To understand free attention, it helps to understand saturated attention.
Another name for saturated attention is, overwhelm.
It's like a full stomach -- nothing more can come in.
Saturated attention -- or overwhelm -- is a memory problem. It's what happens when we take in too much, too fast. Memory is what's saturated; attention is being dragged along, for the ride.
It's also what happens when we're conditioned into a short attention span, as we may be by video games, advertising techniques and "clever" editing of entertainment media.
It takes time for a memory to form. First, it has to go into short-term memory and held, there, long enough (staying with one thing until it's done, before moving on), and with enough intensity or repetition that it goes into long-term memory.
Short-term memory is like the mouth and long-term memory is like the stomach. Food stays in the mouth for enough time for us to chew and swallow -- a relatively brief period compared to the amount of time food stays in the stomach, for digestion.
When we attempt to take in too much, too fast, no swallowing is possible. Overflow.
When we're conditioned into a short attention span, we feel the need to swallow before chewing is complete. Overwhelm.
Since digestion occurs mostly in the stomach, overflow prevents digestion; since comprehension occurs mostly in long-term memory, overflow prevents comprehension.
Haste, overflow, and overwhelm prevent digestion.
When we're full, that's the time to stop. Some of us don't know when to stop. We override knowing when to stop with notions of necessity or limited opportunity. Result: gluttony. Gluttony follows from urgency and leads to poor assimilation and poor elimination. Likewise, with information.
The term for someone who takes in large amounts of information but digests it poorly is, a fathead. If you've studied at university, you know about "cramming" -- "11th hour" studying before an exam -- fueled by caffeine and maybe other substances. How much do you retain what you've crammed and for how long? Trained by our university experience, we bring the strategy of cramming to our life, thereafter. So, there's an intention problem, also, when we have memory problems.
Finally, saturated memory prevents imagination from working. "Loud" memory drowns out "quiet" imagining. "The old" drowns out "the new".
So, it's a four-part problem, as usual, a problem of attention, intention, memory, and imagination.
That's attention saturation, in a nutshell.
Free attention? That's known as "quiet mind", lucidity, clarity and other such terms. Insight, imaginativeness, and ingenuity follow. We seem more intelligent.
Self-regulation of attention allows us to take things in at a speed at which we can absorb it. When we take things in more slowly and in control how much we take in (bite-size), we absorb better.
In this age of haste, many people find that a challenge, both in terms of food ("fast") and in terms of information (too much). We miss details and nuances. We act without comprehension, automatically, and hope we get by. We don't see to it that we're being understood; we don't check by asking, not just whether the other person understands, but what they understood. We're not playing with a full deck.
Trying harder works no better for absorbing too much information than for absorbing too much food.
No amount of reasoning to justify overconsumption results in escape from the consequences -- overwhelm and distress.
When we've saturated our attention, self-discipline is called for -- the
discipline of noticing when we're approaching saturation, fullness --
and stopping, until later, when we have space (interest)
for more. With the right 'tool', the right kind of self-training, that
kind of discipline is relatively easy -- but, of course, we've got to
want to.
- To get things done faster, slow down. It works far better to do many short learning sessions than to do one or a few long ones. We wean ourselves of influences that cultivate short attention span. If you can't tell what those are, you need more free attention.
- Clean up questions and points of uncertainty that trap some of your attention before taking in more information.
- Speak more slowly and clearly (meaning, use language well). Give yourself time to find the right word. Blurting out everything that's in our mind is not just rude; it's ineffective communication.
- Give people time to absorb what we've just said, idea by idea. Stop saying, "um" and "you know" and other time-fillers; allow silence to punctuate ideas.
- If you tend to forget what you're saying, mid-sentence, stop and wait for the thought to resurface -- rather than talking faster to get all of the thoughts out.
Clean up performance anxiety, which makes us speed up. Cultivate listening capacity. The Gold Key Release is a good way to do that.
Result: free attention, better absorption of information, less overwhelm.
Overwhelm is a problem of oversaturated memory triggered by counter-productive intentions and abuse of attention. Imagination fails. Distraction and urgency increase -- and the cycle of saturated attention and overwhelm goes on, unless we change our ways.
Free attention stays put, where we place it, until we're done. It can be selective or completely open. When we're done, it moves easily and stays put on the next thing. We're receptive. We focus and catch the details of things. It's based on feeling, sensing, and intuition -- not word-and-mind based.
Free attention is coherent -- the opposite of which is, "noisy", prone to distraction.
Focussed and coherent.
There's a Tibetan saying: "When things are urgent, move more slowly."
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