On Thinking

Focused and Diffuse

Years ago, being a giant nerd, I took a course called Learning How to Learn. One of the more useful concepts I gathered from it was the framing of cognition in terms of “focused mode” and “diffuse mode.”

Focused mode is exactly what it sounds like. It is when you are focusing your brain on a task. I am using it as I write: thinking about this concept, how to articulate it, how might I write it in a way that will land in a reader's mind the same way that I think about it in my own. 

Diffuse mode is what I switch to when I stop and stare blankly out the window. I’m not consciously hashing through concepts or sentences—I’m often not aware of words at all, just a sort of blank or open feeling. Diffuse mode is where our minds go to wander and flit. It happens automatically when we stare into clouds or wait in a line with nothing to distract us. It is the kernel of truth underlying tropes of movie-cliche genius: answers (or better questions) spring forth as though handed down by forces unknown. 

HOW WE STORE INFORMATION

Let me back up a little bit here and discuss metaphors for how we construct and store knowledge. We live in an age of technology and use quite a lot of mechanical or computer-based metaphors to describe how we think. However, I am of the opinion that we often do much better describing our squishy, organic bodies using squishy, organic metaphors. 

Photo by Eva Wilcock on Unsplash

I think of knowledge as this functionally-infinite set of interconnected spiderwebs—not flat, but each extending out in all directions and intersecting with any number of different webs. 

When we know a lot about a subject, we build a giant web of knowledge for it, and that web connects to varying degrees with any number of other webs. Sometimes, webs have very robust connections and parts of the two webs might look like they are one. Other times, perhaps just one or two nodes connect between webs. Some connections would seem obvious to most people; other connections are highly idiosyncratic and based on the body of knowledge we gain through our unique combination of experiences and learnings. 

When we are in focused mode, I think of it as plumbing the depths of a single web of our knowledge. This is where we are working hard to think through an idea or project, focusing on it alone while setting aside other things. This is a powerful mode of thinking, but it is also highly constrained because we are working largely within that singular web to the exclusion of those around it. 

If focused mode is crossing a continent by interstates or autobahns, diffuse mode is a meander down blue-highways, backroads, hiking trails, and animal paths. You may not travel quickly, but you are going to stumble upon many, many more things than you would by purely sticking to the big roads. 

James Joyce famously followed these interconnections in his stream-of-consciousness writing. Many ideas that might seem unrelated are, in fact, connected through these small and rocky paths we would never happen upon when focused. 

Diffuse mode may be slow and unpredictable, but therein lies its own form of genius. While focused mode is powerful and direct, it will frequently run into dead ends, “construction zones,” or voids of knowledge that need to be crossed, somehow, to keep going. 

Diffuse mode is made of alternate routes. 

BOTH MODES ARE NEEDED

Both modes are needed to do solid, creative thinking¹. And both are under tremendous pressure from the sheer amount of input to which we are subjected by modern life. 

There has been a renewed emphasis on the need for sustained, focused work, and some defense of wool-gathering², but the missing piece in this conversation is that you truly need both. 

Too much focused work without recovery will leave you mentally fried and, mostly likely, stuck in an intellectual rut. 

Too much wool-gathering on its own generally doesn't go anywhere; your mind just ambles along the scenic paths to see what there is to see. This isn't bad, necessarily, but we generally do need to get some level of results in order to see our next day. 

When you combine the two, spending time working in focused mode interleaved with time for diffuse mode, something close to magic starts to happen. Your work in the focused mode activates the web of knowledge related to some problem or idea that you want to figure out or solve. Then your diffuse mode wanders along the paths within this web, and crosses into other webs as it comes to them. Many of these paths don't lead anywhere useful, but a few of them will, and some will seem as revelations when they percolate up to your conscious awareness. 

RECLAIM YOUR DIFFUSE MODE

As stated above, the over-scheduled and over-stimulated cadence of modern life is at odds with this process. Everything seems to come with a deadline, there are more things to do in every day than could be done in a week, and there is an onslaught of information (mostly trivial, mostly not actionable) coming at us from every direction. 

We know that we need focus mode. There are things we must do (pay bills, write reports, file our taxes, and so forth) that absolutely cannot be done without focus. So, when critically necessary, we arrange ourselves for focus. 

But if we ever want to do anything more exciting or groundbreaking than rote work, we also need to make time to have our head in the clouds. 

For both of these modes of thinking, we need time and space free (or relatively free) of any other demands on our attention. Diffuse mode might be slightly more forgiving of tasks that require primarily physical labor, such as “driving thoughts,” where ideas present themselves when one’s body is occupied with a largely-automatic task for a sustained period of time (though with a podcast playing and turn-by-turn directions bellowed from the stereo system, even that crucial, boring solitude is broken). 

So, how does one enable the conditions for diffuse mode? One needs to be cut off from input from other human minds. Diffuse mode requires at least some mild boredom or understimulation; it requires that we be able to hear ourselves think, or even just stare into the middle distance while processes we can't see or fully understand do their work deep in our brains. 

This can be difficult in our modern world where even a seemingly quiet pub likely has a dozen TVs, there are advertisements shouting at us from every corner, and we have built our modern processes under the assumption that every last one of us is carrying—at all times—a small device that started out as a novelty and convenience and now has been engineered to devour every last crumb of our unallocated attention. 

My best advice? 

• Disconnect from electronics. All of them. Not forever, but for hours on end. All of these things have off buttons, and they can take a message for you if it’s truly important. 

• Be bored. It won’t kill you, I promise. Also, it usually passes into something more interesting in less time than you’d think. 

• Do something physical, without mental stimulation. Take a walk. Take a shower. Go for a drive with no stereo and no GPS. Do house work or yard work with nothing but your own thoughts for company. See what bubbles up. 

One further observation: all of this is undermined by stress or anxiety. Being tightly wound for any reason seems to preclude the idle openness so critical to the mental ramble from one subject to the next, fruitful or otherwise. My suspicion is that stress keeps us focused on one thing or topic at the expense of exploring the lesser-traveled paths. Perhaps part of the allure of endless scrolling is that it creates some simulacrum of our natural random walk, though powered by an external algorithm rather than our own, uh, devices.

1. By “creative thinking,” I do not mean “arty” or “design” or whatever. If you have to solve problems in your life or work, you use creative thinking. This means that every last one of us needs creative thinking, regardless of whether or not we consider ourselves to “be creative.” 

2. Based on the number of reviews for each book on Amazon and Goodreads, the defense of focused mode still has an order of magnitude more support than does the also-critical practice of idleness. One presumes that this is, as with so much in our modern world, is due to the pervasive trend that things proximal to output are lionized, while still-critical steps more distant from that output are largely undervalued or ignored.