Paying Attention & Mindfulness | Sam Chase | TEDxNYU

My name is Sam Chase and for the next 15 minutes I really hope you'll pay

attention

. I'm hopeful, but I'm NOT going to allow myself to be too optimistic because I teach meditation for a living and study the science of

mindfulness

. I know a little about the kinds of things that tend to happen inside the human mind; for example, I know that in 2010 a group of Harvard researchers got together to study the daily thoughts of more than 5,000 people from more than 80 countries, one What they found was that our minds are actually wandering about 47% of the time, which means that if half of you are actually

paying

attention

right now, I'm probably beating the odds by a little, but more importantly that, they also found. that when our mind wanders we tend to be less happy than when we are focused on what is happening in the present moment now, mental distraction actually has a lot of benefits it is a big part of how we do our creative thinking it is where all of our planning happens, it actually seems to be a big part of how we maintain a coherent sense of who we are as time goes on, but when it comes to happiness it seems like most of it happens in the here and now and how we handle what happens. .

What happens here and now can also be quite complicated. A 2014 study gathered a group of hundreds of people, probably very much like you, one by one. These people were placed alone in an empty room for 15 minutes just to be with their thoughts about the On the other side of those 15 minutes, most of those people rated that time as boring and unpleasant only to find out how boring and unpleasant it was in a In a later version of the same experiment, before putting people alone in a room, they gave them a painful electric shock, one of The totally surprising result of this study was that they found that people really don't like painful electric shocks;

In fact, many of the people in the study reported that they would pay a significant amount of money to ensure that experience never happened and when those people were taken to that empty room this time, they changed things up a bit. They said you have 15 minutes to be alone with your thoughts. By the way, there is a button on the table. If you press that button, you will receive the same pain. electric shock you just said you would pay to avoid it you don't have to force it if you do it it won't shorten the time it's entirely up to you to see you in a little 15 minutes later 25 percent of women 66 percent of men had pressed that button at least once, many of them pressed it multiple times, a guy who must have had a lot on his mind pressed it one hundred and ninety times in 15 minutes, if you're trying to do the math. let me help you it's about once every five seconds why would we press that button?

We don't really know that it could be boredom it could be anxiety it could be that sometimes pain feels less painful than thinking that One of the things we do know is that for many of us, when we let ourselves be carried away by the landscape of our own minds , one of the first things we can discover is that it feels like a jungle there and sometimes we will do almost everything we can to get out of the philosopher Blaise. Pascal once wrote that all of humanity's problems arise from our inability to sit alone and quietly in a room and if you've ever had a couple of moments inside your own mind that would make you reach for the button, maybe you'd agree.

I agree, but our Conscious attention is like a precious natural resource and, like any natural resource, its power is limited. Now there is no way we can calculate how much information the human brain can handle, but a simple estimate suggests that if we add up all the information. We receive sight, sound, taste, touch and smell every second from the sensory neurons in our body. Every second your brain is being bombarded by around 11 million bits of information. Does anyone want to guess how much information your conscious attention can capture? handle it is about sixty bits six zero the other 99.999 4% of what is happening around you, what is happening inside you right now, is being processed by parts of your brain that operate largely unconsciously and it is possible That all that experience never filters down to your conscious attention, so what do we do with all that?

Because much of the quality of your daily life will be determined by how you invest and manage this precious resource of your conscious attention, especially now, more than ever, thanks to the miracles of modern technology. you can text while driving, swipe right while ordering seamlessly while chatting on Skype, and live streaming the season finale of The Bachelor. More things than ever are competing for this precious 60-bit bandwidth, so what do we do when we multitask? We take this little bit of conscious attention and try to spread it out over everything so that we don't have to miss anything, but one of the things I'm here to tell you today is that you're a disaster at multitasking and I also welcome you to the club because you're kind of multitask. that I just described, doesn't actually exist, it's a cognitive illusion, kind of like when you go to the movies and you know that what's happening on the screen is just an image, an image, an image, an image, but it feels like movement and you never do it.

Guess similarly when you're multitasking, like I just talked about, what's really happening inside your brain is that your conscious attention is going back and forth from one thing to another over and over and over again. again and all this happens so fast that you can't even notice it, it's as if the greatest trick the mind has ever played was fooling itself. Now one of the things we know is that when we engage in this type of behavior, psychologists call it homework. We change and when we do, we are actually worse at almost everything we do, so we multitask to try to get more things done faster and, in most cases, we tend to take more time and perform worse in the process. , a study that literally followed people throughout the entire process.

His work day found that when we are interrupted on a task we probably don't return to it for an average of 23 minutes, sometimes longer. Now I talk about this all the time and I know there's at least one person in the room right now. who is raising your objection and going, wait, wait, wait, I multitask all the time and I'm super good at it, maybe you all have problems, I already have this written and we have a study just for you because it's not a big deal. surprise for the people who do it. This type of multitasking feels like they are the best at it and we find that they actually tend to perform worse, maybe even more worryingly, we see some really disturbing side effects to this type of behavior.

We multitask to manage the stress of too much activity. our plate, but multitasking behavior actually increases our stress levels, it increases the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in our bloodstream and this type of behavior is also hugely correlated with impulsivity and low self-control, it turns out that what we are What we are doing is not training our minds to expand everywhere we are training ourselves to be distracted now even with all that. I'm not here today to tell you to stop multitasking because you can, you won't, but what you can do and what I expect you to do.

What you need to do is consider how you want to manage and protect the valuable resource of your own

mindfulness

because we know from neuroscience that our mindfulness gives us access to three basic abilities. Attention can help us search for new information. Attention can help us classify between streams. of information competing for our focus and attention can help us stay with the things we now feel are important. All I'm suggesting is that you get a lot of exercise searching and sorting just by being alive in New York City today, but the place where we struggle is the ability to sit still with the things that are important to us. us and if you've ever been in a conversation with someone you really care about, you just reached for your phone for no good reason.

You know what that struggle is like now, the good news is that there are actually tons of ways we can train the mind to sit and stay still, but one of my favorites and perhaps one of the oldest is the practice of mindfulness. . Its pop culture moment right now is on the cover of magazines it's in Super Bowl commercials it's in Fortune 500 boardrooms everywhere but mindfulness is not a mystical way of being you don't have to be a monk or a millionaire very simply Mindfulness is the practice of

paying

attention to the present moment on purpose with a non-judgmental attitude.

We are paying attention to the present moment in mindfulness because we know that is where much of our happiness occurs and when we can pay attention to the present. moment on purpose then we are becoming a little less creatures of circumstance and a little more creatures of choice and when we can do all of that with a non-judgmental attitude, well, I think that's where something really special starts to happen because one of The side effects of having conscious attention that is inherently limited is that our minds become very good at making very quick assessments and then jumping to the next big thing.

I like what follows. I don't like what's next. Oh my god, I'm talking. in a room in front of 200 people oh my god, it's a TED talk what's next what's next what's next in the process the mind becomes a very good storyteller and we tend to get tangled in our own stories, but in a mindfulness practice We are trying to get more interested in what the present moment has to say for itself and a little less caught up in what we have to say about it and we find that when we can do that, when we can make a little space around our own stories, in We are actually making space for the stories of others, which is why we see in research on mindfulness and meditation that people who adopt a practice like this have a greater sense of social connection, greater access to compassion, and a altruistic behavior, some of the most recent research suggests that mindfulness and meditation practices can actually help reduce implicit biases and decrease discriminatory behavior, make us more open and available to the world around us and any vision that we might have about how that world might develop, so I'd like us to do that.

What we do with the time we have left now is try, so sit back in your seat. You may already be, but if you want to adjust in some way, you might want to see if you can find a seat that allows you to do so. Feel relaxed but alert, if you wish, you can close your eyes or simply stare somewhere. Let's start by taking a deep breath and letting it go with a sigh. Okay, let's do it one more time, breathe deeply as if you can get it all together. day and then let it go now as much as you can, let your breath breathe on its own, your body knows how to do this and you don't have to micromanage it so you don't have to make your breath bigger or longer or better just let it breathe and ask your attention to be with your breathing you don't have to describe or analyze you don't have to remember as much as you can just breathe and feel if you do this sooner or later probably sooner your mind will wander when you do it, it's not a problem, this is where All the exercise and all the benefits of this practice are carried out, so when your mind wanders, when can you ask it to return to the sensation of your breath?

It goes in and out, maybe your mind wanders a lot after all, you breathe about 15 breaths a minute and maybe 20,000 breaths in a day, so maybe this particular breath doesn't seem that important, but if you can keep coming back to the sensation of your breathing happening here and now, you may begin to notice things you couldn't see before, sensations beneath other sensations, sensations behind other sensations, if it helps, consider this as you inhale and exhale right now, The air entering your lungs touches a folded surface area inside you and if you spread it out with a flap, the surface area of ​​your lungs would be about half the size of an Olympic tennis court.

It is folded within you right now when you inhale and now every time you breathe. The oxygen you inhale enters a network of blood vessels so intricate and vast that if you tied them together into a single thread, that thread would be 60,000 miles long and would circle the Earth two and a half times as it is wrapped inside. You right now and every time you breathe, 37 trillion cells of yourbody absorb the things they need and every time you exhale they let things go. They don't mean it's impossible to understand, but you know what it feels like. it feels like this inhale and breathe inhale and exhale inhale deeply let it go can you open your eyes thank you for paying attention