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‘Open awareness’ creativity under siege in today’s world
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Artists and inventors alike seem unusually adept at productive daydreaming. Brain researchers and Zen masters call the state of mind “open awareness,” the science writer Daniel Goleman reports in his new book, “Focus.” According to Goleman, the author of “Emotional Intelligence,” it’s a form of attentiveness characterized by “utter receptivity to whatever floats into the mind.” Experiments suggest it’s also the source of our most creative thoughts. Going beyond “orienting,” in which we deliberately gather information, and “selective attention,” in which we concentrate on solving a particular problem, open awareness frees the brain to make the “serendipitous associations” that lead to fresh insights.
We tend to think of attention as a switch that’s on or off — we’re focused or we’re distracted. That’s a misperception. Attention, as Goleman explains, comes in many varieties. Its extreme forms tend to be the most limiting. When we’re too attentive, we fall victim to tunnel vision. The mind narrows. When attention is absent, we lose control of our thoughts. We turn into scatterbrains. Open awareness lies in a particularly fertile area between the poles.
All forms of attention, Goleman argues, arise from the interplay between two very different parts of the brain. The older, lower brain, working largely outside of consciousness, constantly monitors the signals coming in from the senses. The alerts that stream from the lower brain are so visceral that, when they pop into the conscious mind, they’re hard to resist.
Working to control all those primitive impulses is the neocortex, the brain’s more recently evolved outer layer. The source of voluntary, or “top-down,” attention, the neocortex’s executive-control circuitry is what enables us to screen out distractions and focus our mind on a single task or train of thought.
Attention is not only a product of brain function. It’s also influenced by culture and, in particular, by the technologies we use to navigate and make sense of the world. Goleman’s book arrives at a time of growing anxiety about what he terms “the impoverishment of attention.” Our smartphones and other networked gadgets allow us to jack into an unending supply of messages and alerts. Worse, our infatuation with social media is making it harder to hear the mind’s whispers.
Trained as a psychologist, Goleman knows his way around a brain. His earlier works on emotional intelligence popularized the notion that being smart involves more than acing the SAT. One reads “Focus” with the hope that it will perform a similar function for open awareness. But the book suffers from an attention disorder of its own. Its brief chapters jump from topic to topic, the links between them growing ever more tenuous.
“Focus,” ironically, lacks focus.
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