DO YOU HAVE YOUR ATTENTION?

The Three-Minute Read from The Business of Pleasure. In a week when The Secretary of State for Business and Trade, Jonathan Reynolds, has entered the work-from-home debate by saying employers ‘need to judge people on outcomes not presenteeism,’ we ask: How present is 'present'?

There is an apocryphal story that has been variously ascribed to Charles Dickens, A.A. Milne, Woodrow Wilson and others, but which first appeared in The Boston Record in 1905.  ‘A bond salesman just back from Maine says he asked an old fisherman, in a snow-bound hamlet, what he did with himself in the evenings? “Oh, sometimes I sit and think,” the old fisherman replied, “and sometimes I just sits.”’

Psychologists, and the experience of our own day-to-day work-lives, tell us that it’s not only crusty old New England anglers that can be found gazing into the mid-distance, however the scale of this phenomenon might raise an eyebrow or two in your firm’s HR Department.  But don’t take my word for it. The next time you’re in the office, try and spot which co-workers appear to be hard at work, when they’re actually engaged (more factually disengaged) in one of the following:

1)     MIND-WANDERING

According to a highly-publicised 2010 study, we spend almost half our waking hours (46.9%) thinking about something other than what we’re actually supposed to be doing.

2)     MIND-BLANKING

A 2004 study reported that people described 18% of task-unrelated mental states as thinking of ‘nothing at all’, while an earlier research paper (published 1985) suggested that mind-blanking was the second-most common form of concentration lapses.

3)     LOCAL SLEEP

Recent research in animals and humans has shown that the neural activity normally associated with sleep can occur during wakefulness.  It has also been suggested that the timing and anatomical sources of these periods of ‘local sleep’ might be responsible for attentional lapses, and may actually underlie the difference between subjective experiences such as mind wandering and mind blanking.

What has the DMN ever done for us?

The default mode network (DMN) is a ‘large-scale brain network’ which is best known for being active when a person is day-dreaming or mind-wandering and not focused on the outside world.  But the difference in the brain’s energy consumption, between the task-unrelated mental states of the DMN and focused mental tasks, is, somewhat astonishingly, less than 5%. 

So what’s burning up all those carbs?

A lot of that energy is consumed thinking about ourselves, or thinking about others, in remembering the past and thinking about the future.  The DMN is also believed to play a critical role in that all-important area for those of us engaged in The Business of Pleasure …story comprehension.

Or, indeed, processing a three-minute read.

According to the clinical literature, there are a number of interventions, ranging from acupuncture to psychedelic drugs and deep-brain stimulation, that have been shown to have positive effects on DMN function, in addition to attention training techniques designed to focus the mind back on the present.

While physical exercise and meditation are also known to be extremely effective.

Alternatively, you could take a leaf out of Aldous Huxley’s final novel, ‘Island,’ which he wrote as an alternative to his more famous dystopian vision, ‘Brave New World.’  

On ‘Pala’, the fictional utopia of the title, Mynah Birds are trained to remind the inhabitants to focus on the moment by repeatedly squawking slogans such as “Here and now! Here and now!” and “Attention!”

But this would probably work better in a home-office environment than an open-plan department shared with thirty task-absorbed colleagues.