Psychologist Describes the ADD Mind State

But what I was saying is I was also interested in people that have dispositional attentional challenges like ADHD for example. What is that? Is that real? ADHD? 100%. Attention functions on a continuum. So I mean I'd love to tell you about it. Let me tell you about attention because that kind of make me feel like at least we'll be on the same page then as it relates to what I'm talking about because even the mindfulness stuff is related to attention. So attention usually in the way we've been talking about it, we've been talking about it as focus. So what does that mean to you? Right now you're laser focused on me. You've got awesome attention. At least it looks that way. Focusing on me. Everything else is kind of fuzzed out. And that we call the brain's orienting system. So I think of it like a flashlight. So wherever it is that you direct your attention in that way, you're privileging that content. So right now you're seeing my face with more granularity, hearing my voice with the crispness more than the air conditioner or whatever Jamie might be saying. Right now you're focused in on me, thank you very much. So that actually does neurally look like it enhances the sensory input. If you focus in on my voice, your neurons as early as your auditory cortex within a few hundred milliseconds, you're going to have a clear comprehension, but even just auditory input is going to be amplified as a function of paying attention. And just like literally a flashlight, if you're in a darkened space, you know, you value that thing. Wherever it is that it points, it actually gives you that privileged information. The cool thing about the flashlight is you can direct it willfully. You can point it. You can also not just direct it to the external environment. I can say like right now, Joe, like what's the sensations on the bottoms of your feet? Can you sense into that? Were you thinking about it before I said it? No, I wasn't. Flashlight got directed to internal bodily sensations, you can pick that up. So it actually goes to one of the reasons attention even evolved in our brain. We talked about the evolution of distractibility, which was to advantage our survival. But why do we have attention in the first place? Why do we even develop this capacity to focus? And it comes down to the brain had a big problem, which is that there's far more information in the environment than it could possibly process. So it's got a sub-sample. It's got to like get bits and pieces of what's going on in attention, just like the flashlight. You know, if you were in a darkened room and you kind of figure out the landscape, you kind of scan it and kind of put together the image. Same idea with attention, focus, very important. We can talk about this, but I actually want to tell you about the other two main systems. But just keep in mind that not only can we direct the flashlight, but it can get yanked. So if you're in a darkened room and you hear a weird sound, you're going to point to wherever the sound came from. So that's the double-edged sword of this system, is that it's not just about where it goes. Again, very good reasons that we evolved to have that. Have you ever done any personal experimentation with sensory deprivation tanks? Oh, I definitely want to talk to you about that. And actually, I think that I have not. I want to. Ooh, you have to. I want to. I just haven't had a chance to go. So I will definitely, I definitely want to, but it actually perfect segue into the second system of attention, which is the exact opposite of this narrowing and privileging. And the second big system of attention I use the metaphor of like a floodlight. It's called the alerting system. The floodlight, unlike the flashlight, narrow privileging some information from the other. But broad, receptive, no privileging of any information, allows whatever comes up to come up. The only thing that's privileging is the now. Like what's important right now, and I was, when I'm driving, I think about this often. You see a flashing yellow light, probably near a construction site or near a school, maybe. What does that mean? Pay attention. But it's not like that narrow focus attention, like broad, receptive, something weird may happen. Be ready for it. So this is, like I said, this system is so important and probably, and not just probably, I mean, there's a lot of evidence that suggests in things like sensory deprivation, you now are challenging that system because what is happening is not necessarily from the actual environment. So whatever is the baseline existence within the internal milieu may actually be more salient to you because just like the flashlight where you can direct it externally or internally, the floodlight you can also direct externally and internally. So in the absence of sensory input, you're kind of in this receptive state where everything that's occurring internally, there's an acute and rich awareness of that. Anyway, so you got flashlight, floodlight, and then the third system is, we call it executive control. It's tied to this notion of the whiteboard and working memory. It's essentially the manager. It's like just like the flashlight is selecting based on content, right side or left side, the floodlight is selecting based on time. What's important right now, this system is selecting information because the whole goal of attention is to sub-sample reality. You just have different slices. Does that making sense? The third system, executive control, is sub-sampling based on your goals. So what is what most goal relevant right now? That should guide the way that I perceive and act. So this system's job and the term executive is like the way we talk about executives of a company. The executive's job is not to go in and do every single task, but it's to ensure that the goals of the organization and the behavior of the organization align. And then when it's a mess up, the executive says, no, fix that. So this is where things like maintaining the goal, working memory, that's where we put our goals, we maintain them. Building irrelevant information. It's like, no, you don't need to go think about that right now, right? Even in the context of a sensory deprivation tank, it's like, yeah, that's great. I probably should remember that, but I can't not experience this right now. It's like goal was experience sensory deprivation, not go write something. So inhibit urges we might have or behaviors we might have. Update new information, update your goal and even shift. You are on that goal, but get on that goal. Very complex system. I like to think of it as like a juggler, as just like all the balls are in the air, but it's a manager. It really is doing this. So the reason I wanted to tell you that is because attention is such a topical thing. People always say their problems are with attention and you were asking me about ADD and is it real? Yes, it ends up that we have people differ along their set points of all three of these systems. And oftentimes we see people that not only are problematic on any one system, like they're too focused, it's a dysregulation. So either hyper focused, you can't get the flashlight off, or you're hyper vigilant, you can't stop seeing everything as requiring this broad, receptive, almost anxiety provoking level of present moment awareness, or you just can't keep the balls in the air. There's a problem with your juggler. So for sure, people vary along these lines and sometimes they vary in their coordination because none of these systems work alone. The executive control is telling the flashlight where to go. The alerting system is telling you what's going on. So you need to know if you need... So there's this constant fluidity between these things. So sometimes it's the coordination that gets messed up. And when people's lives are negatively impacted by the way their attention functions, to the point where it's actually causing serious problems, that's when sometimes it gets diagnosed as ADD. You know, even before we talk about thinking, what we don't do for any of us, it's very, very rare, is teach people the value and importance of checking out where their mind is moment by moment. And going back to the people with ADD, the patients that have ADD, diagnosable ADD, their life is problematic because of this set of set points they have on all these three systems of attention. Those that have this thing we're talking about, which the technical term is meta-awareness. It's essentially a version of that floodlight that I was talking about, broad, receptive. But you're checking out, technically meta-awareness is having awareness of the current contents and processes of your mind moment by moment. So first of all, to say, oh yeah, I can do that. I can see, and we do this all the time. We'd say, oh yeah, look, I'm really, you just did it a moment ago. My brain's not working right now. You're checking in and you're saying right now it's not the crispness I want there to be. But you're attuned to it. And so it may make you do something differently because you're aware of it. If we're not even aware of where our mind is, there's not a lot of opportunity that we can do anything about it. So it ends up, if you look at people with ADD that have a lot of problems, their minds wander a lot, meaning they have off-task thoughts a lot. But they also happen to have good meta-awareness. Their lives don't suffer all that much, meaning they can have a job and do things that are kind of normal kinds of things. Do you think we're doing a disservice by medicating people when they have that instead of by training them how to focus? This is exactly where I'm going. That was a question I thought was a legitimate thing to ask. We didn't want to start out by saying stop your medication. One of the studies we did in my lab is that we recruited a bunch of people, adults with ADD, and we said just keep on your regular meditation. What's the average medication? What are they on for the most part? Did you ask them? I mean all kinds of things, whether it's Stratero, well butrin, or Adderall, Ritalin. Some of those are SSRIs though, right? There's combinations of things. Is well-retrained in SSRI? That's not my, neuro-pharmacology is not my thing. You can look it up. Yeah, jam me, look it up. But the point is that we said whatever your particular medication cocktail is, stay on it. Now take this eight-week mindfulness training program. That program was like, we started with a minute of practice, very active practices. So now it's not sit quietly and focus on your breath, it's go for a walk, feel the sensations of your feet on the ground when your mind wanders come back. So we worked up to about 12 minutes a day for these adults with ADD. And then at the end of the training program, we said, we looked at the objective metrics, looking better, less mind wandering for the people that did the practices. But when I just inquired what's different about your medication use or your mind, they'd say, before I used to take my riddle in and then play video games for eight hours. And I did really awesome on the video games, but I didn't finish my homework or I forgot to go to work. They had this raw power to focus in some sense with some of the medications, but they didn't have the meta-awareness to know if they were using it correctly. After the training, that was the number one most consistent thing people said. I was aware of where my mind was. I could use my time better because I was checking in, where am I right now? Oh, is that tied to where I want to be? Let me redirect. That's also the thing that all of us benefit from with mindfulness training is that not only does it connect to using the flashlight, it allows us to cultivate that kind of broad receptive stance toward what is unfolding right now so that the executive control system can update, shift, or redirect when things are off track. That makes the whole thing function better. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.