This episode delves into the intricate nature of the wandering mind, exploring the complexities of attention, focus, and the diverse manifestations of ADHD. It challenges the traditional objectivist approach in scientific inquiry, emphasizing the value of human experience, metaphor, and emotion in understanding mental processes. The narrative presents a metaphor comparing the lens of an eye to the lens of consciousness, illustrating how mental wanderings impact focus and productivity. Additionally, it discusses the role of short-term and working memory and the emotional bed of consciousness. The episode concludes with practical insights for managing a wandering mind and a musical improvisation piece that embodies the themes discussed.

00:00 Open

03:33 An Appeal to Human Experience

07:52 A Metaphor of the Eye’s Lens

11:36 The Lens of Consciousness

15:16 A Return of The Now and Not Now

16:02 The Vitality of Emotion

18:18 Bringing it Together

25:57 An Improvisation

Rhythms of Focus – Episode 14 Show Notes

The Magnified Mind: Metaphors for Wandering, Focus, and Emotional Depth

Welcome, fellow wandering minds! In this episode, we set sail through the complexities of attention, memory, and emotion—exploring how the wandering mind, so often misunderstood, can be a source of both challenge and creative strength. Below you’ll find references, resources, and further reading to deepen your journey.

Key References & Further Reading

ADHD, Neurodiversity, and Focus Variability

Science, Measurement, and Human Experience

Objectivism in Psychology:
E.L. Thorndike and Measurement in Psychology
Quote from Dr. Frank Summers, The Psychoanalytic Vision:
Book Information

Musical Improvisation & Structure

Featured Tools from Waves of Focus

The Anchor Technique:
A practical, pen-and-paper approach to regaining agency and clarity in moments of overwhelm or distraction. Learn more and access exercises.
Session Pad & Honor Guide:
Structures to help carry momentum and maintain a gentle rhythm between focus and rest. Explore the system.

Mentioned Metaphors & Concepts

The Lens of Consciousness:
Seeing attention as a shifting lens—sometimes magnified, sometimes blurry—mirrors the lived experience of focus and forgetfulness.
Agency as Sailing:
Agency is a boat navigating a sea of emotions, learning to tack and use the winds of emotion to guide, rather than fight.
Improvisation:
Mastery grows from playful exploration, much like improvising music within a framework of learned fundamentals.

Episode Music

This episode closes with “Meandering Improv in E-Flat,” a spontaneous piece that mirrors the episode’s theme of wandering, discovery, and playful structure. Listen to more original music.

Want to Go Deeper?

Waves of Focus Course:
For a step-by-step guide to building your own rhythms of focus, agency, and creative mastery, explore the Waves of Focus course.
Newsletter:
Subscribe for more insights, metaphors, and practical tools for wandering minds.

Thank you for joining me on this voyage. May your focus be as gentle and resilient as a boat riding the waves—and may you discover new strengths in the very places your mind tends to wander.

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review. Your voice helps others find their rhythm, too.

Transcript

There are those times where we can dive deep into that one thing, engaged in this wonderful flow gathering and holding on to multiple ideas, pulling that from there and this from here, and sometimes remembering that some obscure thought from some seeming random other field of knowledge.

And then we discover this new idea and the connection and, uh,

“Why did I come into this room again?”

How can it be so easy to lose touch with something that seems so important from only a few moments ago? What’s going on?

A wandering mind’s complexities can seem staggering.

There are many forces, paths, spirits that can lead to those familiar meanderings from the tightly wound, the anxious, the hurt, the confused, the lost, the misunderstood to the deeply curious, the brilliant, the wonderfully artistic.

The very poster child of focus struggles, ADHD, has its own multiple variations. Some struggle with constantly messy environments while others are impeccably clean. Some are never on time, while others are obsessively early. Some can hardly string actions together into any form of habit while others clutch dearly to routine.

What singular idea could ever describe these variations?

We already have so many perspectives: psychological, biological, social, the motor, the mental, the interpersonal, brain anatomy, task positive network versus default mode network, ideas of the neurodivergent versus neurotypical, neurotransmitters of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, the neural pathways between.

And here I am trying to throw another perspective on the pile. Why? Well, because mine’s right, of course. But uh. Well, joking aside, I do think it’s one worth playing with. I’ll be making a few stops in this journey, this argument, pulling into port here or there.

But first we’ll be looking at the nature of how we view science itself. A bit of a stepping back. Then, I’ll describe a metaphor, get into a bit about time, emotion, and finally bring it all together. So hang onto your proverbial hats here as I hope to string a few meanderings into some central meaning.

Kindly, uh, wish your captain here, good luck as we make this voyage.

An Appeal to Human Experience

The first stop is a rather abstract one. But it is also a vital one, I believe.

I’d like to present this different perspective on a wandering mind, but rather than dive as many do into molecules, structures, graphs, and the like, I want to appeal to human experience. We often do this on the internet and look at it this way or that way. Oh, isn’t that funny how I thought of it this way, or how I did that thing? And everybody chimes in and says, oh yes, I agree. The trouble is, is we tend to look down on these human experiences as truly they are useful measures of thought.

We tend to look at numbers and stats and graphs and plots and say, well, that must be the real truth, somehow looking to bend our experience to fit the science rather than to recognize the science is there for us.

There’s some claim to this objectivism, this tendency to lay stress on whatever’s external to or independent of the mind, as if that’s where the truth lies. The mind itself is somehow too fuzzy to consider scientific.

If we’re generous, we might say it’s the last frontier of science, but sometimes I look at that phrase as some backhanded way of keeping it at arm’s length.

Years ago, this psychologist named El Thorndyke in 1918 said “whatever exists, exists in some amount and whatever exists in some amount can be measured.”

Eh, sounds nice, but it’s a sentiment that’s damaging and it’s also soaked into our scientific discourse far too deeply and far beyond psychology, overshadowing the power of the mind. It’s somehow become this sense that only things that can be measured are worthwhile measured by some external means.

We see this in our graphs and charts of medicines, such as how much cholesterol this has and how much potassium is there and whatever, in the units of productivity at work as we measure it, by time, for instance, or in the measure of success of a company through its financial returns, rather than say an, ultimately unmeasurable, but vital sense of wellbeing that it might generate.

Sure, we can measure some things and add ’em all together and say, well, this might point us in a direction, but it’s ultimately the individual who is the arbiter of those measures.

I want to quote a mentor of mine, Dr. Frank Summers, he’s one of those, brilliant minds who you can tell has read everything, but can use any of those thoughts to support his own voice, which I deeply respect. He’s also extremely humble and would probably be surprised to know that he is being mentioned here.

He comments about psychology in this quote I’ll say, but , as I said, I think the issue is far beyond that and well into the sciences in general. So I quote from his book, The Psychoanalytic Vision:

“This concept of reality has been accepted uncritically by academic psychology for almost a hundred years, despite the failure of its adherents to provide any justification for it.

That is to say objectivism is a dogma, a tyrannical imposition on human inquiry. The contention that reality is quantity cannot hold up to its own terms because that statement itself is not measurable. According to objectivism, the very statement of objectivism does not exist.”

I do get a kick outta that.

What does all that mean? What does it matter for, a wandering mind?

Well, I say it because to approach a wandering mind from a point of view of experience, we need to value experience. Metaphor, story, the tools of the human mind are just as powerful as any other means of understanding, if not more so than a ruler or a plotted graph. Meaning, that which connects to and through us conscious, unconscious really is the ruling class of any measure.

But there’s no reason to malign, the examination of the external world, either. I think that has its place, certainly, and it’s when we combine them that things can become truly interesting.

A Metaphor of the Eye’s Lens

So let’s move to our next stop : metaphor.

Let me present a scenario. Imagine sitting in a chair at a table. You see the foreground, maybe your laptop, a book, a table itself. Maybe you’ll look up to see the room. There’s a tea kettle, a hanging painting, the wall. You look further past the door and see the other room. In that room, there’s a chair, a table, some shoes that need to be straightened out.

These objects sitting all around us at different distances somehow register in our mind. To do so, the light that bounces off of these objects flow into and through the lens of our eye, and that lens guides that light to a singular point at the back of our eye, known as the fovea.

This highly sensitive area of our retina is rich in receptors, able to gather detail and nuance of whatever we’re focused on, and then pass that information along to the back of our brains and onward and its relays to represent the world in front of us

in order to see what’s in front of us, what’s close to us, and what’s further away, that lens that’s in our eye needs to be able to shift. It needs to adjust to bend the light as needed from close or from far to land on that one point.

And when it doesn’t, what we register in our mind, what we see is a blur. The further off from making a pinpoint of those rays of light, the blurrier it is.

For some of us, we can’t make these adjustments. We’re stuck seeing things that are close or maybe seeing things that are far or some distortion in between.

One of my own eyes is significantly myopic, also known as shortsighted, while the other is only mildly so. Without glasses, I can only see my hand if it’s right in front of my face, mere inches. And beyond that point, without correction, the world rapidly becomes a blur.

But there is something else interesting that happens. There’s a magnification. In fact, if I want to see something in detail. I can take off my glasses and probably see things better than others do, at least in that small area.

The metaphor for the wandering mind should be apparent by now. We lose things. We drop things, we forget things that slip past. Things become blurry quickly. Meanwhile, what we can see in front of us is in great detail.

And I think this metaphor, this experienced idea, can be a centerpiece to understanding a wandering mind.

When we bump into things, forget things, lose things, there can be this cascade of problems leading to this sense of injured agency that I got into in module nine, where we feel that we have to force ourselves to do things.

These methods of force are then confused for the problem itself. Waiting for deadlines, shaming oneself, and more. These are all attempts to manage this central issue and the further problems that fester and feed on themselves from there, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

We will come back to how these problems can lead from this central concept , because we’re not quite done with this metaphor.

A metaphor has a resonance. It has two ends. One thing comparing to another.

So if we’re looking at this idea of the lens of the eye, what’s at the other end?

The Lens of Consciousness

Well, this brings us to our next stop. The other end is the lens of consciousness itself. Okay, so what do I mean by the “lens of consciousness?” What sort of malarkey is this?

Well, let’s look at it for a moment through the concepts of short-term memory and working memory.

Short-term memory is said to be this part of her brain that holds seven plus or minus two- five to nine items, things that we can hold in our mind. If I understand history correctly. We’ve even used this concept to establish the number of digits used in our telephones, making the numbers easier to remember back when we needed to remember them.

Working memory is then just what is in front of us, what is on our mind? What are we playing with? But either of these are areas where I believe our adherence to the scientific description does us a disservice.

Reading about short and working memory this way makes it sound, at least to my ears, like we’ve got five to nine objects sitting in a box next to us. You put things in the box and take things outta the box, but that doesn’t seem quite right. It’s not alive, and these things are divided, perhaps even artificially.

Instead, I see it more as this flow around a singular fovea of attention itself, where this maybe five to nine is more about these meandering ideas, sensations, feelings, rhythmically moving in and out of direct awareness. Maybe they overlap , envelope, and fold into each other as they hover around, if not compete for a central awareness, that place of working memory.

In this way, what are these short and working memories other than this sphere of consciousness that fades into the depths of the pre-conscious, if not unconscious worlds?

And what if like the objects in a room? Some of us can only see these mental objects upfront and magnified while the rest quickly blends into a blurred background.

A Stabilizing Video Camera

There’s another parallel of the magnified mind worth considering too. A video recorder. When you record a video, there’s this process called stabilization. In recent years, cameras have gotten pretty good with this. You hold the camera, you might jiggle your hand a little bit here and there, but the video itself feels steady.

In order to do this, the camera records a larger area than you see. It has peripheral vision. It uses peripheral aspects of the recording to make up for and adjust as needed.

When we don’t have much of peripheral memory. That short-term memory, we don’t have much to keep us steady.

When we dive deep, we gather ideas and sensations that relate to each other, allowing items to chunk and build. We can then see more deeply yet entering that hyperfocus, almost like hyperspace, where the periphery flows past blurred. As the paths forward reach this pinpoint of clarity, whichever direction we head has this feeling of moving forward.

We explore, create, and discover in ways others cannot, as we can see with this depth and power, it helps ground us so long as we have the conditions that help support them. Meanwhile, the periphery and the distance can be far off blurred, hardly accessible when these things do not seem to line up with each other.

And so lining up the objects of our mind to have them relate to each other, to find that flow forward helps us engage powerfully. But getting there can be this exhausting struggle.

A Return of The Now and Not Now

When we consider the joked of times of a wandering mind, the Now and the Not Now: we can start seeing how this model blooms in a new way. This lens of consciousness that’s constricted but magnified.

The Now and the Not Now are no longer about time.

Now is consciousness. Present awareness, blown up in full detail and resolution, and the not Now constricted as it is, is not just about past and future. It’s this distance from the now, those sensations quickly fading away from consciousness, this periphery hardly felt. The effect is as if we are in this ship sailing on a sea, sometimes in thick fog.

The Vitality of Emotion

But there’s another piece to this metaphor, which I’ve now made mixed. If the lens is consciousness, what is the lens magnifying? I’ve used this description of objects around the room. We don’t have objects in our heads. We have ideas, thoughts, sensations, feelings, perceptions all cresting into consciousness.

Whether they crash or caress, things come to mind.

We hear a story or watch a movie and feel stirred. We see a puzzle and become curious, if not inspired. We replay a conversation from this morning worrying about how we may have impacted that relationship.

Behind them all is emotion.

That which crests into consciousness are embodied by our emotions, creating the very essence of consciousness itself.

Now it’s worth noting I am defining emotion differently than you may be used to. It’s not a newly considered view. Neurospsychoanalysts are already ahead of the game here. If you’re interested, check out, Mark Solms, The Conscious Id.

For a moment though.

Let’s look at how this shifts the concept of emotion. For example, we often say that logic and emotion are opposite each other somehow. But with this new definition, that emotion embodies that which crests into consciousness, logic is now only an extension of emotion. Using logic is about discovery, curiosity, the desire to understand what is, itself an extension of play and seeking.

How is that not a facet of emotion?

Words themselves become only this cresting of feelings. Even the seemingly meaningless phrase, the quick brown fox jumps over. The lazy dog carries a set of associations of a time and typing class of animals and folktales of the letters in the alphabet ideas flowing and forming into the moment emanating from all these places within.

More than simply things that come to mind, emotion is the bed of our reality and intense emotions bend the lens of consciousness.

Bringing it Together

Bringing these concepts together, we have this magnified Now, a constriction of the Not Now, and a resulting increased power of emotion felt through this lens. Emotions now engaging or disrupting with that much greater power, perhaps that much more deeply felt.

And so here we can return to see how this metaphor can encapsulate this wide variety of problems that we see with a wandering mind.

When we walk into a room and wonder,

“why did I come here again?”

That shift of context was enough to dislodge whatever was in mind, as this work table of ours can feel so constricted.

When we consider what can motivate us, such as challenge, interest, novelty, urgency, and passion, we’re talking about emotions of the now. In fact, any strong emotion helping us gain that consistency of mind can be organizing and empowering care, play lust, fear, panic.

When we struggle with a phrase, “I don’t wanna,” it’s the complex torrent of emotions behind it that envelops our worlds, magnified and constricted as it is. That injured sense of agency, where we’ve hurt ourselves trying, failing repeatedly crush us because they’re our world. This feeling takes over.

When a teacher says, “Hey, learn this thing,” which feels dry and useless, and we ask “Why? When will I need this?” We’re not being oppositional. We’re trying to make it not dry or useless, these harbingers of boredom, an exquisitely painful emotion, that emotional landscape is our reality. We’re trying to connect whatever we are trying to learn with that sense of reality, because otherwise we feel lost.

When we’re not listening in quotes, we may well have an overflow beyond the capacity of that constricted lens, as our associations and feelings bumped whatever was on that table of mind into the gloomy depths, as we flow off into daydream, what some call “inattentive.”

When we fidget, constantly needing to move, perhaps that overflow beyond that constricted area of mind has instead gone off into the kinetic, the so-called “hyperactive and impulsive.”

The depths of emotion can swallow us. Boredom, as I mentioned, is not simple. It’s the depths of despair, this existential dread of wasting our finite life.

As our emotions and experiences can be so powerful, we consciously and often unconsciously devise ways to avoid them, harming ourselves in the process sometimes. We procrastinate.

When we look for a deadline to guide us, it’s not because it’s dangerous, but because the intensity of emotion feels real, anchored in time and stakes that feel meaningful.

When we’re not able to work on a list, the sense of overwhelm, exhaustion, if not anger at past self for writing these damn things can easily blast through whatever our original intention had been.

Distraction, no longer meaningless, some shiny, nothing. It’s a promise of excitement, something that we can get into, something that feels real.

Stimulation is not some meaningless prod. It helps avoid distraction because it gives some part of us a feeling of being present here, a feeling of life here and now. Even if that only looks like a gentle rub of a cloth or twirl of a hair, or playing with that fidget.

With a magnified mind, we see our worlds in great emotional depth.

For some, it begins in this overabundance of play and creativity. For others, it’s about care. For some, it’s about managing shame and anger. For others yet it’s a mix of so many different sensations and perceptions, a distortion of time or beyond well into the myriad, unnamed, worlds within.

And so are we lost in these waves?

Many of us try to counter one wave with another. These force-based methods of work often leveraging negativity and external factors, waiting for the urgency of deadlines, the shame of being told what to do, the prayer that somehow some interest will arrive, and more- all manners of saying, I cannot do things of my own free will.

But before wrapping up, I want to give you one more metaphor, a story of a couple of painters. Bianca Raphaella, a British artist partially sighted and Esref Armagan, completely blind.

Both, not only paint beautifully, but maintain perspective, color, shape, and more.

I do believe there is this parallel with the wandering mind. And not only that, but as there is that power in the magnified aspect of this mind, that once you have a sense of how to guide it, you may even discover and harness a strength, one you didn’t know of or didn’t know you could wield.

It comes from being able to recognize the perspectives with the tools you have with where you are now. It comes from that practice of agency, as I got into a bit in module nine.

We pause and consider, paying attention to those forces within recognizing our options as they are, allowing them time to come to some settled space. And when we do, we reach that height of agency, that place where we can decide and engage non-reactively.

The practice is to find and exercise the places and structures where we can use this.

When I encourage a visit, for example, as I’ve done in other episodes, I do so to help you create that decision space at the Edge of Action. Where it’s as easy to step away as it is to move forward with whatever it is. You can pay attention to the feelings and decide for yourself. Were I to tell you to shove yourself through to “just start,” well, that defeats the entire purpose.

When we feel scattered or exhausted, we can practice what I call anchoring, perhaps using pen and paper to support ourselves in the process.

When approaching something, we can consider the environment, recognizing when we’re trying to make conditions perfect, or we’re about to run down another rabbit trail, or we’re making a good organizing investment for better paths forward.

With more practice, we can better use frustration, overwhelm, and more so that they can work in our favor, almost like tacking with a boat through wind and water.

We can learn how to carry the momentum of a project from one session to the next, so we’re not locked into hyperfocus for fear of never being able to return.

We can learn how to manage the signposts we create for ourselves, whether in apps or lists such that they support our sense of working memory, our short term memory as they are, rather than overwhelm us if not assault the future selves that we write these tasks for.

These and more are all skills, and as skills we can practice them. It’s not some simple checklist of, “oh, here’s the thing to do.”

Similar to any language spoken by voice or other instrument. It takes time to practice.

We pick up one thing, we get good at that, we pick up another and do the same, and we bring them together and lead that process into some second nature. At some point, hopefully we can better understand the waves within ourselves, recognize how to practice our decisions with them, and more importantly, guide our voice and ourselves with and through them.

An Improvisation

for today’s piece of music, I’ll present in improvisation. In some ways it doesn’t have a structure. It flows from one place to another. It can be rather fun and whimsical in its own way,

but perhaps it’ll discover its way into something someday. I enjoy the idea of play for its own sake.

Improvisation is about taking what you have, what structures exist, and then playing with them. Whether it’s a scale or arpeggio or otherwise, rather than having some solid musical structure in place.

But then the question comes to mind, what separates it from chaos? We can certainly break rules, but having a sense of the effect of doing so can make all the difference.

Like a wandering mind, there are still fundamentals. There are still things that exist that we do well to respect. Once we have the fundamentals down, the fundamental skills, the scales and arpeggios and the rest.

We better recognize how they can clear and support paths for our own voice.

This particular piece is called Meandering Improv in E-Flat. It doesn’t really establish itself even as being in a major key until several bars in.

In any case, I hope you enjoy it.

The Magnified Mind

Rhythms of Focus – Episode 14 Show Notes

Key References & Further Reading

ADHD, Neurodiversity, and Focus Variability

Science, Measurement, and Human Experience

Neuroscience of Attention

Emotion, Consciousness, and Motivation

Practical Tools for Agency & Focus

Artists Who Paint Beyond Sight