There's another way we can handle difficult emotion that I think really gets at that aspect of honoring

the existence and arising of that emotion

but allows us to better manage it because to keep that emotion going we're actually feeding it with our attention. So whatever it is that we pay attention to recalibrates the entirety of the way the brain operates. That's pretty powerful. Welcome to the show!

So excited to be here.

I'm so excited to have you because the way you think and your book has really actually given me a totally new way of thinking when I think about stress, overwhelm, my mind spinning, where you just feel like your thoughts are just flooding you. And what I love is you say it all comes back to attention. I've never thought about it like that. So talk to me about how attention is your superpower. I want to start that. Yeah, that's a great question. And that's something that, you know, as a neuroscientist in my lab, was really the first kinds of studies that I had ever done. and some of my earliest experiences studying the brain actually came as a volunteer at a hospital. I thought I was going to be a medical doctor. So I was volunteering at the hospital, realized there's no way I could be a medical doctor because no, I'm not oriented that way. But in a brain injury unit, I was able to see people actually who suffered from brain injury train their brain through physical therapy, through practice, to change it. And that got me so excited about the possibility that there is this thing called neuroplasticity. So, training the brain to alter the brain for the better, for the most part. And attention ends up being, like you said, a superpower in that it moment by moment can transform the way that our brain operates. So whatever it is that we pay attention to recalibrates the entirety of the way the brain operates. That's pretty powerful. So right now I'm looking at your lovely face and you know there's beautiful surroundings but as I hone in on your face, your face, the neurons in my brain that process face information are going to be more active

and everything else is sort of dulled down. That to me is very, very exciting because it means that the way the brain works alters based on how we put our attention. And then that fuel, that attentional fuel, as I like to call it, really impacts every aspect of what we do the way we think the way we feel the way we connect with other people. I love that okay so now how do we start to actually change our brain so thinking about people right now that are feeling the overwhelm the stress that like I can't do it what I don't know what I'm doing with my life. Like that can be really crippling.

So how do we use everything that you just said

in order to get focus on attention?

Or is that actually accurate?

Focus on attention?

Well, our whole conversation is focusing on attention,

but how do we use our attention maybe to allow our lives

to be more fulfilling and more successful?

Correct.

Yeah, how do you do that?

Yeah, that has been my interest and after realizing that attention is this incredibly powerful brain capacity. What I wanted to understand was, does it always work well? Because if it fuels everything else we do, are there things that actually make it vulnerable? And what are the consequences of that vulnerability? Like you said, when it's vulnerable, and if it affects the way we act, and it's vulnerable, that means the way we act is going to be vulnerable. And if it is powerful, and it affects the way we feel, the way we feel is going to be vulnerable. So what you describe as these experiences that many of us have, especially over the last few years, with the global pandemic as feeling overwhelmed or incapable or suffering in some way, that's very real. First, I just wanna honor that that's a very real thing. We don't need to deny that that's the case. What we wanna understand is what we might be able to change about the default of the way our brain functions so that we can kind of uplift ourselves outside of that tendency of the mind. And that's where I got interested in brain training as it relates to something called mindfulness, which I think we'll get into. Going back to your question about vulnerabilities and what to do about it. My work in my lab looks at people that are very likely to experience circumstances that will disable attention, that will really compromise attention. People like military service members, military spouses, medical and nursing professionals, and those are just some examples of the kinds of groups that we work with. And for all of us, our attention matters, but for certain professions, when mistakes are made, when attention lapses, it could be life or death.

So it absolutely is key that we can train attention. And what we didn't know in my lab was like, how do you do that? I mean, how do you actually get somebody's brain to change as it relates to attention? So we tried lots of different things. And it ended up that the thing that would consistently benefited them was mindfulness training. So it is in some sense attention is a weird thing that the brain possesses.

It's one of the thing that were consistently benefited them was mindfulness training. So it is in some sense, attention is a weird thing that the brain possesses. It's one of the gifts we have of our evolutionary ancestry, right? We possess this thing called attention very powerful as you and I just talked about. But it's kind of weird that we have it. Like why do we have an attention system? And what does it actually do in the broadest sense? The reason we think we have an attention system is because very quickly in the course of complex brain evolution, the brain reached a point where it was overwhelmed, meaning there was far more information in the environment than it could fully, correctly, accurately process. And now when the brain, which is dealing with the organism's well-being and survival, can't process everything, it needed to come up with a solution that would allow it to at least sample some aspect of our environment, of our experience so that it can get a sense of what's going on around it, right? So if you can't see everything, if you can't process everything, take a subset of information. And almost like think of it as like a highlight reel of what's going on, right? If we think about a news event or even like the ticker tape on the bottom of your news feed or you know, TV show that has news on it, what is that saying? It's like these are the most important things right now. Pay attention to that. Now the human being doesn't know in any moment what's most important. That's what we're trying to figure out moment by moment. So attention was the solution to be able to sub sample information, privilege or prioritize some information over other information, which sounds like, well, that's used, seems like a useful thing to do. And the way that we know that brain, the brain system of attention is organized is you can prioritize information in at least three main ways. And that pretty much captures what the three main subsystems of attention are. So one way we can prioritize information, which is that's the basic job of attention. Prioritize some information or other information as a way to get the highlight reel of our moment to moment experience. Right now of course we're in a safe, stable, beautiful environment, but our ancestors weren't always privileged to have that. So they needed to know what was going on moment by moment, literally for their survival. So that a storm didn't come and kill them or they weren't eaten by predators, etc. So it's that kind of basic. And the first way that we can prioritize some information is very much like the term that we often use to describe attention, focus. And the flashlight

is a metaphor that I use to describe focus. So it's literally like a flashlight or maybe

from you're from the UK, right originally.

A torch.

So I like that. I always want to make sure that the words don't get in the way of the

...