Order and Attention

A twenty year-old college student came to see me a couple of weeks ago. She said, “I think I might have Attention Deficit Disorder.”

“Why?” I say.

“I’ll be sitting in class and I keep looking at my cell phone to see the time.  Sometimes it’s three minutes.  Sometimes it’s one minute.”

I asked her to draw a picture of her daily activities, so we could see what priorities emerged. As she was working, she stopped to pull her cell phone out of her bag. “It’s my brother,” she reported, texting intently.

While she drew, I was doing integrative work with my hands in the air around her. The human body generates a biomagnetic field that can be measured by sensitive instruments. Search “SQUID magnetometer” and you will be directed to a variety of medical applications for these measurements.

But you don’t need a SQUID to experience this magnetic field. Simply hold your palms a half inch apart. After awhile, with practice, you will start to feel something. Some people describe it as prickly, or warm – but you will feel your hands relating to one another without actually touching. You’ll be feeling a subtle magnetic charge.

Back to my client. I noticed that every time she picked up her cell phone, the biomagnetic field I was tracking with my hands went completely slack.  It took at least three seconds after she put the phone down for the field to become energized again.
Imagine holding a baby – the warmth, the aliveness in your arms.  Now imagine holding a doll. The difference was that extreme.

Now picture this young woman in a college lecture. Between sixteen and forty-eight times in fifty minutes, she uses her cell phone, either to check the time, or text someone. Each time, her charge is depleted.

This means two things. First, there is a small but significant proportion of the class time when her mind is absent and her biomagnetic field is “down.” Second, sustained focus on the material is impossible - every three minutes, she has checked out.

We now know that multi-tasking is a myth. The human brain actually cannot do more than one thing at a time. What it can do is flip very quickly from thing to thing. How does it develop this ability? By focusing deeply on one thing. It is from a quiet space of attention that the ability to make quick adjustments comes.

Imagine a child absorbed in an activity – making sand castles, climbing a tree, playing house. In imaginative play, the topic and activity can float magically from thing to thing, but there is no energy drop. This is a normal learning state.

I tell my discovery about the cell phone to my teen-aged son as I drive him to school the next morning.  I just think he’ll find it interesting. But a guilty silence emanates from the seat next to me. “OK, I’ll stop doing it,” he says.
Somehow, I manage not to shout, “What?  You’re looking at your cell phone in class?”

 “I don’t do it a lot,” he says.

“That’s good,” I say. “But it’s probably better not to do it at all.”