How to rediscover calm in our chaotic world with the Breathing Anchor Mindfulness meditation
Josy took another gulp of her mojito. It was her third within half an hour. She started moving in time with the music and looked out across the crowded living room of her friend’s flat. It was stuffed full of people singing, dancing and waving their brightly coloured drinks in the air. Saturday night was turning into a bit of a riot, which was just the way Josy liked it.
The tall stranger once again wandered over and attempted to strike up a conversation. She’d evaded his advances earlier, but this time she responded with a smile. He leaned a little closer, trying to make himself heard above the sounds of the party. She could just about hear his words, but then a different voice cut through the noise of the room: ‘Josy was telling me about that mad hitchhike back from Italy . . …’ As soon as her name was mentioned, Josy’s mind focused on the conversation on the other side of the room. She heard every word, with crystal clarity, as if the room had fallen into silence.
We’ve all experienced this so-called ‘cocktail- party effect’, where we are in a noisy place and suddenly find ourselves snapping to attention when someone mentions our name. Sometimes it can be even more powerful than this, such as when you hear the few words before your name is even mentioned. In such moments, it can feel as if time has flowed backwards a few seconds and allowed you to catch up with the world. And in a sense, this is what happens.
The cocktail-party effect arises out of the mind’s astonishing ability to gather disparate information from its senses, fuse it all together and analyse its significance. This data is then used to update our different ‘models of reality’, with the one that best fits crystallising to become our actual experience. This happens because of the extremely odd and counter-intuitive way that our mind makes sense out of the world. In essence, what we regard as the present moment is actually a stunningly realistic illusion created by the mind. An illusion so compelling that we mistake it for reality. It is called a simulation and the process it relies upon is known as ‘predictive processing’.1 (For more detail about this emerging area of neuroscience and psychology see this article).
Predictive processing works by constantly ‘guessing’ what information the senses are about to send to the brain. We do not truly see the world; we see what our minds think the world is about to look like. Nor do we truly hear, but instead experience the sounds that the mind believes are about to hit our ears. And the same is true for our other senses, too. The mind predicts what we are about to taste, feel and smell. And in practice, it is this prediction – or simulation – that we experience, rather than the ‘real’ world.
As you can imagine, this is a fantastically complex process, but a simple analogy helps here: if you are talking about politics in the UK and someone mentions the Houses of P . . . you can guess what’s coming next (the word ‘Parliament’). Because you have predicted the word, you don’t need to listen to the word itself. You can instead use that moment to capture the meaning of the whole sentence. Such predictions make perception and responses more fluent because the world is normally predictable. As explained above, we don’t create a prediction for one single sense but for all of them. Simultaneously. We construct a global model that incorporates sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations. This model is constantly updated, moment by moment, and incorporates any deviations from the real external ‘reality’; we move through the world creating and updating – predicting and checking – it. And if our checks show that we have made an error (like when we approach a shop door and pull on the large handle rather than pushing on it), we simply begin to pay more attention to the actual stream of data arriving from our senses. Any necessary corrections are then built into the model. The mind runs many different variations of the model simultaneously, and each is continuously checked against reality to notice the beginnings of any divergence. The most accurate one ‘wins’ and becomes a moment in the simulation that we experience.
Often, we only get an inkling of this process when the mind ‘jumps the tracks’ from one model to another and we experience such things as this cocktail-party effect. It can be powerful and, occasionally, eerie. Central to this process is the brain’s capacity to monitor the world for important information that signals when you might need to update your global model – or switch to an entirely different track. From moment to moment, your brain compares the mind’s predictions with the actual incoming data from the senses and looks out for ‘surprises’ – or prediction errors. If it detects such an error, your attention switches towards the source of the surprise – the voice that has just spoken your name, for example – to see whether the model needs updating. Often, only a little tweaking is needed, but, for an instant, there is an uncertainty that needs to be resolved in case more significant action is needed, and so your attention is inexorably drawn to anything new or surprising. For example, all animals are sensitive to movements in their peripheral vision because it indicates the possible presence of a predator. And humans are no different. Evolution has hard-wired our brains to look out for many such ‘distractors’, and we don’t have a choice whether we notice them or not. Ever found yourself incessantly distracted by a flickering TV above a bar? Put it down to your primate ancestors.
We can also learn to look out for other distractors and these can become written into the mind’s ‘software’. Hearing your own name in a crowded room is one example, but so too are conversations that resonate with you. Looking to move house, buy a car or take a holiday? Suddenly, you start to notice references to them everywhere and feel compelled to pay attention. Normally, though, after a few moments of heightened awareness, you slip back into your own thoughts and are, perhaps, left in awe of your mind’s ability to keep track of the world.
In practice, even if you are focusing on one thing and trying to ignore everything else, your mind continues monitoring the world in the background in case something important needs attending to. Often, though, your attention isn’t waylaid in such an obvious fashion but is, instead, subverted without you realising it. Such subversion is often far more insidious and powerful in the long run than any number of cocktail-party hijackings.
It works like this: if you are not paying attention – really paying attention – then you will not notice the accumulating ‘prediction errors’ that allow you to keep a tight grip on reality. It is these prediction errors that, when noticed, keep us in contact with the real world and prevent us from living inside a disconnected simulation. They provide the exciting little jolts that bring us back into full consciousness and spark our curiosity. They are the source of life’s joy. They provide the magic – the stardust – that makes life worth living.
The message is in the error.
Allow us to explain this seemingly irrational idea.
If you are eating your favourite treat, your mind will predict how it tastes and feels in your mouth. It will be a fairly accurate simulation, but it will not be real. If, however, you fully tune in to each of your senses as you eat, your experience will be slightly different from your mind’s simulation. There will be errors in the simulation that will normally pass you by unnoticed. This means that the real treat, the one that you are eating in the present moment, will be far more wonderful because you are actually tasting it, rather than experiencing a simulation. All the interleaved nuances of flavours, aromas and textures will be experienced and savoured. They will be absolutely real, not an imitation. If, however, you do not pay attention, you simply will not notice the taste of your food – along with countless other things, such as the feel of the sun on your skin, the smell of freshly baked cakes, the smiles of loved ones, hugs and kisses, the laughter of children in the park . . . The list is truly endless.
Thankfully, such losses are not inevitable because you can learn to pay attention in a very special way; a way that allows you to reconnect with the world around you. And when you do so, something astonishing happens. You begin to see the world in its true glory – full of magic, mystery and wonder. This is what the eight-week course (or plan) in our latest book Deeper Mindfulness offers; and it’s so much more than the absence of anxiety, stress, depression and exhaustion. It offers you the opportunity to reclaim your life – to rediscover the simple, beautiful, joy of being alive.
A Life, Reconnected
The first step to regaining control over your life is learning to notice when your mind has begun to subvert itself and slip into unconsciousness. This is done by first training it to focus on one single thing at a time and then gradually learning how to move this ‘spotlight of attention’ around as you wish. You may not find it easy at first, but with gentle persistence, you can learn to see where the spotlight of attention is pointing, when it starts to wander away from your chosen focus, and then to bring it back to where you had intended it to be. And you do this by setting aside a few minutes each day with the sole aim of training the mind: seeing your attentional spotlight at work, and then bringing it back each time that it wanders away from your chosen focus.
To aid this process, it is helpful to have one place you can bring it back to, over and over again. You see, your mind is like a boat; it needs an anchor, so that it doesn’t drift too far away from the shore with the ebb and flow of the tide. Meditation traditionally uses the breath as this anchor. For some meditators, the breath is sufficient, but for many (or when the mind is unusually scattered or busy) the breath may not be enough. People often need stronger and more noticeable sensations to focus on than those provided by the gentle to-ing and fro-ing of the breath. They need more options. This is especially true if you have breathing difficulties, or if distractions have become too intrusive.
If you have found the breath to be sufficient so far, don’t worry – it will still be there for you later on. However, the first week of the meditation course in Deeper Mindfulness is dedicated to exploring alternative anchors (be they the feet, the hands or the feeling of contact with a seat or mat, or even an external one, such as sounds) to give you a taste of the different qualities that each one brings. If you have practised mindfulness in the past, particularly if you have read our previous book, the two-million selling Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World, or taken a course based on it, some of the ideas will seem familiar. But there are many subtle but crucial differences, the primary one being that you learn how to tune in to the vedana (or feeling tone) as you carry out the core meditations. You tune in to the different flavours of awareness as you carry out meditations that may seem familiar but are, none the less, different from those that you may have practised previously. These vedana focused meditations deepen your experience and understanding. This is the kernel of what we want to share with you through our latest book Deeper Mindfulness. It has, for us, become a treasure trove of new insights from the most ancient of Eastern traditions, as well as modern psychology and neuroscience. They have transformed our understanding of meditation and we hope that they will do the same for you, too.
You can stream/download the Finding Your Ground meditation here.
For more information on vedana, or feeling tone, see here.
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- For a review of this approach, see Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), Lawrence Barsalou (2008), ‘Grounded cognition’, Annual Review of Psychology, 59, pp. 617–45 and Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Pan Books, 2017) and Manjaly, Z. M. & Iglesias, S. (2020), ‘A computational theory of mindfulness based cognitive therapy from the “Bayesian brain” perspective’, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, p. 404. ↩︎
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