Chapter 5: How Attention Works

I was sitting quietly in my room in the midst of a one-hour meditation. I was now in the second half-hour and things were quiet and calm. My attention rested on the breath. The mind had settled.

A sudden sound grabbed my attention. The Amber alert on my phone had gone off.

Ordinarily we say “I pay attention” as if I’m the one doing the paying. But in that moment, the wallet of my attention had been mugged and emptied of its contents. Whatever attention I had been paying was now fully oriented toward the noise. No choice, no decision - just instant capture.

I opened my eyes, reached for my phone, and read the alert. Missing child. Vehicle description. License plate number. My mind quickly processed: Not my neighborhood. Not someone I know. Not an immediate danger to me.

I set the phone down and closed my eyes again, ready to return to my breath.

But my attention wouldn’t come back. It didn’t stay on the alert details - those were no longer interesting. But it also wouldn’t settle on the breath. It just… floated. Restless. Scanning.

Was that noise outside? Should I check my phone again? Did I lock the front door? What was that sensation in my chest?

It took a good ten minutes before things finally settled down again. My attention eventually found its way back to the breath, but not because I forced it there. It came back on its own, once whatever had been activated finally calmed down.

This isn’t actually a problem. In fact, it’s how things should be.

Capturing vs. Keeping

The writer Chris Hayes talks about this in his book “The Siren’s Call.” He points out that capturing attention is easy - brandish a gun, yell “Fire!” - but keeping attention is incredibly hard.

That Amber alert captured my attention instantly. Automatic, fast, no choice involved. But once I determined I wasn’t in immediate danger? My attention couldn’t stay there. The alert became irrelevant as quickly as it had become urgent.

You’d think my attention would simply return to where it was before - back to the breath, back to meditation. But it didn’t work that way. The alert had captured my attention, but then nothing could keep it. Not the alert, not the breath, not anything I chose. My attention was now just… activated. Scanning for what might be important.

I wanted my spotlight back under my control. But my attention system had other ideas about what mattered.

Two Systems

There’s something going on here that I completely misunderstood about attention for years. Attention isn’t just one thing. It’s not a spotlight I control through effort and practice. It’s actually multiple systems working together - and sometimes working against each other.

The psychologist Michael Posner identified three distinct attention systems in the brain: alerting, orienting, and sustaining.

Alerting is what happened when that Amber alert went off. Something potentially important occurs, and your attention system goes on high alert. This is bottom-up attention - stimulus-driven, automatic, involuntary. You don’t decide to pay attention. Your attention gets grabbed whether you want it to or not.

Orienting is what happened next. My attention swiveled toward the sound, toward the phone, toward the information. This is still mostly automatic. When the alerting system says “something important is happening,” the orienting system turns your attention toward it.

Sustaining is what I was trying to do when I went back to meditating. Keeping attention focused on something - the breath, a task, a conversation. This is top-down attention - goal-directed, voluntary, effortful. This is me trying to point my spotlight and hold it there.

Here’s the thing: two of these systems are fast, automatic, and powerful. One requires constant effort and gets tired quickly.

Guess which one I’d been trying to use for meditation?

The Emergency System

You’ve probably experienced this: riding the metro late at night, exhausted after a long day. Your eyes are heavy. Your head starts to nod. You’re drifting toward sleep despite the noise and the lights and the motion of the train.

Then you arrive at your stop. The doors open, and suddenly you’re wide awake. Alert. Moving through the station. And if you see a strange shadow in the corner or hear an unexpected sound? You’re instantly, completely focused.

Wait - weren’t you just falling asleep thirty seconds ago?

This is your bottom-up attention system. It never sleeps. Even when your top-down system (the one trying to stay awake, the one trying to be vigilant) is exhausted and failing, your bottom-up system is monitoring the environment. Always ready to alert you if something potentially dangerous appears.

That shadow, that sound - they trigger the same system that the Amber alert triggered. Automatic, fast, and powerful enough to override whatever else your attention was doing. Including sleep.

This system exists because your ancestors who had it survived. The ones who could detect danger quickly - who noticed the rustling in the bushes, the shadow moving at the edge of vision, the subtle change in someone’s expression - they lived long enough to pass on their genes. The ones who could focus deeply but missed the approaching predator? They didn’t make it.

Your attention evolved to keep you alive, not to help you focus on your breath.