This is a piece of July reading, but I’m pulling it out from the usual booklog (which will come in August) both because I have more than usual to say about it, and because in this case, there’s good reason to mention it before next month.

What this book is: a very cogent discussion by a neuroscientist specializing in the study of attention — and, as knock-on effects from that, memory, emotional regulation, connection with other people, and so forth. She talks about how we focus (and what disrupts that), how we stay aware of our environment (physical, emotional, etc.), how this relates to working/short-term memory and what goes into long-term memory, why we get disrupted by negative memories or worries about the future, how to keep from being hijacked by emotional responses, how to really be present for our interactions with people around us . . . and how basically all of these things can be improved through mindfulness practice.

Which is kind of a buzzword these days, but not without reason. Jha is very explicit that mindfulness is not about “thinking happy thoughts” (that’s actually counter-productive a lot of the time, as it burns the mental resources you need for actual coping), nor is it something whose purpose is to make you feel better. In fact, the early road there often sucks! Instead, she treats it as mental training, the way you might undertake physical training for your body. The aim is to have better control of your focus — not so you can be focused all the time, but so you can switch as needed between that and broader contextual awareness — and a meta-awareness of what your own mind is doing, which gives you the chance to intervene when what it’s doing is uhhhh not so great.

(As a sidebar, this book is also the first time I’ve encountered the word “hypertasking.” It refers to tetrising your time so that you’re always focused on something and never give yourself downtime between tasks, and, uh. Hi. Yeah. That’s me. Turns out that whole “I don’t know how to turn off” thing is also part of this same cluster of concepts, and while it has its benefits, in the long run it’s not really good for your brain.)

A few caveats: first, a good chunk of the research Jha has done, and therefore presumably a chunk of her funding, involves the U.S. military. I found that I was not as bothered by that as I expected, because frankly, her work is ultimately about helping them not do the kind of thing I want them to not do. For example, she talks about how we need to be aware of our own mental narratives so that we can see how they’re influencing our attention and know when to let go of them: for example, if you have the mental narrative of “anybody around me could be a terrorist,” then you are automatically going to notice things that fit your narrative and literally not see the ones that signal “actually, this is a harmless civilian.” (If you’ve ever heard of the basketball/gorilla experiment, it’s very much in line with that.) I’m honestly in favor of anybody working against the “assume anybody could be an enemy and react accordingly” mindset.

Second, though she touches briefly on ADHD, she is not specifically a researcher in that field. So, for example, she comments that using mindfulness training to build awareness of mind-wandering abates the “costs” of mind-wandering in people with ADHD, but she doesn’t address the challenges in undertaking that training in the first place. That’s the kind of thing that would probably benefit from reading a different book, one written by someone specialized in the relevant sub-field — or, of course, direct therapeutic guidance. (She is very very clear that while mindfulness plays a key role in certain treatments for a variety of conditions, including both ADHD and PTSD, reading her book is 1000% not a substitute for actual therapy, and please do not use it as such.)

Those caveats laid aside, I found this lucid, well-argued, and convincing. I’ve gone through spates of doing mindfulness meditation before, and they were fine, but I never found them life-changing. Turns out that might be because I was almost always doing only five or ten minutes, and so far, the research suggests that — for whatever reason — twelve minutes is the minimum effective “dose.” (More is better, but since telling people to meditate for thirty minutes tends to result in them doing it for zero, she is very pragmatically aiming at the minimum line.) Twelve minutes a day, at least five days a week, for at least four weeks, to produce measurable changes in people’s performance in various cognitive tests . . . though of course it’s not like you do that and then stop, any more than you get swole at the gym and then quit on the assumption those muscles will stay with you forever. But theoretically, after four weeks of following this regimen, you’ve done enough mental lifting to notice a change.

And that’s why I’m posting this now. As of it going live, I have successfully meditated for eight days straight, twelve minutes each time. By saying that publicly, I’m giving myself a bit more accountability — because my hope is that I’ll be able to keep this up, and in August I’ll come back to report on how it’s going. Will I feel less scattershot? Better able to remember things? More skilled, not only at focusing on what’s in front of me, but knowing how to stop focusing and just &#$! chill for a bit?

Only one way to find out!