Regulation of Attention: The capacity to disengage from thought and direct attention where required
A hugely important skill in mindfulness is the ability to direct attention where and when required. The normal mental style of most people is for their thoughts to wander from one topic to another without much control. This is a little like having a body that randomly throws its arms or legs out in any direction or starts walking off without any warning. However, if we saw the mind more as a vehicle, could we learn to control and direct it in the same way as we do our body.
Regulation of attention is the ability to direct or maintain attention or awareness intentionally towards whatever topic we want, including thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations. For this to happen there must be some re-training of the old style of random thinking or the wandering mind.
Just like a horse that is wild and needs to be gently trained to follow requests, the mind needs to be able to be led somewhere, rather than going wherever it wants to go. This is not easy as the mind has been conditioned over many years in a particular way. Patterns of thinking build up over time and these can become a default style of thinking.
One way to see the power of conditioned thinking is with Pavlov’s dogs. During his research on digestion in dogs, Pavlov noticed they started to salivate when the person feeding them was there, not just when there was food. He conducted an experiment by setting up a ticking metronome (neutral or unconditioned stimulus), and then giving the dogs food.
After repeating this a few times, the dogs started salivating in response to the metronome (now a conditioned stimulus). In the dogs’ brains, a link had been made between the food and the sound. The way to break the link again was to make the sound but not to deliver any food each time. Eventually the chain was broken, and the dogs stopped salivating at the sound like they did in the beginning (extinction of the conditioned stimulus).
This is similar to why many people struggle with getting success through meditation at the beginning. There are already so many thoughts that have strong associations to experiences, ideas, people, and places. Like the metronome reminds the dogs of food, one thought triggers another thought or memory or association. As we grow up and keep building these associations, we end up developing a style of thinking that is mostly continuous without a break.
Training to regulate our attention to just watch creates a gap between these stimuli and our responses. As a result, it can give us a more intentional mind, one that is not so frequently in reaction to its conditioning.