Meditation & Mindfulness
The 12 Rules of Attention
CJ Liu interviews Joseph Cardillo, Md an expert training on his book “The 12 Rules of Attention: How to Avoid Screw-Ups, Free Up Headspace, Do More and Be More at Work”.
Part 1: What’s the Difference Between Attention, Mindfulness, and Awareness?
Attention is often misunderstand an in common vernacular is conflated with awareness, and mindfulness. The passage below pulled from Dr. Cardillo’s book explains the difference
- Mindfulness: Mindfulness can be understood as largely relating to energy. In this way, mindfulness itself is nonreactive to whatever you’re observing. Think about this: mindfulness is not just about being present. Rather, mindfulness is about increasing the energy (currency) of your presence. For example, when you give sound more presence, you are making it crisper and sharper, of higher definition. The energy of mindfulness does that for your experiences. Think of increasing the brightness on your cell phone flashlight by sliding the brightness bar upward to a stronger setting. Similarly, increasing your presence by boosting its energy (mindfulness) will sharpen your focus. When your focus feels too mellow, use your mindfulness mechanism to boost it.
- Attention: Psychologists define attention as what (data) you are putting in your working memory (fast, short-term memory bank) to activate procedures to achieve imminent goals. Although there are several different elements in our attention’s chain of command, here we are referring primarily to selective attention. Your brain’s attentional system is an electrochemical mechanism. It operates like an ultra sophisticated fetching system, targeting a piece of information, bringing it into your working memory, and connecting it to other information you have stored there to create processes to accomplish tasks. Your mechanism for selective attention gives you say in which details to regard and which to ignore.
- Awareness: Awareness is a consciousness that extends beyond the periphery of your attentional spotlight, and you have it at your disposal. Often, however, you simply aren’t aware that you are aware. In attention training, our job is to discover more ways to use this machine to our advantage. When driving, you can be aware, for instance, of a hairpin turn coming up in two miles and yet focus your attention on navigating through traffic directly ahead. As you drive, details become available to you that the turn is imminent. Your brain’s awareness mechanism almost instantly calibrates your attention to focus on the turn. Expectation, predictability, and surprise are all influenced by your awareness. Because you are aware of certain details, you may be surprised if something different from what your expectations are set for occurs. You are less surprised (or maybe not at all surprised) if you are able to accurately predict from the details. Your ability to attend advantageously toward goals is also affected by these variables. Later in this chapter you will see why and how you can use this predisposition throughout the day to more effortlessly hit your goals and keep your good vibes flowing.
Dr. Cardillo explains that 96% of the time are brain is on autopilot and we mindless execute actions. CJ provides a recent example of her unconscious behavior.
What’s the Difference Between Attention, Mindfulness, and Awareness? : YouTube Video
Part 2: How to Rewire your Brain to Optimize Productivity
Dr. Cardillo explains how you can use awareness to be conscious of the thoughts, actions, and mood that your memory will fetch.
Once you identify your current default “robotic state”, then you can build a mental visualization of what you’d like to do instead. This would be identifying your current behavior and then the new behavior and creating new circuitry, which happens through cementing in the new behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. Realistically, it’s impossible to get it right the first time. However, after each incident we can refine and retain our wiring by increasing the energy (mindfulness) we apply both in analyzing past events as well as reacting during the actual event.
Another aspect of retraining your brain is to recognize how our brain is programmed to create shortcuts and less aware of our day-to-day reality. In part 3, Dr. Cardillo shares several ways your brain go into auto pilot.
How to Rewire your Brain to Optimize Productivity: YouTube Video
Part 3: What are Brain Shortcuts?
Even when we try to rewire our brain we are working against blindness created by our brain’s desire to create shortcuts. The passage below pulled from Dr. Cardillo’s book explains the multitude of ways our brain loses the forest from the trees:
- Change blindness can affect our gut feelings, which can slant our attention. For example, we tend to dismiss information that we may see as against our “tribe” or our beliefs. Hence we reject
corporate, political, cultural, departmental, and regional information that we feel cuts against theories or ways of thinking that are important to us. Yet this can actually prevent us from making good choices. Whenever you are tempted to dismiss an offer automatically, you should consider these potentially harmful tendencies and ask yourself, “What am I dismissing here? And why?” This approach can often get you on track. - In-attentional blindness, just because information enters your field of vision doesn’t mean that you’ve “seen” it. You need to focus on it. In fact, as we have been saying, our brains are taking in a massive amount of information as we approach any task, and we can only pay attention to a very small amount of it. Some of the left-out information can turn out to be important to our decisions, and so we err.
- The miser brain describes your brain’s tendency to want to be a cognitive miser, to problem-solve quickly, relying on shortcuts to use the least mental effort and bypassing your thinking process. So for a multitude of reasons—including times when you are feeling low energy, don’t want to think too much, or don’t want to rattle your emotions or another person’s emotions—your decisions are apt to take the quickest, easiest trail. This comes at a cost. For one, fast-tracked decisions calculated by your brain’s miser mode can also cause you to miss relevant information, focus.
- Priming is an unconscious connection to external stimuli (words, images, sounds, and so on), memory, and experiences. It occurs when exposure to certain details activates your responses due to your prior experiences. Priming works on you just like a remote control and it happens under your radar.
What are Brain Shortcuts?: YouTube Video
Part 4: What’s the Difference Between Broad and Narrow Awareness?
Dr. Joseph Cardillo explains that one of the ways we can train our brain to pick up more information is to build the capacity of our brain to shift from narrow to broad.
He explains that we shift our focus from broad to narrow and back again constantly throughout the day. Think of it as adjusting a camera lens back and forth. You can peer at an entire baseball team positioned across the field, or you can tighten up and choose to zero in on just one player. You utilize the function whenever you scroll on your word processing screen to locate a specific print font and size, select it and then check out how it looks in your document.
Knowing when to concentrate or open your focus effectively isn’t a question of putting this function to work more often. Rather, it’s about consciously shifting when it will make a difference.
One of primary ways to hold both a narrow and broad view is to create a balanced state of energy. Dr. Cardillo shares one of his favorite tips is to use music to either pump you up or calm you down so that your energy can be balanced.
In the last segment, Dr. Joseph Cardillo talks about bias, which is another way in which our brain can limit our awareness.
What’s the Difference Between Broad and Narrow Awareness?: YouTube Video
Part 5: Confirmation Bias and Your Brain
Dr. Joseph Cardillo explains that the different ways that are brain interjects bias in our thinking.
*Halo effect* You may see, for example, one attractive quality in an individual, and then that triggers you to look for others.
*Bandwagon Effect* At times we find ourselves jumping on board when and where most people in our peer group or our culture—workplace and otherwise—seem to be opining on a certain issue.
*Confirmation Bias* Known as confirmation bias, this tendency makes certain individuals become overly defensive when they are made aware of a potential risk in the way their actions are being conceived and conducted.
*Optimism bias* has us thinking we are less likely to experience a negative event or outcome to what we do. The phrase “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” captures the more general meaning of optimism bias as a sort of positive thinking.
Confirmation Bias and Your Brain: YouTube Video
https://youtu.be/mWYRusXB3wYhttps://youtu.be/mWYRusXB3wY
More on Joseph Cardillo
Joseph Cardillo, PhD, is national leader in holistic healthcare. He is the best-selling author of several books in the fields of health,
mind-body-spirit, and psychology. His books include *The 12 Rules of Attention: How to Avoid Screw-ups, Free Up Headspace, Do More and Be More at Work*; *Body Intelligence: Harness Your Body’s Energies for Your Best Life*; *Can I Have Your Attention: How to Think Fast, Find Your Focus and Sharpen Your Concentration*; and the body energy classic, *Be Like Water*.
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