I’m waiting for a phone call from a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. He’s written articles and books about distraction and attention and has requested an interview. At our appointed time, my phone buzzes with a text from him: Can we talk in ten minutes?
I write back, Sure, and I wait.
Ten minutes later, he calls and starts to apologize. “It’s been such a day,” he says. “I—”
And then nothing. Silence. He clearly can’t speak. I can tell that his brain has just—to use a technical term—glitched. Like when your computer freezes and that little spinning beach ball of death appears. I’m talking to a man who won a Pulitzer for his use of words, and he can’t utter a single one.
He takes a deep breath and asks me if it’s okay if we take thirty seconds to breathe. Again, I agree. The thirty seconds go by. But now he has another request.
“Can I write down a couple thoughts?” he wants to know.
By the time we finally start the interview, I’m feeling pangs of irritation at all this preamble that he could have just done alone, before calling me. As we launch in, now a bit short on time, I go right to the topic of working memory, because it’s key to understanding attention and how to train it to work better.
Working memory, as we’ve discussed, is a dynamic cognitive workspace you use every waking moment of every day. Don’t get thrown off by the word memory: this isn’t only about the storage of information. It’s a temporary “scratch space” that is, by necessity and evolutionary design, impermanent and fleeting.
“I always think of working memory as the mind’s very own whiteboard,” I explain to the writer when he can speak again. “But it’s a whiteboard with disappearing ink. And that ink vanishes pretty fast. As soon as you ‘write’ something there, the ink basically starts to fade.”
I describe how attention feeds into working memory: the flashlight of your attention selects key information from your surroundings, or internal environment, and that goes into working memory. Just like writing on a real-life whiteboard, you can scribble ideas, consider concepts, deliberate decisions, notice patterns, jot down something you want to say . . . and more. Unlike a real-life whiteboard, though, this one is peculiar: the ink only stays on the board for a few seconds.
A few seconds is pretty short. That’s fine, even helpful, if you’re moving quickly from one thing to another. But how do you keep important content on your whiteboard longer if you need more time? Simple: keep paying attention to what’s there.
Directing the flashlight of your attention to the contents of your working memory essentially “refreshes” that content. It’s as if you’re tracing over the ink as it’s fading, again and again. Stop paying attention—that is, move your flashlight to another target—and the ink dissipates and starts “writing” something else.
Because working memory is so deeply intertwined with attention, it’s vulnerable to those very same forces that degrade attention—threat, poor mood, and stress. This is in addition to other corrosive factors like sleep deprivation and psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and PTSD. Under these pressures, this critical capacity doesn’t function so well. Your whiteboard rapidly becomes cluttered as your mind wanders, drawing in distracting content that fills up the space, leaving no room for what you actually want to do. As I’m explaining all this to the journalist, he suddenly cuts in.
“That’s exactly what was happening when I called you!” he said. “I had just gotten off another call. I was switching between projects. I didn’t want to leave you waiting. But my ‘whiteboard’ was completely full—there was no room to process anything.”
He said he needed to “clear his mind,” a common phrase that we’ve all probably used at some point or another. But there’s actually no way to “clear” your mind—you can’t wipe your whiteboard clean and keep it that way. It’s impossible. As soon as the ink fades on one thing, it’s replaced by something else.
The question is . . . what?
Let’s do a quick whiteboard assessment. You don’t need anything for this but a pen, paper, and this book.
Here’s your task. Think of someplace you visit regularly—a grocery store, your workplace, your child’s school—that’s about a fifteen-minute journey from your home. Picture it in your mind. Now, I want you to relive the path from your front door to this destination and count the number of times you have to turn. Doesn’t matter if you walk, take a car, bus, subway, whatever—just try to accurately count the number of turns. If you lose track, no big deal, just start over.
If and when you do get distracted, take a minute to jot down what distracted you. If your phone buzzed because you got a text, email, or Twitter alert, write phone. If an anxious thought popped up about a meeting you have later, write meeting. If you find yourself thinking about the same distraction more than once, note the repetition. You may have had thoughts about the place you are journeying to (in your mind). Try to be as accurate as possible in getting the turn count, and as precise as possible in noting what got in the way of doing this. Don’t skimp or skip over stuff—ideally, we want a lot of data here.
Remember that distraction can be good stuff. It doesn’t have to be negative to qualify as mind-wandering. Your thoughts may shift back to something pleasant that happened this morning (the stranger ahead of me in line bought my coffee; what a kind gesture!) or something you’re looking forward to (three-day weekend coming up!). No matter the category—positive vs. negative, productive to-do vs. unproductive rumination—simply jot it down.
This activity is similar to a mental activity I asked you to do in the introduction when I had you note the number of times your flashlight drifted from the page. In this case, you’re noticing not only the frequency of your distraction, but also what was distracting you.
Now let’s assess. What did you find yourself thinking about, over and over? Reading your list, you might notice that certain topics are “sticky,” that they pop up repeatedly. You might have been fantasizing about the delicious lunch you’re about to have or ruminating on an awkward comment you made at a gathering last weekend that you still feel embarrassed about. I have no idea. But I’m willing to bet that the vast majority, if not all, of the stuff on your chart isn’t actually an external distraction like a phone call or a knock at the door. If you’re like most of us, the biggest distraction culprit is actually your own mind.
We tend to think of distractions as external—the buzz of a phone, the bing of an email, a ringing doorbell, a colleague’s voice interrupting your thought process. More often than not, the most irresistible distractions are internally generated. In the previous chapter, we talked about finding your focus in a world of distractions, which means noticing when your flashlight has strayed and how to quickly and smoothly move it back where you want it. This is an essential first step in training your attention. But one thing you’re going to notice as you start paying attention to your attention is that even if you manage to eliminate potential external distractors (by silencing your phone, pausing your in-box, locking yourself in a quiet room—whatever it takes!), there’s still always something popping up: a worry, a regret, a desire, a plan.
Where on earth do these thoughts come from? And why do they appear, unbidden, in our working memory, when we want to be using it for something else?
Around two decades ago, those of us working in the field of neuroscience pondered a mystery: A new and powerful technology—functional MRI (fMRI)—had just been invented, and a strange new pattern of brain activity was visualized for the first time. It didn’t match any of the brain networks we already knew about—so what was it? The question lingered for years.
The new technology was thrilling for neuroscientists. We were able to see signals tied to brain activity while a research volunteer was actively doing things in the scanner, and we were able to track exactly where the action was happening. What we wanted to do most urgently was gather information about the brain regions that were activated during attentionally demanding tasks. In other words: Which parts of your brain “light up” when you pay attention in certain ways, and what does that tell us about how your attention system works? To do this, we needed to be able to compare the “at work” brain to the “at rest” brain.
First, we looked at the brain doing something demanding for attention and working memory, like the “3-back” working memory task: while in the scanner, you watch a screen as numbers go by one-by-one, and for each number you answer the question “Was it the same as the number you saw three slides back? Or not?” This is a tough one! It gives us a great snapshot of working memory at work.
Then, we needed an image of the brain at rest to compare it to. “Just rest,” we told our study participants. No test, no task, nothing attentionally demanding to puzzle out.
As expected, certain prefrontal brain regions were much more active when participants were doing the 3-back task. In study after study, however, something odd kept happening when the participants were “at rest.” A different network came online—a new combination of regions activated at the same time. Regions having to do with memory, planning, and emotion all came online together. We hadn’t seen this before, and we couldn’t immediately identify what it was. Why would these regions get activated together during rest? They even appeared to be yoked, so that their activity waxed and waned together.
We tried giving participants different, more-specific instructions, but it didn’t matter what they did—when they were told to rest, we got a very specific activation profile in the middle of the brain (called the midline—think of the part of your brain that would be under the skull if you parted your hair right down the middle of your scalp). Every time we said “rest,” this mystery network booted up.
So we started asking people as they came out of the scanner: What did you think about during the rest period?
Their answers:
“I thought about lunch.”
“I thought about how uncomfortable I was.”
“I thought about a fight I had with my roommate this morning.”
“I thought about how I need to get a haircut.”
The more participants we polled, the more we started to notice a pattern in their responses: they were all self-related topics. People weren’t in the scanner thinking about world peace or politics—instead, they were turning inward, reflecting on recent episodes in their lives, making plans, analyzing their own feelings, thoughts, and sensations.
This led some research teams to try a twist. They showed participants a series of adjectives while they were in the scanner: Tall. Funny. Smart. Attractive. Interesting. Friendly. Sad. Brave. Likable. The instruction: rate how much each word described Bill Clinton (he was president at the time) on a scale from “not at all” to “quite a lot.” Then: “Rate how much this word describes you.” And boom, there it was again: the very same, unidentified network we’d seen during rest. As soon as participants were asked about themselves rather than the president, that same pattern of midline brain regions came online.
The researchers realized something: perhaps rest was never actually restful. Asked to “rest,” the participants were instead defaulting to thinking about themselves. A new, somewhat playful acronym emerged and was jokingly used among brain researchers: Rapid Ever-present Self-related Thinking, or R.E.S.T.
Neuroscientists now call this once-mysterious network the “default mode network,” because the brain is thought to default to this mode whenever it isn’t otherwise occupied with attentionally demanding tasks (and, as we’ll see here shortly, often even when it is occupied). Once we were able to isolate and identify the network, we started to see its fingerprint in all sorts of situations. When you’re mind-wandering, the default mode is active. When you’re performing a task and making errors—again, you’re in the default mode. Many labs tested this and saw it consistently: when people got questions right, the attention network was “online”; when they got stuff wrong, the default mode network was active instead.
What all this tells us is that when mind-wandering directs both your attention and your working memory inward, your default mode is activated. Even in the absence of external distractions, your brain will produce its own salient, self-related content. And these internal distractions are just as “loud” as external distractions—emotionally charged thoughts can capture attention just as powerfully as someone shouting your name.
This might not be such a problem when you don’t need your working memory for something else—as we discussed in the previous chapter, allowing space for spontaneous thought can be great. The problem is, this is happening all the time. And often you do need your working memory for something else. You need it for almost everything.
Using your working memory is how you learn and remember. It’s a “portal” into more permanent storage: you need it to be able to encode information—an experience, new information, and much more—into your long-term memory. And when you want to get something out of long-term memory (retrieval), your working memory is where that information is “downloaded” for fast access so that you can use it.
Working memory is critical for social connection and communication. It’s where you track and analyze the intentions and actions of other people and hold those observations in mind so that you can navigate social dynamics, like waiting your turn in conversation or listening even while you have something to say.
And it’s where you experience emotion. When you recall a happy memory or something sad or upsetting, you’re using your working memory to do so. You essentially “fill up” your whiteboard with the thoughts, feelings, and sensations associated with that memory as you construct a full, rich, emotional experience. Working memory is deeply connected to your capacity to feel.
It goes the other way, too: you need working memory to regulate emotions as they come along. Example: You’re overcome by some feeling, and you need to get steady. What do you do? You think through the problem, or you distract yourself by focusing on some other topic, or you reframe the situation (maybe it’s not as bad as I think . . . ). All these tactics require the use of your working memory.
One study had participants come in and watch a disturbing movie. The only catch was that they were instructed to limit any overt expression of emotions while doing so. No shouting, crying, or facial expressions were allowed. Separately, researchers tested each participant’s working memory capacity by asking them to remember letters in between completing simple math problems. Then they looked for a link: Was there any correspondence between people’s success at suppressing their expression of emotion and their working memory capacity?
Yes. People who had low working memory capacity were expressing all over the place. They truly weren’t able to control it, even though it was the one task they were given. Meanwhile, those who had higher working memory capacity were much better at modulating their responses. They may have been using working memory to keep the goal in mind (“My job right now is not to react”) more strongly than those with low working memory, or perhaps they were reappraising the situation to shift their response (“It’s just a movie; it’s not real”)—whatever their specific tactic was, the key was that they had the cognitive capacity to do it.
Finally, and critically, working memory plays a role in every single thing you want to do, every day, from making your lunch to thinking a thought. In neuroscience-speak, it’s where you “maintain a goal.”
Working memory is where you hold a goal in mind so you can move toward it. By goal, I don’t mean the kind that wins soccer games (though that is the goal of soccer). I mean the micro-intentions and deliberate aim of having a desired outcome for each and every task you engage in—all the decisions, planning, thinking, actions, and behaviors you do over the course of a day: anything you set out to do. Deciding to read a book, shopping for dinner supplies, thinking about your favorite memes, making your presentation slides, learning how to use a new gadget, waiting for traffic to clear before crossing the street. You lean on your working memory to maintain your goals and subgoals, update them, and scrap them for a different goal, on a continuous, moment-by-moment, task-by-task basis.
During the quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic, my husband and I decided that we should really mix it up and do something exciting one evening. By “exciting” I mean that we decided to spend the evening playing cards with both our kids.
Sophie, our daughter, asked us all to play a card game called “Egyptian Slap.” The rules go like this: players take turns rapidly playing a card from their hand, and when specific sequences of cards appear, you slap the pile and win the hand. The sequences you’re looking for are things like: a sandwich (8–2–8), three of a kind (8–8-8), ordinal (7–8–9), and so on. The kids loved this game—Michael and I kind of hated it. There are so many rules. And you have to maintain constant access to them in order to win. You have to hold all these rules actively in working memory and take quick action in the moment.
Surprise, surprise, the kids wiped the floor with us. A couple of forty-something parents were no match for the lightning-fast mental and physical reflexes of our teenage offspring. Our kids, baffled by how poorly we were doing, kept trying to correct us. “No, no,” they would say, “you have to slap as fast as you can.” Adorably, they didn’t realize that it wasn’t that we didn’t understand the rules, but that while their young frontal lobes were springing forward, en route to actualizing their full potential, ours were falling back, sadly on the decline. But it was interesting—as I was playing (and losing), it struck me that the game was the perfect example of a pure working memory task: we had to hold a goal in mind, and then take action based on that goal. That’s how working memory works, and also why it impacts you so profoundly.
Working memory is the essential partner to attention: it’s what allows you to actually do something with the information your flashlight focuses on. But if attention keeps piping in salient and distracting content, that will become a big problem for goal maintenance, let alone goal accomplishment. Why? Because you only have so much space to work with. Just like a real-life whiteboard, your working memory has limits.
In the lab, we regularly run experiments that try to push the upper limits of working memory. We wanted to know: If working memory was so critical for every facet of our lives, exactly how much “space” do we possess in which to do all this important work?
We had participants come into the lab and look at an image of a face. We made it unremarkable—no unusual or striking features that would make it especially memorable. Then the face would disappear for three seconds, before being replaced by another face. Their job was to mentally compare the two faces and tell us if they were the same or different. Easy! So then, we increased the number of faces people had to hold in mind, to two, then three, then four, five, up to nine. It’s a basic way to test working memory’s capacity to maintain information: During those three seconds when those first faces are no longer available, the participants have to hold those images in working memory—that is, “draw” them over and over on that whiteboard. And when they start to answer incorrectly, we know they’re reaching the upper limit of how much their whiteboard can hold.
So, how many faces can people remember before they “max out” their working memory? Take a guess. Five? Ten? More?
The answer is three.
Every time we did this experiment in the lab, people got worse with more and more faces. After three, their performance was no better than making a complete guess. They performed as poorly as they would have if they had never seen the faces in the first place.
“Well,” you might say, “faces are complicated—they have so many little details!” But it turns out that three or four items are about the limit that can be held in working memory, even with very simple stimuli like colored shapes. Why? Well, one possibility is that each item you hold in working memory has a unique brain frequency signature—like a radio channel. And you can “open” three or four of those channels at once and still keep them separate from each other. But if you try to go past four, they start to scramble, or become “disambiguated.”
The reason that local phone numbers have seven digits is actually directly related to the “size” of working memory: In 1956, a psychologist named George Miller published a paper on working memory titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” He’d found that seven (plus or minus two) was the sweet spot for memorizing a string of numbers—it was the upper limit of what most people could briefly hold or easily memorize, because the time it takes to say seven numbers in English is roughly the “time buffer” of our auditory working memory. Even a couple of seconds longer means that those numbers are already fading too fast for you to dial. (And if you remember rotary phones, you know how important this was at the time!)
You can use several strategies to assist you, now that you’re empowered with the knowledge that your working memory is limited. For example, recall the journalist who had called to interview me. “Cognitive offloading” is what he utilized when he asked me if he could write down his thoughts at the beginning of our interview. Cognitive offloading is a great tactic—it’s beneficial for task performance. Yet it doesn’t address one of our core problems: we don’t always realize that we are overloaded. We aren’t aware, moment to moment, of all that is on our whiteboard, and we don’t get clued in until we experience a failure.
The first story in this chapter is the perfect example of a common type of working memory failure: overload. You’re trying to hang onto too much, and you push your working memory past its limits. You might also experience the opposite: blanking.
I just had it! you think as you walk into a room and have no idea why you’re there. Or you’ve been called on to speak after sitting in class or in a meeting with your hand up, only to turn to your own mind, which moments ago had a brilliant, fully written speech, to find an empty white page. Why does this happen? The field of neuroscience suggests a few ideas. One is that we mind-wander with no awareness . . . the flashlight gets pulled away, whatever we were maintaining vanishes, and we return to a “blank” whiteboard. Another hypothesis is that there is a “sudden death” of neural activity for the information we were trying to hang onto: a whole symphony of brain activity is happening, and then all of it stops at the same time. You may have a sense that something was there, but now it’s gone.
And finally: distraction.
You’ve learned by now how powerful salient distractors can be. Anything especially salient, or “loud” (literally or metaphorically), will definitely capture your attention, whether it’s in your external environment (producing sights, sounds, or other sensations) or in your mindscape (thoughts, memories, emotions). One of the ramifications of this is that once the “loud” thing lands in your working memory, it may write over what you were trying to hang onto. Result: whatever previous content you were in the process of either maintaining (keeping the traces active for use) or encoding (“writing” more permanently into long-term memory) is disrupted. This form of disruption highlights again how deeply intertwined working memory and attention are.
Working memory and attention are like dance partners: they must work together smoothly to accomplish any of your goals, whether large or small. Whether that’s in service of a quarantine card game or a life-defining crisis, the mechanism is the same—and so are the key vulnerabilities:
— Key vulnerability: Bait and Switch
When your attention is automatically “captured” or yanked by something salient, this more exciting (to your attention) content overwrites what was being maintained. Voluntary attention then starts retracing this new content. The prior information is lost forever, gone without a trace.
— Key vulnerability: Road Block
The alerting system can be set off by feelings of threat, even when there is no real danger. This temporarily cuts off access to working memory and impairs any functions that rely on it (like long-term memory, social connection, and emotion regulation).
— Key vulnerability: Ball Drop
Overload, blanking, and distraction in working memory all derail the central executive’s juggler, leading to lost goals and misguided behaviors. The juggler drops the ball.
Each point above represents an opportunity for that tight “dance” between working memory and attention to either work smoothly and fluidly in service of our goals, or to trip us up: Put the wrong thing on the whiteboard. Block important content. Derail goal accomplishment.
When we experience working memory failures—whether large or small—they can pile up over the course of a day, a week, and even a lifetime, and can set us far back from where we want to be and who we want to be.
“So,” you ask, “what can we do about it?”
In 2013, our lab collaborated on a large-scale study with schoolteachers from around the United States and Canada to see whether mindfulness training would have any impact on cognitive performance and burnout, a particular concern for educators. The training was an eight-week mindfulness course taught by a qualified trainer. In addition to attending the class meetings, they had to do mindfulness homework exercises between classes. The teachers were all given a classic experiment to index their working memory capacity: Remember a short sequence of letters, say, M Z B. Then they were asked to do a simple math problem. We’d add another letter to the sequence, then give them another computation; then add another letter, assign another problem. We wanted to know this: How long of a string of letters could they remember accurately before their working memory started to fade and ultimately fail, all the while maintaining their ability to give correct answers to the math problems?
Half the group then participated in an eight-week mindfulness course, while the other half waited for their turn to take the course. (That’s an important way to control for a potential study contaminant: differing motivation. Instead of having a control group that simply receives nothing or has no interest in receiving training, a wait-list control group, at least in theory, has a similar level of motivation and investment during the testing sessions, because eventually they too will get the training.) When we retested both groups after the first group finished their training, we found that those who’d already done their eight-week mindfulness course showed better working memory than the group that was still waiting.
These intriguing results led us to our next burning question: How was mindfulness training improving working memory? My hunch: It helped declutter the mental whiteboard.
Colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had the same hunch and tested it out in a clever experiment. They gave forty-eight undergraduate students the same working memory task we had provided teachers and those Marines we studied in West Palm Beach years before, but they added one important twist. After the experiment was over, they asked participants to report how often they were mind-wandering—were they having off-task thoughts often or not so often during the experiment?
After doing the working memory study, half of them were invited to receive mindfulness training for two weeks and the other half got nutrition education as “comparison training.” They found that only mindfulness training improved working memory in these students, and it was most helpful to those who mind-wandered a lot before their training. This study also asked a practical question: Does improving working memory and reducing mind-wandering help students on academic tasks? The answer: Yes! Students who got the mindfulness training improved an average of sixteen percentile points on the reading comprehension section of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), an important test for gaining entry into graduate programs.
Let’s sum up and connect the dots: In high-stress groups, like teachers experiencing burnout, stress is kryptonite for attention—mental time travel is one of the main culprits. Instead of being able to keep your flashlight aimed where you need it, you’re either in rewind (ruminating, regretting) or in fast-forward (catastrophizing or worrying . . . often about something imagined that may never come to pass). Working memory (your mental whiteboard) relies on this vary same attentional flashlight to encode and refresh its contents. But if stress-related mental time travel hijacks attention away, working memory gets filled up with irrelevant input. Any processes that rely on working memory will suffer as well. This means comprehension, planning, thinking, decision making, and experiencing and regulating emotions all become compromised.
In short:
STRESS-RELATED MENTAL TIME TRAVEL YANKS THE ATTENTIONAL FLASHLIGHT AWAY FROM OUR PRESENT-MOMENT EXPERIENCE AND INCREASES THE CLUTTER ON OUR MENTAL WHITEBOARD.
When it’s present-centered, attention can encode and refresh the contents of working memory with task-relevant information. And in turn, working memory is able to successfully meet present-moment task demands. In other words:
MINDFULNESS TRAINING HELPS TO DECLUTTER THE MENTAL WHITEBOARD, SO THAT WORKING MEMORY WORKS BETTER.
One Friday night, after a very long week of teaching, meetings, and deadlines, I told my husband, Michael, that I had really maxed out my decision-making powers. I asked if I could offload to him all decisions regarding our evening plans, but I had one request and one condition. The request: that we do something fun that would be “transportive” and entertaining. The condition: “I am not leaving this couch.”
He announced that we would be streaming a show called Lucifer. It’s a show about the Devil, who, bored with being in Hell, moves to Los Angeles (where else?) to become a nightclub owner. (I rolled my eyes in protest, but he pushed play. “You asked me to make the decisions!” he reminded me. Fair enough!) Lucifer partners up with a cop and dedicates himself to punishing people when they choose to use their free will to do bad things. And when they die? You guessed it—they get sent to Hell. And then the show started to elaborate on its version of Hell: basically, Lucifer was putting people in circumstances where they had to play out their biggest regret—the same time loop, over and over again. And I thought, Ha! That’s rumination!
Rumination is one of the most potent forms of mental time travel. It involves getting stuck thinking about the same thing over and over. When we ruminate on something, we get caught in a loop: we go over events, wishing they could have gone differently; sometimes we imagine the alternate ways things might have gone, or we remember how they actually went, and we end up going over those events yet again. We can also ruminate by catastrophizing: imagining how events might unfold in the future, worrying about various potentialities that may never come to pass. These types of mental loops are magnetic—they become conflict states, and it’s very hard to pull our flashlights away from them. When we do manage to, we tend to return immediately to the topic as soon as possible, like a tongue seeking a sore tooth.
It was kind of funny, to me, discovering that rumination is so terrible that somebody made a whole show about how it’s literally Hell.
Mental time travel diminishes our working memory’s ability to do the work needed for the demands of our present moment. And because when we’re mentally writing and rewriting things over and over again, regardless of what we’re looping on, it leaves no room for anything else. We don’t have capacity available for either cognition or emotional regulation. You might find yourself, in this situation, making a hasty decision or snapping at your kids. Stress levels go up, mood goes down. That self-assisted stress wears on our attention, making it even more difficult to resist what I call the “loop of doom.”
Whatever the contents of our working memory, highlighted and escorted there by our attention, they are the actual contents of our moment-to-moment conscious experience. Let’s say your working memory is goal-focused, occupied and engaged in content aligned with both what you want to be doing and what you’re actually doing, as in some external task. You’re focused, engaged, responsive. You’re noticing everything, from sensory details to the larger context of your experience—all the “information” about your surroundings and immediate environment that you need to accomplish your task is available to you.
In contrast, if there’s something else on your whiteboard, then that becomes your experience in that moment. You are likely to lose the intention and purpose of the activity you embarked on in the first place. To use an example that’s near and dear to my heart: if you’re physically sitting with your child, reading a book together, but mentally mulling over a work-related problem, then you are, essentially, at work instead of on that couch with your child. You may even experience perceptual decoupling, where your flashlight is so focused on your whiteboard content that you aren’t even able to process sensory input from your surroundings. (That, for the record, is how we get ourselves into situations where we’ve read a book a hundred times, and still don’t know what a wump is.)
Here’s how strong this effect is: if you’re holding something in working memory, your brain’s computational resources shift to service that content. This is what we call the biasing effect of working memory. In one experiment, we wanted to figure out the power of working memory’s biasing effect on perception. How “strongly” does it influence what you perceive?
We ran an experiment similar to the one I described earlier that told us the upper limits of working memory. But this time, we put the brain cap on our participants while they did the experiment, and we only gave them one face to remember. What we found: when you’re maintaining a face in your working memory, during those three seconds when there’s no face on the screen, your face-processing neurons stay active. How did we know this? During the delay, we presented a small gray “probe” image—a sort of shapeless blob—which we made by taking all the pixels of the face image and randomly moving them around. We were intrigued to see a stronger N170 (the brainwave response generated when seeing a face) to these probes when participants were remembering faces than when they were remembering anything else (like scenes).
Let’s break that down. Why was this an intriguing finding for us? Well, it told us that working memory performs the same type of “top-down” biasing that your attention system does: everything your brain does now becomes calibrated to what’s on your whiteboard. It isn’t just that it seems as if you’re experiencing whatever you’re thinking about instead of what’s right in front of you. It’s that neurally, that’s exactly what’s happening. Your brain is perceiving a face internally, even as your eyes are staring at a gray blob.
So: if you’re reading about wumps on the couch, or driving across a long bridge in Florida, or sitting at the judge’s bench while a defense attorney gives closing arguments, and your thoughts are elsewhere, then—as far as your brain knows—you are elsewhere.
Now, I want to take a minute here to make an important point. Everything we’ve been talking about so far regarding your working memory—its temporary nature, its susceptibility to threat and stress, and the way it can be hijacked by mind-wandering—all probably sounds like a litany of negatives. As if working memory is programmed solely for failure. Meanwhile, I’m telling you how important it is for all you want to accomplish. So, what gives? If this is such a critical brain capacity, why on earth would Mother Nature leave us with such a faulty, error-prone tool? Why are there so many “bugs” in this software?
My answer to that is: It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Each of these apparent flaws has a purpose. Let’s take a look.
Disappearing ink
If this fast-fading ink on our whiteboards is such a problem, why didn’t we evolve to have ink that stuck around longer? Something more permanent?
Imagine what it would be like if your whiteboard didn’t auto-clear every few seconds. Every passing thought, everything that caught your attention, every little intrusion or distraction would stick around. Even helpful stuff would turn into a burden. Forget maintaining goals or problem solving—you’d be overburdened by the weight and stagnation of any arising mental content. It would be hard to tell the difference between what is important or not, since no matter what, content would just stick around in your conscious mind, for longer than you might need it. Your working memory had to evolve to be fleeting. Your brain needs to automatically dump content at a rapid, constant pace, so that there is flexibility and choice in what you continue to focus on and, therefore, maintain.
Fragility
But why is my working memory so vulnerable to distractions?
Let’s bring back our helpful assistant, your long-ago ancestor, to help us out with this one. Picture him in the forest. He has a goal he’s holding in working memory: find food. He’s scanning for the red pop of a particular berry that grows in this area—all his brain functions are now calibrated to achieving that goal. As he scans for red, his color-processing neurons are sizzling, active and ready. Then, he spots it: motion in the trees. Tiger. Working memory dumps the previous goal as fast as he could snap his fingers, and a new directive appears: freeze.
We still need this feature—though it can get us into trouble when we misperceive or imagine threat. We need to be able to rapidly act without a sluggish delay. And this feature allows us to perform this crucial, and sometimes lifesaving, pivot.
Capacity
But why are we so limited? Why can we only remember three things, instead of three hundred?
To be honest, we are still puzzling this one out, and frequency-based brain dynamics are likely to give us an answer. One explanation may be this: even if you could remember a million things, a big reason for having working memory, like attention, is to be able to take action, and you still only have two hands and two feet.
These features of working memory evolved so that we don’t remember everything and thereby become unresponsive to changing demands. They served our ancestors well thousands of years ago, and they continue to serve us well today, even in our mostly tiger-free world. It’s just that these evolutionarily selected features come with their downsides. On the upside, though, we are learning rapidly, with more and more research studies suggesting that mindfulness training can help. With training, we can still have a peak mind—even with these tendencies.
I used to think mindfulness was about hitting the “pause” button, which to me always felt artificial or idealistic. Life has no pause button—why pretend it does? But when we’re talking about stabilizing attention and developing a peak mind, what we’re actually looking for is a play button. We need to stop holding down the rewind or fast-forward buttons and stay in play, to experience every note in the song of our lives, to hear and take in what’s happening around us.
In the previous chapter, you tried out the first core practice, Find Your Flashlight. Now we’re going to try a variation on that practice that helps pull us out of the loop of doom. It works because you must step outside your journey going around and around in those ruminative loops of doom to make a category judgment about the contents of your mind-wandering. And then, after labeling the content of your mind-wandering, you return back to the present moment. When you do get sucked into ruminative mind-wandering (which happens to the best of us), you start to recognize what’s happening—and as you practice more, you recognize it sooner. You’re not replaying an argument with a friend for the tenth time before you notice that you’ve been using your whiteboard for something else while you’re trying to listen to your colleague talk to you. As you train yourself to monitor what’s happening in the present moment, you’ll default less and less to long, unproductive, and off-task bouts of mental time travel. You’ll get better at noticing mind-wandering and asking: What are the contents of my working memory right now, and are they supporting me for what is needed right now? Or would shifting back to the present moment be best? If so, redirect your attention back to the sights, sounds, and demands of the present moment.
This is another “variation” of classical practices aiming to cultivate concentrative focus. It builds on the Find Your Flashlight exercise, and it will be great preparation for one of the more advanced practices coming up later in the book, where you’ll need to develop the skill of observing and monitoring your mind, which begins by “watching” your own thoughts.
CORE PRACTICE BOOSTER: WATCH YOUR WHITEBOARD
An important point: I am absolutely not suggesting that the contents of your whiteboard should always match the contents of your immediate task-at-hand. Like the fallacy of having a “perfect unbroken focus,” that’s neither possible nor desirable. There’s nothing inherently bad about having stuff on your whiteboard other than what’s right in front of your nose. It’s neither bad nor good—it’s simply how the brain works. It happens. Spontaneous thought arises. We use working memory to work something out that has nothing to do with the present moment—puzzle out a logistical problem, figure out how we feel about something, or make a plan or a decision. There are plenty of situations where it’s absolutely best to have the content of the whiteboard be information about the past or future—and in those moments, the present moment becomes enriched with the content that time traveling provides access to.
If spontaneous thought is not affecting your performance, then maybe it’s not a problem. This could be a fine time to give yourself some “white space” and let your mind drag whatever it wants onto your whiteboard. (In fact, what your off-leash brain fetches for you can be quite informative—we’ll be talking about that a bit later.) But this very well might be a moment when you do need your working memory for a current demand. And this is not just about some on-the-job type of performance—there are all kinds of reasons you don’t want to be disconnected from your environment, like connection to others, learning, personal safety, and more. So ask yourself:
If I’m distracted, is there a cost?
If I miss this moment, is that important to me?
Managing your working memory, just like managing your attention, is not about being 100 percent present 100 percent of the time. The point is not that you become only about the present moment—you can’t, and I wouldn’t recommend it! What you can do is become aware of what’s happening. That’s the superpower that allows you to intervene.
In the show Lucifer (which I did keep watching after all), it was later revealed that Lucifer had one final trick up his sleeve. All the people who were “trapped” in Hell weren’t really trapped at all. All the doors were unlocked. They could choose to leave at any time. They simply didn’t, because they assumed they couldn’t.
Ultimately, having a strong working memory is not about always using it for your goals and plans, every minute; or about always being in the present moment—this is neither realistic nor desirable. Instead, it’s about becoming aware of what your working memory actually contains. It’s about recognizing and heading off any interference (such as mental time travel) when there is a task to be done. It can even be about basking in the “nowness” of a refreshing morning shower. In the lab, we find that people who display better performance are better able to drop the distractions. They are able to allow the ink to fade when it’s appropriate for it to do so, selectively making the decision: “I’m not going to rewrite that.”
This is where the new science of attention has moved us forward in our understanding of how to reclaim this critical cognitive workspace. We have long understood the connections between working memory and attention, and between working memory and long-term memory. What we’re understanding now is that working memory is far more than just a “holding cell” for information.
What’s in your working memory will—as we’ll see in the coming chapters—constrain your perception, your thinking, and your actions. So the first critical thing we need to work on is pointing the flashlight of our attention at that mental whiteboard, to see what’s on it. This is an entirely new way to use the “flashlight beam” of our attention, but one that we are beginning to realize is critical to achieving the cognitive capacities we need to really thrive in the world we live in today.
However, you cannot just “decide” to be aware of what’s on your whiteboard, moment to moment—as with any kind of training, you have to build up to that capacity. And this is why, at a certain point in my research, I had to push forward with exploring mindfulness practice even when I encountered resistance at every turn.
That study with the Marines in West Palm Beach showed us that with mindfulness training, plus a commitment to daily practice, people under long-term, high-stress conditions could indeed keep their attention and working memory intact and have cognitive resilience. They could be trained to protect their attention and working memory from the damaging stressors surrounding them. It was a promising study, but small—too small. We needed a bigger sample group, and a more-honed experiment. I wanted to find out more about what type of mental training, specifically, worked best, and the “dosage” level required to make a real difference for someone operating under high-stress conditions.
Professionally, I was warned against pursuing this line of research. Mindfulness was a dead end, colleagues told me. It was too wishy-washy. Not rigorous enough. If I kept on this trajectory, they cautioned, I’d be “committing career suicide.”
We wrote grants anyway. And we got funding: two million dollars to run the first-ever large-scale mindfulness training study with the US Army. I felt ecstatic. Maybe I was “committing career suicide,” but at least I was going all-in.
There was only one problem: nobody in the military would accept the study. I shopped it around everywhere, but every door I knocked on stayed closed. It seemed we were asking for too much: we were asking for time, and a lot of it. This study had a brainwave component, and the setup for the electrode cap alone took one hour! And we were asking for their time during the worst-possible period: predeployment, when soldiers train for some of the most intense and high-stakes conditions they will ever experience. But that was exactly when I needed them—during that high-stress interval when they’d have to perform at their peak, and then continue to do so as they were deployed. “No,” everybody said. “No, no, no.”
And then, after an entire year of asking, a yes.
That “yes” came from Walt Piatt, the lieutenant general we met in the introduction. At the time (more than a decade ago) he was a colonel, heading up a US Army brigade based in Hawaii that was in-between deployments. When my team and I flew out to meet Colonel Piatt about the study, I was briefed by his executive officer to keep our presentation short and to the point, as his time was extremely limited. I walked in ready for him to be stereotypically “military”—all business, stiff and stoic with a no-nonsense edge.
Instead, the first thing he did was take us to the base’s “remembrance room,” where the service members who didn’t make it back alive were memorialized. We walked slowly around the room, looking at the names and boots of the fallen. He talked about the challenges of life in the military, before, during, and after deployment. He showed us photos of friends he’d lost, including Iraqi friends. And he told me that when he looked over our materials describing the study, he thought of something his wife, Cynthia, was always saying to him: “Don’t deploy before you deploy.” Through his multiple deployments, she’d noticed that before he had physically gone to a war zone halfway around the world, he would already be mentally gone. Immediately I thought of all the myriad ways so many of us might “deploy before we deploy,” spending so much time in our heads planning and imagining the next upcoming thing that we completely miss our lives in the moment. I thought of myself earlier that week: standing on the sidelines at my son’s soccer game, I was mentally already at the next day’s faculty meeting. I barely remembered a thing about that game. (It still gets me.)
Driving back to the hotel, I went over the experience in my mind—it was not at all what I had expected. The colonel’s decision to take us to the remembrance room first was telling. It occurred to me that in Sanskrit the word for mindfulness is smriti, which can be translated as “that which is remembered.”
When we stay in play—when we are filling up our whiteboards with the present moment—we have a much greater chance of encoding that moment into long-term memory. We all want to “remember better.” Can mindfulness help us also press the record button?
Yes. But pressing record isn’t quite as straightforward as it may seem.