The Neuroscience Behind Attention & How Mindfulness Helps In A Better State Of Mind & Better Life

How does attention relate to the brain and our conscious experience? When we’re given a task or we’re working, how does attention affect how we perform?

Attention is at the core of how our brain functions and in turn, relates to how well we perform when given a task.

We all would like to be a hundred percent attentive when we’re performing important tasks and not drift and mind wander or should I just say ‘zone out’.

But what about people for whom attention and being attentive is a critical component of their line of work: such as a soldier going into battle or listening to a briefing, a pilot landing a plane, a firefighter entering a burning building or a doctor performing a surgery?

At those critical moments, they can’t afford any lapses in concentration and attention because the results could be calamitous.

Attention Is Your Brain’s Boss

Neuroscientist Amishi Jha has been studying the brain’s attention system for the majority of her career and reveals what she’s found out about it:

“Attention allows us to notice, select and direct the brain’s computational resources to a subset of all that’s available. We can think of attention as 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 studying the human brain’s attention system.

In all of our studies, I’ve been very interested in one question. If it is indeed the case that 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 attention control our perception?

Second, why does it fail us, often leaving us feeling foggy and distracted?

And third, can we do anything about this fogginess, can we train our brain to pay better attention? To have more strong and stable attention in the work that we do in our lives.”

Her experiments on people by attaching funny shower-cap looking head gear with electrodes on it revealed one critical thing — attention changes perception.

How Does Our Attention Get Affected By Stress & Negativity

Jha’s further experiments revealed that when presented with negative images or when put in a stressful environment, attention gets affected and considerably decreases.

“In our follow-up studies, we wanted to see what would happen, how could we perturb or diminish this effect. And our hunch was that if you put people in a very stressful environment, if you distract them with disturbing, negative images, images of suffering and violence — sort of like what you might see on the news, unfortunately — that doing this might actually affect their attention. And that’s indeed what we found.

If we present stressful images while they’re doing this experiment, this gap of attention shrinks, its power diminishes.

So what do all of these studies tell us? They tell us that attention is very powerful in terms of affecting our perception. Even though it’s so powerful, it’s also fragile and vulnerable. And things like stress and mind-wandering diminish its power.”

How Mindfulness Helps In Improving Performance and Health

So we now know that our attention is critical to how our brain works, our perception and how we perform in important tasks and our work.

So how do we ensure that our attention and subsequently our brain, can work to its best capabilities? — The answer is ‘Mindfulness’.

You can read about the importance of Mindfulness and how to practice it in an earlier article of mine called Mindfulness: 3 Questions To Practice Mindfulness & The Art Of Mindful Walking Which Together Lead To Spiritual Growth & Awakening, which is really helpful and powerful. Trust me, it’ll help a lot!

Coming back, Jha further reiterates how ‘Mindfulness’ and practicing it is the best way to improve our attention and in turn, keep us completely attentive and help in keeping our brains healthy

“Is there anything we 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 stressed and wandering mind is a mindful one.

Mindfulness has to do with paying attention to our present-moment experience with awareness. And without any kind of emotional reactivity of what’s happening. It’s about keeping that button right on play to experience the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives. And mindfulness is not just a concept. It’s more like practice, you have to embody this mindful mode of being to have any benefits.

And a lot of the work that we’re doing, we’re offering people programs that give our participants a suite of exercises that they should do daily in order to cultivate more moments of mindfulness in their life.

And for many of the groups that 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 sure we offer them very accessible, low time constraints to optimize the training, so they can benefit from it.

And when we do this, what we can do is track to see what happens, not just in their regular lives but in the most demanding circumstances that they may have.

Over a high-stress interval, unfortunately, the reality is if we don’t do anything at all, attention declines, people are worse at the end of this high-stress interval than before. But if we offer mindfulness training, we can protect against this.

And perhaps even more impressive is that if people take our training programs over, let’s say, eight weeks, and they fully commit to doing the daily mindfulness exercises that allow them to learn how to be in the present moment, well, they actually get better over time, even though they’re in high stress.”

Jha’s findings come from over 15 years of studying people and the human brain and her most important message is that, mindfulness exercises are just like physical exercises, except for the brain.

So if we want to keep our brains healthy, we must incorporate ‘Mindfulness’ exercises just like doing physical exercises to keep our bodies fit and healthy.

“And this last point is actually important to realize, because of what it suggests to us is that mindfulness exercises are very much like physical exercise: if you don’t do it, you don’t benefit. But if you do engage in mindfulness practice, the more you do, the more you benefit.”

So, what does all this teach us?

It’s that we need to be more aware of our attention and where our attention is and where it goes. This is backed by science and practicing mindful exercises on a daily and regular basis will also help in keeping our attention and consequently our brain in better shape and will also lead to a better, fitter and healthier brain and life experience.

“So I want to actually end by sharing my 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 training as part of your daily wellness toolkit, in order to tame your own wandering mind and to allow your attention to be a trusted guide in your own life,” says Jha

In her TED talk, neuroscientist Amishi Jha, explains her studies on attention and the human brain with examples and stories of people she’s worked with, to raise awareness about how important it is to be mindful, perform mindfulness exercises and be mindful about our attention.

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