Optimal balance of attention and awareness

According to “The Mind Illuminated” (which I wrote about here we have two ways of consciously knowing the world: attention and peripheral awareness.

Metaphorically: consciousness is everything in our field of vision; attention is the thing we are focused on; peripheral awareness is like peripheral vision: it’s everything else that we are aware of, except for what we are focused on.

More precisely, quoting from TMI:

Attention: The cognitive ability to select and analyze specific information and ignore other information arising from a vast field of internal and external stimuli…Attention isolates some small part of the field of conscious awareness from the rest so that it can be identified, interpreted, labeled, categorized, and its significance evaluated. The function of attention is discernment, analysis, and discrimination.

Peripheral awareness: A general cognizance of sensory information; mental objects like thoughts, memories, and feelings; and the overall state and activity of the mind. Any or all of these may be present in peripheral awareness simultaneously. Unlike attention, which isolates and analyzes specific objects within the field of conscious awareness, peripheral awareness is inclusive, holistic, and only minimally conceptual. It has more to do with the relationships of objects to each other, and to the whole, and provides the background and overall context for conscious experience—where you are, what’s happening around you, what you’re doing, and why. Peripheral awareness is the product of very large numbers of serial processes occurring simultaneously in multiple sensory streams—what is called massively parallel processing.

TMI meditation.

In TMI-style meditation, you start by learning to control and stabilize attention while expanding awareness. This increases the strength of consciousness.

Stable attention works like this: you move your attention to an object of consciousness, and it stays there. Your attention doesn’t wander. It doesn’t get pulled away by things that are merely novel.

While you try to stabilize your attention, you also try to expand peripheral awareness.

Later you work on other practices that lead to greater mindfulness.

Mindfulness (sati): An optimal interaction between attention and peripheral awareness. This type of optimization requires increasing the overall conscious power of the mind. Fully developed mindfulness is a major objective of meditation practice.

I’m still working on stabilizing attention and expanding attention. But yesterday I saw the road to mindfulness.

Toward mindfulness

I was driving Daniel and Dana’s car to pick up Bobbi up after her weekend with friends. Because I was unfamiliar with the car and the route, I was being extra-vigilant, checking both side mirrors, the rearview mirror, being aware of the cars around me, ahead of me, and behind me.

Max aware.

The car’s side-view mirrors have warning lights on them: if a vehicle is moving into your blind spot, the warning light goes on. I was trying to stay aware of the lights went on as well.

Supermax aware.

The car has a USB connector for Android phones and a big display on the front dash. I had my Pixel plugged in, and I was using Google Maps to navigate. Maps on the display was one more thing I was aware of.

Everything was fine until the screen suddenly went dark.

Suddenly my awareness collapsed, and my attention focused on the problem.

I glanced down, and my phone was rebooting.

It came back up quickly. I poked a button for Google Assistant and told it to navigate to my destination. Then I twiddled a knob and pressed something to confirm my destination.

Things went back to normal, and I expanded my awareness to include the cars around me.

Optimal attention and awareness

What was optimal before the crash was not optimal afterward. In an instant consciousness had changed.

But had I chosen optimally—either before or after?

Well, first of all, I had not chosen.

There had been a quick change in balance: more attention here, less awareness everywhere else. The change was automatic. The AutoMike-attention-awareness-balancer(TM) had chosen.

Nothing conscious was aware of the choosing.

Nothing was aware that choice had been made until after the fact.

Nothing was aware that there were optimal choices until long after the fact.

Nothing was aware that the goal was not “optimal balance” but “optimal interaction”—until the greater part of this essay had—what? Risen to consciousness? Appeared on the computer screen?

How to choose optimally

How could I have chosen optimally?

I would have had to be aware of the then-current state of my mind and interaction between attention and awareness.

Never crossed my mind.

I would have had to have been aware of the attention and awareness and interaction requirements of the priority activity; I would have diverted as much attention to that task as necessary, and no more; I would have reserved the rest to peripheral awareness.

I don’t even know how I would have wanted the interaction to change. I don’t have enough experience with modes of interaction other than tradeoffs.

I would have to have been aware of my awareness and attentional reserves. I would have needed to have assessed what if any reserves were required, and mustered what was needful.

I did none of that.

I would have needed to assess, moment to moment, my state of mind and the needs of the environment and the fitness of my state of mind to the requirements.

I didn’t do that, either.

And I would have to be aware of the interaction between attention and awareness. There’s an interaction? Well, I guess, but I never thought about that.

Metacognitive introspective awareness

Meditators can develop a skill that TMI calls “metacognitive introspective awareness,” and this is what I lacked. (Among other things.)

But now I see its utility and its need. I understand that at every moment (like now) I can be metacognitively introspectively aware.

Right now, I’m writing. Until a moment ago I was typing mindlessly, peripherally aware of the words as they appeared. AutoMike-blogwriter (TM) does a good job.

Attention? Who knows where it was.

Now I am paying a little more attention, more aware of the words appearing on the screen and the fingers typing. And extending awareness to the room around me and—what else can I be aware of?

What would be the optimal interaction between awareness and attention when writing this post?

What’s the interaction right now?

“That’s enough for this post,” arises in consciousness.

I think I’ll pay attention to that.

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