Attention Therapy

Adrian Wells introduced Attention-Training Therapy (ATT),one of many Attention Therapies, as a part of his Metacognitive Therapy (MCT). MCT proposes that psychological disorder involves a style or pattern of recurrent, recycling ideation, fixing attention narrowly on worry and problems. MCT focuses on these recurrent patterns of thinking, whereas Cognitive Therapy focuses on the thoughts.

ATT involves attending to sounds individually and in combinations. After practicing a few times with an mp3, you practice on your own in natural soundscapes, (such as the classroom if you are teaching as I was), or in the office cubical if that is where you work. You practice shifting from sound to sound, two or more sounds at once, and isolating one sound from others.

Attention Therapy is one of many Attention Therapies in “Total Self-Renewal Through Attention Therapies and Open Focus.” Attention Therapies help us to capture our 45 bits of attention with a healing focus. These self-healing therapies include Open Focus, Ki Meditation, Insight Therapy, Mindful Meditation, and Metacognitive Therapy.

Minuscule Sensory Information Available to Consciousness

Sensory Loss

Information available to our sensory receptors is astronomical. By the time we are conscious though, we are missing virtually all of this sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch sensory information.

Sensory information enters from our eyes, ears, nose, and skin and travels along sensory (afferent) nerves to the brain. The total capacity for our eyes is 10 to 7th power: The eyes send ten million bits/second to the brain versus the 40 bits/second we consciously perceive.

Time Delay

A tremendous compression takes place when 10 million bits per second is reduced to 40 bits per sec. Compression on this massive scale takes time. Research to discover how much time was done by physiologist Benjamin Libbet at University of California, San Francisco. Libbet demonstrated that the brain takes a half second before a person consciously gets this tiny fraction of the total sensory data. The brain discards almost all of the bits of sensory data, offering our conscious mind only a few bits, letting our conscious mind think it is making its own decisions a half second later. But the brain has already decided for us.

We live in a world teaming with sensory information, but the brain discloses to the conscious mind only what is necessary to move about, procreate, get nourishment,  and ruminate. The body gets lots of sensory feedback, but we cannot talk about or share most of what we experience. We are alone in solitude with a conscious internal voice that drones on.

Selective Attention

We do have some say though, as to what data survives the compression. Our focus of attention can be anywhere we like. We can use all our senses at once and combine information from them all. Or, we can shut out all of the other senses and focus on listening. Or we can focus on ruminations.

Because from one instant to the next we can switch from one focus to another, consciousness is not perceived in its limited capacity. One moment we are aware of the lack of space in our shoes, the next moment of the expanding universe. Consciousness possesses peerless agility. But that does not change the fact that at any given moment we are not conscious of much at all.

The flow of what goes through our consciousness is limited only by the scope of our imagination. The limit is the volume–45 bits– at any moment, even though the next moment 45 bits of something quite different may be passing through.

Illusion of Reality

Our brain is pulling the wool over our eyes, creating an illusion that we are seeing all that is out there. In effect, we are looking with restricting blinders through a pinhole. We are seeing one ten-millionth of what is out there. No matter how this truth is presented,  however, it runs counter to our intuitive perception of consciousness as vast. But, forty-five bits of attention is far from vast.

We live in a story concocted by our brain. The brain concocts stories to explain to our consciousness what just happened. The brain lies to make things seem right; even with totally irrational lies. No way to think our way out of stories within stories. We spend our lives trying, getting tangled in paradox upon paradox. An enormous waste of effort. And a complete waste of therapy if the therapist is unaware of this Alice-in-Wonderland, paradoxical illusion of reality.

Breathing Therapy

For Total Self-Renewal, breathing needs to be your basic Attention Therapy. Breathing therapy means breath awareness and breath work. Breath awareness is mindful meditation breathing therapy and breath work is the active use of breathing to alter body and mind.

Breathing therapy is at the root of Total Self-Renewal. Breathing therapy has been the source of awakening for millennia.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body