Meet Amishi Jha, Author of Peak Mind
Interviewed by Diane Cyr
For a calmer, healthier, better-focused brain, neuroscientist Amishi Jha offers this succinct advice: “Pay attention to your attention.” As one of the first scientists to research the links between mindfulness and attention, Jha, a neuroscientist and psychology professor at the University of Miami, is known for her pioneering mindfulness work with soldiers, firefighters, medical trainees, and others for whom attention is a matter of life and death. Now, with her new book, Peak Mind, she’s bringing her healthy-attention message to parents, CEOs, accountants, teachers, managers—essentially anyone whose work and decision-making feels like life and death. In this interview, Amishi talks about the challenge of creating focus in a world of constant distraction—and why breaking up with your cell phone won’t work!
Had you been aware of mindfulness before you began your research on attention?
I was aware of meditation in the broadest sense, but had an antipathy for it. I’m Indian, and I’d see my father doing his morning meditation using mala--prayer beads--before work, and I’d think, that’s great for him, not for me. I considered myself a serious student of science, so whatever I did would have to have an evidence base, and there was nothing I knew of that was evidence-based about mindfulness or meditation.
So how did you come to practice?
I needed it! It was at a period in my life where I had started a new professional position, I had a small child and a husband in graduate school--and I had a lot of pain in my jaw and teeth, which I discovered was from stress-related grinding! I was in a constant mental fog, and here I was studying attention in my research lab, and wondering why there was nothing out there in the literature telling me how to get out of this. One of the first books I picked up was Jack Kornfield’s Meditation for Beginners. As I started reading it, I thought, wow, this whole thing is about attention! You focus on your breath, and when you notice your attention has wandered away, you guide it back—that’s like a mental ‘push-up’, right there. And all of sudden, it became extremely interesting from a personal and professional point of view.
I went to look at the scientific attention literature and found almost nothing. So I wanted to see if we could put mindfulness meditation to the test and research it rigorously in the lab. This was all in 2004, before mindfulness was even a thing in our popular culture, and people in my department warned that I’d be committing career suicide by researching this topic. Fast forward to today, and that same department is inviting me to speak about it.
Much of your work has focused on first responders and the military. Why?
Even though attention is powerful, it’s also fragile and vulnerable, and things like stress can diminish its power. If you’re a soldier or a firefighter you get your training in simulated scenarios and other stressful situations to be prepared for combat or the fire season, and after all that training, your attention is exhausted and your mood begins to tank. We find that when we offer mindfulness training to such groups, individuals who practice mindfulness exercises regularly are able to keep their attention and mood stable, making them better prepared for the challenges ahead. But mindfulness is not a quick fix; it takes training to change our orientation to our moment-to-moment experiences, and this shift in orientation may be key to protecting and boosting our mood and attention.
Clearly, this also applies to other populations, as you acknowledge in your book.
There are many people whose personal and professional contexts degrade attention: athletes, undergraduates, accountants, professors, parents. So many professions are high-stress, high-demand, where things can feel like life or death, even if they literally aren’t. This book is designed for all of them, meaning all of us.
You tell your TED talk audience, right off the bat, that they will be unaware of what you’re saying during half your talk. Why do our minds insist on wandering?
In some sense, it can’t be a design flaw because we are the success story of many thousands of years of evolution. If our ancestors had become hyper-fixated while visiting some watering hole, they would have been eaten, so having this shifting attention became a survival benefit. It also has the benefit of allowing us to simulate realities that don’t exist--to predict, plan and deliberate. But unfortunately shifting attention also makes us prone to worrying--to visioning doomsday scenarios or deliberating things that may never come to pass. In that sense, we could be in the Garden of Eden but in our minds we’re in hell. The evolutionary advantages of mind-wandering are outstanding, but when we are unaware that it’s happening, and it’s in overdrive, it can cause a lot of problems. And stressful circumstances ramp up mind-wandering.
We also have the further challenge of social media. How do we resist that which is attention-grabbing by design?
In the book, I really want to make clear how your attention works, because knowing how it works helps us understand when, how, and why we’re being captured by social media or technology. It helps us understand why breaking up with our phones won’t work. Improving your attention is not about simple behavior modification: It begins by learning to pay attention to your attention.
When I see people on their phones, I see how not there they are. But our own mind wandering can hijack us, too. I was that person. My journey to mindfulness as a parent began when I was reading a book to my child, and when he asked me a question about it, I had no idea what he was talking about. I wasn’t there! I was still at work in my mind when I was sitting there with him. That felt really bad to me. He was only a toddler, and I knew this time was precious and I was missing it.
The exciting new science of attention suggests that we can train our brain to pay better attention to the here and now. The first step to doing so requires paying attention to our attention. We need to first find our focus to be able to use our attention when it matters most, for the moments of crisis as well as the moments of joy.