It's Personal

VII: It’s Personal
I think about the article I need to edit for a freelance client and how I’ve been having a terribly difficult time focusing on it. I sit down in my bedroom and can’t deal. My eyes flit across the corners of the room, itching to focus on something else. I go to a coffee shop and get up to leave after only 45 minutes. What is all this about? It looks like I get bored easily, and when I’m bored I can’t concentrate. Does that make any sense at all? Boyfriend pointed out the other day, actually, that when he interrupts me while I’m telling him something, even if it’s only for a moment, it’s often hard for me to pick up the thread of my thought again. Having my stream of thought intruded on, in other words, is more disruptive for me than for most people. I wonder if it’s not boredom but the constant interruptions I allow to occur, both at home and at coffee shops, that are the real culprits.

“Hey, wanna come get a slice of pizza?” Sean and Dave are standing by the door, giving me that ‘Doesn’t this sound like a great idea?’ look. I shake my head. Boy, I’d like to go get a slice of pizza. But it’s easy to say no. I have rules that I’m following. It’s amazing how easy it is to follow your own rules to minimize distractions when you know you’ll only have to follow them for one week. Weirdly, however, I’m having a serious urge to clear this empty food trash off my desk. Just to have things tidy. In fact, after three days in this place, I’m pretty sick of all this junk lying around everywhere. It’s an absolute mess. I put my foam critters back in their basket when I first got here, because the whole place was so visually overwhelming that I simply didn’t want anything more on my desk than had to be there. Am I getting more sensitive to visual distractions here? It’s definitely distracting that the whole place looks different every day. It’s not predictable like the tree outside, and that’s noticeably harder on my concentration.

This might have something to do with the fact that I’m particularly sensitive to unpredictability in my living and working spaces. It goes back to my childhood. My mother was the sort of person who would sell all the furniture while you were at school one day, without telling you she was going to. Actually, she was the sort of person who would sell the house while you were at school one day. And she did so, more than once. Such minor deeds as simply rearranging the furniture were so run-of-the-mill that I didn’t even register them half the time. But I have to admit that the bigger changes were tough. Especially the time she gave away the cat.

So things moving around where I’m trying to get things done—in a place I’m dependent on—is kind of a sore spot for me, an emotional trigger that has a much bigger impact on me than it probably has for most people. It is what brain scientists Florin Dolcos and Gregory McCarthy call an “emotional distracter,” and their f-MRI research shows that when one hits you, it not only grabs your attention away from your “working memory”—your mental notepad that holds relevant information nearby for easy access—it directly impairs its functioning.

I have a feeling the following, pulled from a 2006 article in the Journal of Neuroscience, applies to me perhaps more than anything has ever applied to me before: “Goal-directed behavior depends on executive processes, such as working memory… Distraction challenges our ability to maintain focus on goal-relevant information, and emotional stimuli are particularly potent distracters that can capture attention and reallocate processing resources (Ellis and Ashbrook, 1988) and thus impair cognitive performance.”

It’s a question of what Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt (a book about attention; and here I’ll add that I’m thoroughly distracted by her name) calls “bottom-up” versus “top-down” attention. Basically, the former is emotional in nature and is meant to save you from predators or natural disasters, while the latter is rational and enables you to complete complex cognitive tasks. When the bottom-up system sounds its alarm, it not only activates the emotional centers of your brain, it dampens the activity of the areas involved with thought and reasoning. Dolcos and McCarthy also found that the more emotional the distracter, the more thorough the interruption. Success or failure at concentrating, then, depends on two things: the sensitivity of your bottom-up apparatus, and the discipline of your top-down system.

What’s really damning, for me anyway, is that I fall into the category of people with “affective disorders, such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, which are characterized by increased susceptibility to emotional distraction.” I actually have both of their listed examples, meaning I have one of the more sensitive bottom-up systems around. And I can say from experience that taking medication for both has done wonders for my productivity, largely because it makes it possible for me to sit down and actually, truly think. I can also say from experience, however (as anyone who takes medication knows), that no meds make your mind run perfectly and really all you’re going for is the ability to function as well as the next guy. In other words, the chances of me ever getting really good at concentrating in difficult circumstances are pretty much zero.

And there’s more. There’s the fact that I have a “highly creative mind,” which is not unrelated to the fact that schizophrenia runs in my family. According to f-MRI studies cited by BBC reporter Michelle Roberts, this means I, like people with schizophrenia, “lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.” I question how important those receptors are—ahem, I seem to do just fine without them—but I do relate to this statement. I have figured out over the years that my brain really does not filter and direct thought particularly well. I think of it as a strength as much as it’s a drawback, since it’s the force behind my creativity, but it makes transforming the mess of ideas in my head into coherent language a sometimes formidable challenge. Even if you took away all these external distractions—the noise, the activity, the smells, the bad light—writing would be struggle for me. A struggle against the distraction of all those other ideas bouncing around inside my head.

I think this means I need to do some serious, serious thinking about how to minimize the distractions I do have control over.

Here’s something else: Now that it’s so quiet in here, with only a couple people working in the other corner of the room and night falling outside, I’m having trouble sticking to my work. Why? Because I feel lonely. That’s another emotional trigger for me. I absolutely hate to feel lonely, and it creeps up on me all the time when I’m at work. Because writing is of course a solitary pursuit. And often, when I find myself not only engaged in my solitary pursuit but also engaged in it in a solitary manner, I really feel that solitude and it really gets me down.

Somebody turns the music on and after a few minutes I realize I’m not lonely anymore. The sounds have made me feel comforted and content, although they are inherently distracting. Apparently they’re not as distracting to me as loneliness is. This is, I think, an extremely useful discovery.

Directly over me, a guy is literally walking on a steel beam ten feet above my head, adjusting a parachute that’s been put up there as a visual element. I have a moment of wondering if I’m distracted by this—the possibility that he’ll fall, on me or otherwise. But this triggers no deep-seated fears. I decide that I’m not particularly concerned about it.