May I Have Your Attention, Please!
When I was preparing for my eldest daughter to be born I imagined what her environment would be like at home. Along with plush toys and enriching activities, I imagined myself playing the guitar while she toddled around the living room. What a great way to share something I love and contribute to her development! Or so I thought. It didn’t take long to realize my fantasy didn’t line up with reality. Nearly every time I picked up the guitar she cried. Luckily, it wasn’t my playing, it was that I wasn’t paying attention to her. There was a competition taking place. Neurons in my brain associated with my parenting fantasy were chirping for a serenade and others signaled me to respond to my daughter’s very innate sense of boundaries. Put the guitar down and pick her up! I had read all of Daniel Siegel’s books on attachment and mindfulness, I knew this was important. I would later discover through my own EMDR practice that much of what is important as a psychotherapist was playing out right before me in this everyday predicament.
In this installment #2 of The Science of Connection in a Disconnected World, I’ll be exploring the central role that attention plays in the Biopsychosocial-AIP Model of EMDR. We will focus on the theory I introduced in my 2012 paper that states that adaptive information processing is the apex of the attachment system. The best model for psychotherapy is the securely attached child and caregiver. After a decade of being inspired by the application of these ideas, I proposed in 2022 that trauma is best defined as an absence of attentional agency. I believe we innately fear not being attended to and that much of the work of psychotherapy can be organized best by taking this into account. We will look into why attention may be the most important resource involved in human information processing and why being able to process information of all sorts is a life or death matter.
An important resource can only be identified and understood in the context of the particular organism we are considering in its environment. If connecting with each other is life sustaining (see Introduction and Installment #1) and information processing is central to connection, then what is at the hub of information processing is likely worth paying attention to. Attention has not always been around despite having a long evolutionary history. It didn’t proceed information processing but it did take it to levels never before seen in living creatures. Before we look at its origins, let’s consider a definition. William James, one of the first psychologists to study attention, defined it like this:
“It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”
No wonder my guitar was such a perceived threat to my daughter! Of all the possible things I might need to “deal with effectively” it makes sense she’d innately sense she was one of them.
By definition, we use attention to highlight some things and therefore, “withdraw” from others. This selective aspect of attention is inherently competitive and prone to manipulation. In information processing terms we would say it like this, “Attention allows us to process some things more deeply while simultaneously degrade the information processing of others.” Like all technology, this biological tool was an advancement that brought with it a dark side, literally. It had the power to both illuminate and extinguish.
I believe trauma results from the absence of the flexible control of attention, in addition to the presence of a life threatening object or event. Understanding the role of attention in helping us process our experience is crucial to navigating everyday life and engaging effectively in psychotherapy. Organisms haven’t always had an onboard resource to highlight what is important to them. That’s what attention helps with. Not only are life-threatening things important, but so are life-giving things. To deal thoroughly with trauma we often need to attend to both. Attention rose up as a vital information processing tool both because it allowed some information to be highlighted and because it allowed other information to be ignored. What is important to process will always depend on timing and context, so having flexible control of it is what matters most.
No organism has access to absolute reality. We don’t live well because we have all the information. We are always living in a world we will never fully comprehend, yet with which we need to connect everyday. Our brain gives us a more or less complete picture of what’s going on. Despite being fundamentally disconnected from the entirety of the world around us, every organism is bombarded with information from within and without all day long. Attention is the tool that helps organisms shift their focus among all the possibilities to stay on track with what is important to them given the umwelt they live in. Since we live with some control over our attention it may be hard to imagine not having had control or even still not having attention! To appreciate just how important attention is to information processing, let’s go back to a time when organisms acquired it.
You may have seen the YouTube video of the selective attention study by Dan Simon & Chris Chabris. It’s an entertaining example of how attention works (I won’t spoil it here, so check it out). It is always selective. Whenever our attention is directed here, it can’t be there! This is called selective signal enhancement and it emerged about 550 million years ago (Graziano, 2014). As stimuli within and without competed for attention it could be grabbed (bottom-up) by the more provocative signals. Attention emerged as a comparatively more random filter than what we have today. It helped organisms prime their senses to orient toward what was most important in any given moment. Just like a modern day filter on a search engine helps us process items based on a criteria, like which is least expensive, the color red, or our size. Organisms succeeded in their umwelt with a limited number of senses and a narrow range of sensory modulation among them. Attention changed all of that.
Our modern day attention is so integrated with our awareness and self, that in order to have any idea of what it was like for organisms to live without one, we have to shed all of them. Once we get the hang of it, we begin to see why the function of consciousness itself may be to control attention (see Moth to the Flame). Think of how information is processed in our body proper for example, we are not involved with making the decision to breath, feel full, or begin to sweat. Furthermore, imagine there is no I to filter out signals coming in from the outside world that are stimulating our senses. That is the role the conscious self plays in information processing. The simpler the range of behaviors, the less of an issue this is. If I’m an organism geared for eating and not really for defense, I don’t need to filter out information about danger so much. For me it’s an “eat or be eaten” kind of existence. As behavioral options expanded with more integrated sensorimotor systems, it became helpful to have multiple filters to assist decision making. With the integration of memory and attention, organisms could learn how to exploit their sensory experience and adapt to life in a wider range of settings.
Over an unfathomable span of time, attention became so important that monitoring attention itself emerged. Somewhere between 550 and 300 million years ago organisms with more complex bodies and nervous systems developed models of attention (Graziano, 2014). Not only could these brains devote more processing resources to what caught their attention, but they began to process information about their attention. Why? An internal model allows the organism to monitor, control, and predict the thing it models. So, keeping track of what is paid attention to can help shift attention as the need arises based on new demands in the environment or internal state of the organism. Over a painstaking process of natural selection, some organisms were given room in their minds to process what was going with them including what they were paying attention to. If we think about it in reverse, we see something just as fascinating and important, which is there was a time life went on without anybody paying attention! Much of the information processing involved in EMDR takes place sub-personally, where memory networks link together. To keep it on track, requires a personal and interpersonal level of information processing (Cotraccia, 2012), which is where attention takes center stage.
It’s not surprising that awareness seems to have evolved between 350 and 65 million years ago (Graziano, 2014) on the heels of mental models. Early in that range of time, was the development of top-down attention. That is, in addition to having attention which relies on being grabbed by provocative stimuli, it could also pre-emptively scan the environment to locate things to process more deeply. Advanced filtering systems (attention) involving both spontaneous and more intentional prioritizing of information processing emerged. It makes sense that as multicellular bodies became more complex there was a need for more reliable communication about the life experience within the body and between the body and the environment. An organism that could monitor and predict what it was going on inside and outside of its boundaries would be able to stay focused on the ever growing complexity of life. For us humans, that environment often means other people. Biopsychosocial connectivity (Cotraccia, 2022) is a term I used to describe the ongoing multilevel process of information processing within and between the sub-personal, personal, and interpersonal domains of our experience.
According to attention schema theory awareness is our brain processing information of it paying attention to things. Not only did awareness take center stage, but somewhere between 65 million years ago and 6 million years ago, Mother Nature was perfecting the social attribution of awareness (Graziano, 2014) in us. That is, homo sapiens began acquiring the capacity to process information about what they thought others were paying attention to. Our brains were now creating mental models of ourselves paying attention and others paying attention. In modern times the study of theory of mind (Premack & Woodruff, 1978) is an example of the mind reading skills we’ve acquired. With the social attribution of awareness, we can see how attention is at the core of both information processing and relationships. This is why my daughter cried when I picked up the guitar. I couldn’t passively be in her umwelt. Her brain was counting on me to actively pay attention to myself and her.
Imagine what the pros and cons of such an advanced filtering system are. Imagine four people going online to buy a pair of shoes. The first buys the first pair they come across when the website loads. The second scans the website and buys the pair that grabs their visual attention the most. The third scans for audio samples of what the shoes sounds like on different surfaces. A fourth enters a brand into a filter on the website’s search engine. Who will make the quickest decision? Who will make the best decision? Adding more criteria to the search loses valuable time. Now imagine a fifth person searches with a filter for the top items others are buying! Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Each time we pay attention, we are always leaving something out. Is it possible that something important is filtered out? Of course. I like to tell my clients, “It’s not the amassing of content that makes us smarter, it’s the ability to shift our attention to discover what we are missing to help us get unstuck.” Information processing is context dependent and subjective. What’s important will always depend on what’s going on and who is involved.
I like to express this situation with the term, intersubjective collaboration. People connect and communicate both to find out what’s going on and to sort out what’s important to help us stay focused on goals for living. We do this in a world where we will never know for sure what’s happening. By its very nature, attention hides just as much as it illuminates. So, it’s most helpful to compare notes. A robust human umwelt is rich with opportunities to combine ideas and try on new perspectives. This holds true for what makes EMDR a robust psychotherapy. In an information rich therapeutic relationship (Cotraccia, 2022) the value is on attentional flexibility, not specific content. This comes into play most importantly when it comes to memory consolidation, the chief goal of EMDR. There is a distinct type of mind wandering that is a prerequisite skill necessary for EMDR to work (Shapiro, 2018). My interpretation of it is through the lens of the science of attention. When we let go of our top-down attention and notice where our bottom-up attention goes, we are letting our mind wander in a way that facilitates adaptive information processing.
Memory consolidation involves the whole person in a connected relationship who has the intent to engage in mental time travel with the other person. Therapeutic mind wandering is an intentional way to allow our brain to reveal what’s characteristically been ignored. “Where does your attention go and why?” is my favorite question. Imagine your therapist recognizes how attention is both an illuminator and a cloak that covers up information at the same time. They would realize that both of you may inhibit information processing by what you do or do not pay attention to. Trauma is hard to identify by definition for most trauma therapists. However, we are still taught that experts can know what is a trauma or not ahead of time because of “objective” measurements and categorizations of trauma. When us and our therapist can see trauma more like a verb and less like a noun, we provide the psychosocial boundaries necessary for our brain to make the adaptive linkages it needs to and then embody outside of therapy and new way of engaging with the world. It’s easy to make trauma a noun and simplify things to fit more forceful interventions that rely less on a relationship. We do need to nudge the brain along when complications emerge, but force is not the primary causal quality that makes EMDR work. A therapeutic relationship with appropriate goals and boundaries is.
Imagine a therapist asking us at the beginning of therapy to make a list of all the traumas we have experienced so that we can begin processing them one at a time over the course of therapy. If trauma was a noun, meaning a thing in our brain (a trauma memory) that we could scientifically prove all humans would have if they go through certain life threatening events, this approach would work well. In fact, this is usually how trauma-informed psychotherapy is taught. Even in EMDR trainings, we are taught that the source of the problem is “an isolated memory network, stored in an excitatory state” (Shapiro, 2018). It is an unprocessed something. It can be activated when we are reminded of it by present day stimuli that are thematically similar and influence our behavior unconsciously, out of our awareness. This is the standard story. It is also based on a philosophy of force, and linear cause and effect, that does not adequately account for the therapeutic relationship. The standard story seems sufficient when robust information rich relationships are at play, because the relationship’s importance fades into the background.
If we fail to think in nonlinear terms and see ourselves as a hypercomplex dynamic system (Cotraccia, 2012), then we make the error of assuming the last thing that happened was most causally responsible for the change in therapy. Our self-system itself is information that requires processing to maintain and be available to engage in a relationship. All of our EMDR tools help with sustaining the therapeutic relationship in a very physical and causally relevant way. We will dive into how mental models defined in AIP terms (Cotraccia, 2022) can help an EMDR therapist stay focused on EMDR while accounting for the relational aspect of therapy, in the next installment.
EMDR therapists are no strangers to this predicament. It leads clients to ask, “When are we going to do EMDR?”, if they aren’t using a forceful intervention like formal trauma processing techniques. Force is not the only way to cause change! Some clients become more confused at times when they are working on a memory but it’s not from their original list and it doesn’t fit the criteria in classification manual for a trauma memory. It’s the maintenance of attention on the goal to go where our client’s brain leads us Maintaining attention on the goal of processing the memory is what keeps the processing going, not a fixation on a pre-ordained definition of a trauma memory. When therapist and client become distracted by what they think they know and succumb to intellectualizing about what trauma is or isn’t, they stop connecting in an informationally engaged, whole body, person to person way.
When the relationship factors need more attention rather than less, many newly trained EMDR therapist abandon their EMDR training for another therapy approach. As an EMDR trainer I observe this all the time. I liken it to a music student who gives up before the knowledge they have acquired has been embodied through painstaking practice. So much of what is needed is to pay attention to where your attention goes when things are more complicated than you thought they were supposed to be. No matter how fast the desensitization phase of EMDR may be at times, it does not represent the whole of AIP. The uncertainty built into the nature of trauma requires a relational model to avoid the predicament that is set up by a belief in objective science and forceful causality. In my experience, students of EMDR are prone to abandon its fundamental principles if they and their clients become too desperate for a quicker and easier (more forceful) solution.
I believe that with the advances in the scientific study of consciousness we are collectively experiencing the growing pains of letting go of a philosophy of science steeped in the myth of objectivity and accepting that subjectivity and science can co-exist. We do a disservice to the public when we over simplify things and avoid grappling with the challenges of a subjective science of connection. I wonder how much this contributes to cultural artifacts I see more often lately like the bumper stickers that say, “Everything isn’t a Trauma!” and “F#@k Your Feelings!”. They belie the frustration of relying on force to fix things that are often too complicated to understand so easily. Good trauma therapy is always full of uncertainty, mystery, and a lack of control, as is to be expected with any natural system. We provide the information rich environment within which processing can happen. We can predict it will be different each time, but there is order to the chaos. We will get to the other side by maintaining boundaries the help us stay focused.
Does trauma exist or are people just complaining about nothing? This reminds me of the riddle, “If a rooster lays an egg on the peak of a roof which way will it roll off?” Neither, roosters don’t lay eggs! Maybe trauma isn’t a noun, a thing we can isolate in a lab and forcefully desensitize, neutralize, or eradicate.
A biopsychosocial-AIP approach to EMDR considers trauma more like a verb. The overarching goal is to promote biopsychosocial connectivity not trauma processing per se, as traditionally understood. Formal trauma processing in only one type of information processing considered as causally responsible for trauma resolution. The restoration and maintenance of attentional agency is a process that takes place between two people. We can’t be aware of things that are not available to be attended to (Graziano, 2014). Information in our brains must be processed and amplified to rise to a level that we can be conscious of it (Baars, 1982). Attention determines what will receive further sensory processing (Posner, 1980 in Proctor & Vu 2023) and what will enter working memory for ongoing processing of goal oriented tasks (Hasher et al. 2007 in Proctor & Vu, 2023). If we don’t take it for granted or reify it, the question becomes, “How do I facilitate adaptive information processing while my client engages in mental time travel?”. My clients and I practice therapeutic mind wandering and we follow where their bottom-up attention redirects things. We slow down to notice how the ordinary patterns of top-down attention keep leading them astray from sorting out what happened in the past. We apply force (formal trauma processing) when it makes sense to both of us. All the while, leaving room for taking what we learn into the future to change things for the better.
Like the featured image of the Philadelphia Phillies noise meter shows us, attention and goals go together. The subtext of the sign is, “Look here! If you want the Phillies to win, start making some noise!”. Whatever trauma is, I do know that it’s disruption of our ability to flexibly pay attention and to align our attention with what is life giving is what’s at stake. The Phillies won that night I took the picture. I’m sure the home team advantage helped. I also noticed the businesses outlining the noise meter were vying for our attention and patronage just on the edge but strategically placed. Our culture is full of abundant examples of how the self and other models our brain relies on to process experience can be exploited vis-a-vis attention. Advertisers have known how to manipulate cultural norms to increase the odds that we buy their products by shaping mental models in us that monitor, predict, and control what we do. They do this by directing our attention and thereby determining what information gets illuminated or extinguished. We will explore mental models in the next installment.
There are many stakeholders in the game of attention and information processing. For better or worse, psychotherapy has been late to the game. When clients and therapists are not afraid to let their mind wander and pay attention to what bubbles up they move forward. Connection happens when we relate more and force less because this kind of relating is informative. An intersubjective, flexible, sharing of attention by both therapist and client provides the information rich relationship needed to get unstuck when things bog down and become disconnected. A brain that relies on two people carefully attending while traveling through time in the mind’s eye will heal itself and make the way clear for a better future. It always has.
