day in Provincetown, I took a boat out to Long Point, which is the tip of the tip of Cape Cod, a yellow crest of sand and sea. There, I could look back over the whole of the place where I had spent my summer, stretching from the Pilgrim Monument all the way

down to Hyannis. It was a peculiar feeling, to see the boundaries of my summer in one single scan of the horizon. I felt more still and centred than I ever had before in my life.

You can’t just go back and live the way you used to, I told myself, sitting in the shadow of the lighthouse. It’s not hard. This summer has shown you how to do it. I demonstrated pre-commitment by cutting myself off. You can show pre-commitment in your everyday life now. I already owned the tools. On my laptop, I have a program called Freedom. It’s easy – you download it, and you tell it you want it to deny you access to a specific website, or to the entire internet, for an amount of time you designate, from five minutes to a week.

You hit the button, and no matter what you do, your laptop won’t get online. And for my phone, I owned something called a kSafe. Again, it’s simple – it’s a little plastic safe that opens at the top. You put your phone in it, and you put the lid on, and you twist the top to determine how long you want to shut your phone away for. Then it’s gone – locked away, so you’d have to smash it with a hammer to get the phone out. Using these two devices, I said to myself, you can recreate Provincetown wherever you are. You can use your phone and the internet part of your laptop for maybe ten or fifteen minutes a day.

That evening, I gave away the small mountain of books I had read, and boarded the ferry to Boston. I got violently seasick on the journey back, and it felt like a rude metaphor for how I felt about returning to the online world. I reclaimed my phone from my friend the next day, and I lay on my hotel bed staring at it. It seemed strangely alien now – even the Apple font looked unfamiliar. I found myself flicking between icons, looking at various programs and websites. I looked at social media and thought, I don’t want this. I flicked through Twitter and felt like I had stood on a termites’ nest.

When I looked up, three hours had gone.

I left it behind and went to eat. When I got back, people had started replying to my emails and texts, and despite myself, I felt a

little rush of affirmation. In the next few weeks, I started to post on social media – and I felt myself become cruder and meaner than I had been in the summer. I made snarky comments. The complexity and compassion I had felt in Provincetown was, I felt, being replaced by something thinner. At moments I didn’t like what I was saying.

And then I felt the slow rush of approval, the retweets, the likes. I want to tell you that I learned the lessons of my time in Provincetown in a linear and life-affirming way, but that would be a lie. What happened was more complex. I left Provincetown in August, and I used Freedom and the kSafe, and slowly it slipped, and by December, the Screen Time on my iPhone indicated that I was spending four hours a day on my phone. I told myself that includes using Google Maps to navigate the city, and the hours I spent listening to podcasts and the radio and audiobooks. But I felt ashamed when I thought of it. I wasn’t quite back to where I had been at the start, but I had clearly slid into distraction and disruption.

I felt like a failure. I had a strong sensation that something was pulling me down. Then I told myself: You’re making excuses for yourself. You are doing this, nobody else. These are your failings.

And I felt weak. I had gained a lot of insights in Provincetown – but I felt they were fragile, and easily broken by something bigger, something I didn’t quite yet understand.

I wanted to know what was preventing me from doing what I wanted, in the better part of myself, to do. I discovered that the answer is more complex than we have been led to believe, and has many facets – and I learned about the first of them when I went to Silicon Valley.