Peak Mind

Amishi P. Jha

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062992161
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

***NATIONAL BESTSELLER***

STOP FOR A MOMENT.

Are you here right now?

Is your focus on this page? Or is it roaming elsewhere, to the past or future, to a worry, to your to-do list, or to your phone?

Whether you're simply browsing, talking to friends, or trying to stay focused in an important meeting, you can't seem to manage to hang on to your attention. No matter how hard you try, you're somewhere else. The consequence is that you miss out on 50 percent of your life—including the most important moments.

The good news: There's nothing wrong with you—your brain isn't broken. The human brain was built to be distractible.

The even better news: You can train your brain to pay attention more effectively.

Stay with me a little longer and soon you will be able to:

• Focus without all the struggle.
• Take back your attention from the pull of distraction.
• And function at your peak, for all that truly matters in your life.

1

Attention Is Your Superpower

I threw open the bedroom door.

“I can’t feel my teeth,” I said, an edge of panic in my voice. My husband looked up, startled. He was sitting up in bed, tapping away at a homework assignment on his laptop.

“What?” Michael asked.

“I said I can’t feel my teeth!”

It was the strangest feeling, a numbness as if from novocaine. I was struggling to talk, and I felt a little shaky. How would I eat? How would I teach? I was supposed to be giving a major talk later that week on my latest research. What was I going to do—get up on stage in front of hundreds of people and mumble as if I’d just had a cavity filled?

Michael asked me to sit down. He tried to talk me through it. He suggested that perhaps I needed more rest, and the problem would go away. Had I crunched down on something too hard while eating? Did I feel sick in any way?

He picked up my hand and held it. “What’s going on?” he asked gently.

What was going on? Well, a lot. Our son, Leo, was almost three. As it is for many, the first few years of integrating new parenthood into an already busy life had been . . . well, challenging. I’d finished up a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University and then landed my very first faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania. We relocated, purchasing a hundred-year-old fixer-upper in West Philly, which Michael immediately got to work renovating. Now, as an assistant professor, I had set up my own lab and was on the tenure track—an arduous process during which you are constantly asked to prove your worth and defend your work. I was engaged in the constant, all-consuming work of running the lab: writing grants, conducting studies, teaching courses, mentoring students, publishing. And Michael, who was working full-time as a computer programmer, had also started a demanding graduate program in computer science at Penn. I felt extraordinarily scattered, as if I was being pulled in all directions. At the same time, I felt I should be able to just handle it. Our lives were demanding, sure, but these were all things we wanted to be doing.

When I went to the dentist, he said I must be grinding my teeth in my sleep.

“It’s probably just stress,” he said. “Have a glass of wine to take the edge off.”

One night at bedtime, I began reading Leo his favorite book, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. A short section of this classic Dr. Seuss book was about wumps—the wumps went here, the wumps went there, the wumps did this or that. Halfway through the book, my son put his little hand on the page to stop me from turning to the next and asked, “What is a wump?”

I opened my mouth to answer him and then stopped. I had no idea what a wump was. I was in the middle of reading a book—one I’d read aloud probably a hundred times, and I could not answer the simplest question about it. Like one of my undergrad students caught off guard by a pop quiz, I tried to salvage the situation, focusing on the page in front of me—what the heck was a wump? It looked like some kind of fuzzy brown lumpy thing, maybe an oversize guinea pig? Whatever it was, I had somehow completely missed it, even with my little boy nestled in my lap, turning the pages, saying the words.

Oh no, I thought. What else am I missing? Am I missing my whole life?

And if I was this way with my son when he was not even three, when he was safe and small and the parenting challenges were also relatively minor—getting him to take a nap, coaxing him to eat his vegetables, helping him find his favorite toy—then what was going to happen when things got really challenging someday? Was I going to be able to be there for him?

It was ironic. I’d spent years as a devoted student of the human brain’s attention system. And now, the lab I ran at a top-notch university was entirely dedicated to the study of attention. Our mission was to investigate how attention worked, what made it worse, and what made it better. When the university’s media team got requests to interview a subject matter expert on the science of attention, they called me. Yet, now, I had no obvious answers for myself. I was distracted and unable to grab hold of my own attention. Nothing I’d learned in my professional life was helping me with this situation. I was used to being able to “study my way” to success, reading everything I could get my hands on to track down an answer, conducting research studies to glean scientific insights. This approach had gotten me far in life, my education, and my work—but it wasn’t working now.

For the first time, I couldn’t “logic” my way out of a problem. I couldn’t analyze or think my way back from feeling out of step with my life, as hard as I tried. I thought about what I could change to make things easier. I thought about my career—the thrill of being on the frontiers of brain science, collaborating with smart colleagues, using cutting-edge neuroscience tools, and guiding the next generation of scientific minds on their journeys. I thought about my family—the all-encompassing love of being a parent and coparenting with the spouse I adore. When I reviewed this life of mine—which was, in so many ways, exactly what I wanted—I felt uneasy instead of happy, just as I had when reading my son his book. A troubling thought bubbled up: I’m not here for this story, either.

I was perpetually preoccupied by a blaring, unrelenting onslaught of mental chatter, ranging from what I should have done differently on the last experiment we ran in the lab, to the most recent lecture I gave, to chasing the next work, parenting, or home-renovation demand. It felt like a perfect storm of overwhelm. Yet, I wanted this life. None of these very real demands were going to magically vanish anytime soon—nor did I want them to. In that moment, I realized something: if I was unwilling to change my life, I was going to have to change my brain.

Can the Brain Really Change?

I was born in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, a state on the western border of India. It’s notable for being the location of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram—his legacy looms large there. But when I was a baby, my parents moved to the United States so that my dad could complete his graduate work in engineering. We lived in the suburbs of Chicago, where the neat, straight road grids of the city dissolved into curvy, subdivision cul-de-sacs. In many ways my sister and I were like typical American kids growing up in the 1980s—we listened to Wham and Depeche Mode, and did our best to look like characters from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But inside our house, we were on our own little island, surrounded by the ocean of America. Our parents had carried 1970s Indian culture and traditions here with them, and when we were at home, that was the world we lived in. Walking out the door to go to school each morning was a little bit like crossing a bridge to another world, one with rules and rhythms very different from those within the walls of my home.

As Indian kids, the children of hard-working and educated immigrants, my sister and I knew there were but three choices for our eventual professions that would be acceptable to our parents: doctor, engineer, or accountant. This was, of course, an almost comically restrictive stereotype, but I also knew that their expectations for us to pursue and achieve professional success were real. I figured doctor would be the most thrilling, so as a teenager, I declared my intention to get my MD. First step: volunteer in a hospital.

On my first day as a candy striper, I had the realization that I absolutely could not become a doctor. I felt uncomfortable, and thoughts of being surrounded by sickness and death were troubling to me. Unlike my friends who felt purposeful in that environment, I had to accept that it was not for me—all the bad news and uncertainty, the long waits, the fluorescent lights and institutional hallways. But I had signed up, so I stuck to my volunteer hours, disliking nearly every single shift—until they sent me down to the brain injury unit.

My job there was to take people who were recovering from traumatic brain injuries outside for some fresh air. One of the orderlies would get them into a wheelchair (most had varying levels of paralysis), and I would wheel them down the long, windowless hallways with their smells of bleach and cafeteria food and through the double doors into the fresh air. I got to know one of the patients particularly well. His name was Gordon, and he’d been in a motorcycle accident. At first, I thought he was a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down, but as time went on, he started to regain the use of one of his arms. Initially, I had to push his wheelchair when we went outside. Then, gradually, he started to be able to move his hand just enough to press a little lever on the armrest of an electric wheelchair so he could move it forward without my help. I’d walk next to him, in case he had any trouble, but he did better and better. He was getting physical therapy to help with the recovery, but he told me something else—that at night, when he was lying in bed in the dark, trying to fall asleep, he’d vividly imagine the hand motion of pressing that lever in his mind. Even after the hours of physical therapy he was receiving, he’d still spend even more time every night going over the motion in his mind, memorizing that muscle movement, repeating it to himself like the lyrics to a favorite song he never wanted to forget.

“It exercises my brain!” he would say to me as we stuttered along the sidewalk, his hand pressing the lever and then pressing it again and again as he rolled along.

That was it—the moment that it dawned on me. I thought, Wow, he’s training his brain to be different. He’s actually changing his own brain!

Later, in the midst of my undergraduate neuroscience studies, I discovered that professional athletes use this tactic—it’s a known strategy of “mental practice” in sports psychology. Even when athletes aren’t physically training, they’ll go over a move or motion in their minds as a form of practice. Golfers talk about visualizing their swing, while pitchers imagine the pitch, from the first muscle twitch to the last. After the superstar swimmer Michael Phelps won one of his gold medals at the Olympics, he described the way he “lives the strokes” in his head all the time, even when he’s not in the water. And brain imaging research shows that this mental rehearsal activates the motor cortex similar to the way actual physical movement does, exercising and strengthening neural networks that control movement, similar to the way physical exercise does for muscles.

After my stint volunteering in the brain injury unit, my fascination with the brain only grew. I became captivated by its fragility, its resilience, its capacity for change. I wondered: How does the brain work? How can it control all these different functions? How can it adapt and change so radically? How does it manage to be this shifting map that can rewrite itself, altering and updating its roads and boundaries—all those things that seemed so permanent, as if carved in stone?

Eventually, my pursuit of these questions led me to the brain system that has been the passion and focus of my career: attention.

Super-powerful

The attention system performs some of the brain’s most powerful functions. It reconfigures the brain’s information processing in important ways that allow us to survive and thrive in an ever-complicated, information-dense, and rapidly changing world. Like X-ray vision, your attention zooms through a crowded sea of thousands of people, a cacophony of sounds and flashing lights, to find your friends and your seat at a concert. Attention gives you the ability to slow down time: you can do everything from watching the sun slowly sink over the horizon to meticulously checking your gear before a rock-climbing trip or following a checklist or instruction sheet for an intricate job you’re about to perform—as medical teams do before surgery—and not miss a thing. (As my military friends put it: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”)

Attention allows you to time travel—you can browse through your happy memories and select one to unpack, relive, and savor. You can use it to peer into the future as if clairvoyant, planning and dreaming and imagining wha...