Attention!

Attend!
Pay attention!
Are you paying attention?

It seems that attention is what's missing in this society. But how important is it?

Lately a few things I've been hearing and observing have made me think about this scarce commodity, so hard to come by in our rushed, atomised, money-obsessed world.

But what does it mean? And why have I suddenly become fixated on it?

In the last few years, a few books relating to this idea have been published in Australia. A young Australian philosopher, Damon Young, wrote Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, about the prevalence of distraction in the modern world, ruefully admitting his addiction to his Blackberry even while on holiday. And Hugh Mackay wrote Why Don't People Listen?, a well-received book in which he urged readers to start really listening to others.

Both of these books' topics are related to attention. Distraction is attention's obvious opposite. Listening is impossible to do properly if you're not attending to someone. But attention has wider scope than listening. It's a focus on someone or something, sometimes an intense focus. Why does it matter?

I regularly take my sister's little cocker spaniel, Jordan, to the park for a romp. When we get back to his place, I usually play Fetch with him for a little while. Occasionally we play Fetch at the park but he's usually too distracted by his all-consuming sense of smell to keep focused on the game. With such succulent, wafting scents everywhere, it's almost impossible to get him to follow the track of the ball (Fetch!) let alone bring it to me (Come!) and drop it at my feet (Give!)

What I have noticed, though, is that he performs much better when I focus on him. When I look at him and am very aware of what I intend him to do, what I want him to do, he seems to sense it. If I'm half-hearted and distracted, so is he.

Attention seems to be to be related to love and bonding. I have a strong bond with Jordan, and when I 'activate' it through my attention, this no doubt helps him to keep focused on me as we play this game.

Children, as we all know, absolutely crave their parents' attention, and will act out mercilessly if they don't get it.

I'm hopelessly intolerant of my friends having their mobile phones on and answering them when I'm socialising with them one-on-one, because for those minutes they're on the phone they've let go of that attentiveness that I'm hungry for.

Journalist Rupert Isaacson is the father of an autistic boy, Rowan. The child was incontinent, constantly having tantrums and unable to relate to others when Isaacson and his wife, psychology professor Kristin Neff, decided to take him on a trip to Mongolia to be healed by shamans (horses were already playing a large role in his progress, so the trip also involved horses).

After the shamanic healings took place, miraculous changes occurred. Rowan became toilet trained, his tantrums virtually ended and he made his first friend. Isaacson wrote a book about the experience, Horse Boy, and a documentary has been made about the journey.

Isaacson can only speculate on what actually caused the changes. But could part of the shamans' powers have come from the intense focus they had on Rowan, and the inner healing powers they were able to summon up, during the healings, partly through that focus?

And could some of the trip's success have come about because Rowan's parents were so intensely focused on him and what they wanted for him, not in a grasping way but in their willingness to drop everything for him? (This is not to suggest, of course, that attention will cure everything, or that parents with disabled children who can't be helped are not giving enough attention.)

Recently a UK journalist, Simon Singh, along with coauthor Edzard Ernst, wrote the book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial (I think this is too complex an area to have only one opinion on; homeopathics are nothing but water, yet herbs are clearly medicines that we still need to know much more about.)

Naturally Singh was down on homeopathics, and I don't blame him. But when western scientists and science writers such as Singh have discovered that people benefit from homeopathics anyway, I think they too easily dismiss the reasons. There's the placebo effect of course; that's the mind healing itself, which is highly significant and extremely worth exploring.

But it's also acknowledged that sitting down with a naturopath who listens to your problems, asks you questions about all aspects of your life and gives you the time and attention that so many GPs are just too busy to give may also help the healing process.

But, you might well ask, what about animals and children? How could they possibly benefit from homeopathics and get better as some seem to? Of course, the usual maxim applies that many would have got better anyway regardless of treatment. But perhaps the actual dispensing of the homeopathics, with the ritual involved and the attentiveness necessary, has something to do with it?

Too bad that kind of thing can't be measured, and too bad it can't be bottled and marketed and made it into a brand (I guess capitalism tries to do that, but I'm talking about real attention …).

What if all medical students, in addition to having good marks, had to demonstrate qualities such as empathy and compassion? Perhaps this is an essential aspect of healing, not just an add-on?

Attention is perhaps a kind of love, or perhaps love is not the word I'm looking for. I don't mean individualistic love or romantic love but the life force that flows through us. Perhaps when we give something or someone our attention we allow our minds to provide the beginnings of healing. That's one reason why truth and justice commissions are so important after terrible massacres. Sufferers need to be heard by other humans.

And that's why in naturopathic, but also psychotherapeutic, consulting rooms all over the world, people seek out and are willing to pay large sums of money to those who will listen to their stories, mobile phones and pagers turned off and no computer blinking in the background. That's one aspect of therapy I really miss – the quietness of the consulting room, and the sense that someone was giving me their complete, undivided, fully focused attention, even if only for 45 minutes a week.

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Changing my mind: slightly all-over-the-shop thoughts about brain plasticity, excessive worry, and mindfulness

For many years I have pictured my condition/illness/neurosis (whatever you want to call it) as a small child constantly tugging at my sleeve and demanding care, attention and protection. Of course, I’m not Robinson Crusoe in seeing myself this way – inner child therapy suggests that we all have a needy child inside us that we need to listen to, love and support.

What I’m trying to do more actively these days is actually learn to manage this child, look after it, but also keep it in line. And to do this I’m finding myself viewing my brain as a pliable thing that I can manipulate.

I know this sounds a bit negative and mechanistic so let me explain. Ever since I read The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, a book that reveals some of the latest research into just how plastic and changeable our brains actually are, I’ve been pondering how disempowered I’ve always felt about handling my chronic anxiety and panic.

These feelings of disempowerment have only increased over the last four years or so, since I gave up therapy and decided once and for all that my body couldn’t handle antidepressants. During this time I have done a few empowering things – I learned how to control my breathing and still practise abdominal breathing when stressed; I did a short group therapy course for social anxiety sufferers; and I bought a mindfulness book and CD, and still do a mindfulness session with the CD about four times a week.

I also try to practise mindfulness (staying in the present; being aware of my surroundings and sensory experiences; noting but not judging thoughts) but I’m not strict about letting the thoughts go – more on that later.

These are all good things, but with my wayward brain they’re simply not enough!

The Brain That Changes itself was an incredibly affirming book. I’m the sort of person who needs constant affirmation, and exterior, visible proof that something is working. I think that’s one reason I’m finding it hard to make further necessary changes like starting meditation – there’s no-one there to say ‘I can see that’s making a difference’, no machine I can hook up to that will show my altered brainwaves after a meditation session.

But Doidge’s book, even if it can’t make my brainwaves visible to me, has been making me see my brain as something fluid, something that I can change, something that’s constantly affected by what I think, do, and tell myself.

So I don’t want to manipulate it in a way that denies my reality (‘I am now a multimillionaire with a swish New York apartment and a cottage in the south of France’). I just need to give it a bit of discipline. When I think of manipulating my brain, I’m actually thinking of a process more like, say, massaging sore muscles into shape or, conversely, exercising slack muscles.

Some examples. I can fall prey to obsessive thoughts sometimes, and while I don’t class myself as having OCD (I have enough problems!) I found the section on OCD in Doidge’s book very helpful. (It’s also useful for anyone who worries excessively.)

When you have an obsessive thought that won’t go away, you do two things: you refuse to focus on the content of the thought, and tell yourself the actual content is not the problem, but the obsessive thinking is; and then you do something pleasurable to distract yourself.

It’s so simple, and yet, if you do it over and over, determinedly, you’re actually changing your brain, creating positive new circuits and connections. What a fantastic idea!

Of course, it’s hard work, and takes perseverance. And it doesn’t mean you actually eliminate the old mental habits. Instead, you create new, competing circuits.

This part of the book was quite tantalising, because the book as a whole doesn’t include a lot of practical suggestions for dealing with anxiety and so on.

But it does suggest how important self-talk is in general, something I’ve been working on in a separate but related area, my social anxiety. Every time I go into a scary social situation, I now tell myself I’m safe. I tell myself I’m doing well. I talk sense to myself. I guess this is a very basic form of cognitive behavioural therapy, which seeks to identify and challenge irrational thoughts.

The book also offers a concrete way of thinking about those more esoteric habits that are hard to introduce, such as meditation, progressive relaxation or mindfulness in daily life. These practices are not simply good in the abstract; over time they’ll produce new neural connections and new mental habits.

When I think about it, meditation (even if it’s not specifically mindfulness meditation) and progressive relaxation (where you progressively tense and relax all the major muscles in the body) are related to mindfulness, if not forms of it, because they’re both about being in and experiencing the present moment.

But mindfulness actually seems to clash a bit with the good self-talk and the anti-worry treatment described in Doidge’s book.

Mindfulness is quite interesting in relation to the general kind of brain manipulation I’m discussing. If I adopt it along with my anti-worry strategy I’m at once attempting to take control (by introducing a new practice that will alter my mind for the better, and striving to stay in the moment) and let go (by not trying to control or judge feelings, behaviours, thoughts but simply observing them; by letting life be the way it is).

This is consistent with Doidge’s suggestion of not buying into the content of the thought. But it contradicts the idea that I should challenge my thoughts, either in relation to persistent obsessions and worries, or specific anxieties like social anxiety. According to mindfulness practice, I should simply note thoughts, not buy into them as fact, and let them go.

Perhaps this apparent contradiction doesn’t matter – perhaps the main thing is to have a grab bag of tools one can use? Oh dear, I can feel a worry coming on …

If anyone has any suggestions about reconciling mindfulness with CBT and the treatment of obsessive thoughts that I’ve briefly sketched, I’d be glad to hear them!

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There’s something about Cate

‘Our Cate’, as the Australian media love to call Cate Blanchett, has well and truly made it. She’s been in countless successful films, and is regularly on the red carpet at opening nights. But she’s one of the few stars who will always be first and foremost seen as a practitioner of the actor’s craft rather than an empty-headed celebrity. This blog entry is a little treatise of admiration for her – well, sort of – and a meditation on acting styles.

The other night I watched a great documentary on ABC 1, In the Company of Actors, that featured Blanchett. It’s a fly-on-the-wall study of the process of taking a successful Australian production – the Sydney Theatre Company’s Hedda Gabler – to New York.

The original season, directed by Robyn Nevin, was performed in 2004. It starred Cate Blanchett as Hedda, who agreed to the project because it was to be based on an adaptation of the original Ibsen play written by her husband, Andrew Upton. The cast would include actors of the calibre of Hugo Weaving, Aden Young and Justine Clarke.

We watch the cast rehearsing the play in Sydney, in a huge high-ceilinged studio, where they’re dressed casually and horseplay around in between finetuning scenes. Next thing they’re in New York, working out how to buy subway tickets, carrying out a technical rehearsal, experiencing their first taste of New York snow, and taking part in a Q and A with local high school students.

Despite the stellar cast, it’s Cate Blanchett who stands out in the doco, even in the rehearsal room. Cate can’t help but always be acting. In this doco, sometimes I swear she responds to the camera (despite herself, I reckon) and plays the part of an actress rehearsing a role. Not that she’s not actually rehearsing the role as well, of course.

Which leads me to the thesis of this blog entry. Forget the bad actors, I’m not talking about them, the ones who are stars first and actors second. (I’m also talking about film rather than the stage, as the latter necessarily involves exaggeration of movements, voice projection and so on.) When it comes to good film actors, I think there are two kinds – those who overtly dramatise the role, perhaps are in danger of overdramatising it, and those who disappear into it. Blanchett is definitely in the former category.

In the doco, the camera takes advantage of this quality in Blanchett. We see her dressed for her role as Hedda Gabler, hair up in a severe bun and wearing a very fitted Edwardian gown with a high collar, set to make her first entrance on the first night in New York. (We find out later that the audience has included luminaries such as Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep.) In the moments before she goes on stage she stares nervously around, breathes, drinks some water, waits. The camera at this point shows a quick series of stills of her performing these actions, rather than obvious motion. Blanchett’s whole persona lends itself to this beautifully. Again, she’s unconsciously acting being an actress waiting to go on stage.

You can’t fake this kind of, well, fakery. It has to be there, in the litheness of your movements as well as your intelligence, and the way that the two work together. That’s why Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow will never be great actresses – they’re reasonably intelligent but they can’t communicate their characters through their bodies that effectively. When Kidman tries too hard to do this, she’s ludicrous. Blanchett's lanky body, in contrast, drips affect, no matter what she's doing.

This category of actors show off their craft – you know they’re acting, you can see it, but does that matter if the acting’s good? I don’t think it does, mostly, in the same way that you might be able to see the machinations of a favourite writer but still love their work.

The other classic example of this style is, of course, Meryl Streep. Think of the mannerisms she employed in Sophie’s Choice, or the exaggerated accent in Evil Angels. Streep is always on show, always being seen, yet she’s mesmerising. Recently I watched her being interviewed by British talk show host Jonathan Ross about her role in Mumma Mia. She draped herself on the couch and smiled just a little too magnanimously, and she was stately, dignified and actorly. But she was also funny, ironic, willing to laugh at herself.

Emma Thompson’s another obvious example of this category – her style was just perfect for a classic melodrama like The Remains of the Day.

The danger with this kind of actor is that if they are let loose they may ultimately overdramatise, so it’s very important that the director reins them in. One of the few of Blanchett’s performances I didn’t like was her role as Katie Hepburn in The Aviator. A drama queen playing a drama queen? It was way too much (and she was too old for the role, I thought).

I sympathise with this kind of acting because I think I can understand it. It’s fuelled by a particular kind of sensibility that always needs to add another layer to life, to either send it up, ramp up its emotional volume, or both. It’s born of a compulsive need to comment on things, to reflect the world back at itself, through the medium of the body. It runs in my family – my uncle was an amateur thespian and my sister’s a drama teacher, and as a frustrated non-actor I’m always wanting to mimic people and dramatise the stories I tell others. I don’t think it’s necessarily an exclusively feminine tendency, but I think women add to it a further layer of culturally installed self-consciousness that men don’t tend to have.

There is a very different kind of actor that, as I said, inhabits the character so entirely they disappear into it. It’s not a matter of underplaying the role, but of letting one’s ego disappear altogether. Samantha Morton stands out in this regard, for example in her role as Deborah Curtis in the film Control.

At her best Kate Winslet does this too and Aden Young is simply brilliant at it, as he demonstrated in the role of Nat in the recently released film Lucky Country. And let’s not overlook Anthony LaPaglia: it’s been said of him that you can see him thinking. Finally, there’s Russell Crowe, bless his cotton socks, who despite his huge ego and the dramatics he gets up to with telephones in real life, is never afraid to play men of every stripe and character, and to ‘become’ them.

Ultimately neither acting style is innately superior to the other. Both styles remind us that no matter how obscenely rich and ridiculously feted they are, and even how absurd their private lives may become, good actors are first and foremost artists.

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