The Attention Economy: Why Your Focus Is the Most Valuable Currency in the World

Ep 112.  Attention in our electronic age is considered the new currency of commerce and influence of the global human masses and we are moving unerringly in the direction of growing electronic interface and dependence that is quickly going beyond what roboticists in the 1970's feared when first positing of the uncanny valley. The crevasse has become a crack on the sidewalk and we have willingly crossed it with little concern for the consequences of growing dependence. Attention however is a human currency of validation and given social worth and value to people and their behaviors that are socially acceptable and in line with our personal values as well as the larger community values. However, in the current political climate and in the past we have seen a trend of legacy media attention on the negative side of human nature and the fomenting of anger, irritability and acting out based on distorted shared political ideals. We are being fed the negatives of national and global tribalism that is distilled to the ugliness of us versus them while throwing out the most generative values of tribal village and that is tolerance, acceptance, kindness and nurturing and care of our neighbors not filtered through their differing beliefs. Let us use our attention in the direction of all the things that are doing well. I encourage you to make your everyday walk an authentic extension of your attention as a currency of kindness. Take care and walk well. 

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 112 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at our local community college. What we're going to be discussing today is going to be attention. And we know that currently with a media heavy existence that we have now where we have not only cell phones, but tablets.

and all kinds of devices, computers that we're listening to, even in our vehicles, wherever we're tapped into the internet, amongst other things. But attention is one of the things that a lot of these companies are vying for, not only for marketing to sell to us, but also just being able to get us to listen to market their ideals by having more eyes on, so to speak. So our attention is currency.

And what I'm going to ask is today, and this is rather rhetorical, so yes, ask yourself this question. What is it that I'm attending to? What are we attending to in the larger sense, including yourself? And also what is it that our nation is currently attending to or wanting us to pay attention to that we're giving attention away and validating? To kick the discussion off, what I'd like to really do is start out with when we're little, when we are children, when we're infants.

when we're neonates and whenever we start becoming toddlers, when we're still little unsocialized savages learning the ways of the social norm by guidance, by example as parents that we leave. Of course, children do as we do versus what we say, even when they get older. And on top of that, what is it that we do whenever we lay eyes on a child, whenever we give presence and attention? We give them life.

We let them know that they're important without saying the words important, even when they're too young to understand that. So whenever we put eyes on someone or something and what they're doing, so to speak, and we've added value, not just social value, but one that has a sense of self-efficacy tied to that. When we learn to repeat and do something that brings the beloved attention of a parent, a grandparent or somebody whom we value or care about.

armando (03:03.318)
Especially if we get older and their opinion really means something to us. Those are the things that we work for. And it's not so much about placating people in the negative sense, but rather we do have a component of not only becoming more and doing better because there is payoff, there's good feeling there. And that's okay, that's healthy. It's whenever it becomes unhealthy and manipulative that we tend to look at it through a darker lens, but we're not going to do that just yet.

But the reason I'm laying the pavement down this way, starting with children, is that we learn not only to give attention, but we also learn what it's like when attention is not given or it's removed or taken away. And often whenever people talk about having love pulled back or taken away in relationship, we're discussing some complex things, but it's very, really a very simple thing to be honest. Whenever we are given attention, we are being validated.

We're also being given a sense of value and also appreciation that grows our little egos that helps us learn how to get along to get along and how to fit within the social norms of whatever group we belong to. Now these things are deeply wired within us because we learn vicariously. I've used this example before and I'll go back to it now. But whenever the psychologist that I believe it was CNN many years back was

watching his wife deliver a baby, had a camera person, his friend, looking over his shoulder and he was doing an experiment. And baby was literally probably a couple of minutes old if that was already in swaddling with his hand and two doting dad while mom was on the table after having delivered the baby. And they were recording how dad was sticking tongue out repeatedly in front of baby. And then baby repeated the same action back. So

Baby now belonged to the larger man that was sticking out his tongue and his tribe because he now looked like him. He was now the little version of the tongue sticking out tribe, so to speak, and increased his survivability, so to speak, if we look at it through that lens. Now that sort of attention, attentiveness, is not necessarily intentional. Baby is doing that with intent too.

armando (05:25.176)
but rather it's wiring. It's something that we reflect back and much of what we do vicariously is picked up without necessarily having to have a really deep thought process involved. We get it directly right out of the womb. So that's a powerful thing to consider. Now let's zoom back out to more modern things now that we're grown up and we're seeing things along the lines of what we're seeing on social media, then we are buying for eyes and attention.

and validation, a social validation of sorts that occurs within self, even if somebody is not there present. And this is a really powerful thing because this is where the influence is being applied, where people are buying for our attention, our attentiveness, our currency, so to speak, of attention that validates what they're doing, therefore marketing and whatnot. But what about whenever we're interacting with each other from a very young age to even whenever maybe

We're in our teens when we're still in school. Those things that we do whenever we're trying on our new social roles to find out not so much who we are, but how we're going to be and aspects of who we are being blind. And we either get the validation and the payoff that says, Hey, keep doing that. You're more accepted or don't do that. Cause so that's creepy. that gets you shoved attention. Then we start learning how to nuance.

and how to cut back things and also how to encourage and grow things and do more of those things, behaviors, mind you, that are going to bring about those things that make me feel good to acceptance. And three, I look in the mirror and now I might even start practicing whatever it is that I'm going to do in the future because I'm trying this out. I don't know. So we're doing basically a social experiment and we are the guinea pig. We're our own guinea pig. We're our own scientists and then

We determined by our tests whether or not we're going to do things or not. And sometimes we're afraid to do that and we may take our cues from others because they seem more bold, more outspoken or just outright more obvious in what they do and seem much more confident to maybe even skilled and social behaviors of practice. We develop that over time. But one of the things that we do throughout this thing without practice per se, because we're born with it. Remember the little baby tongue sticking out tribe.

armando (07:45.782)
is that we have attentive awareness. You can pay attention and we can focus attention, yes. And wherever attention goes, energy flows and therefore you can exhaust yourself in a direction due to hyperfocality that will tire you out. You will burn some serious glucose that way, not unlike working out. But the important thing I'm trying to point out is that there is a measure of attention that is always on. We don't have to turn it on with a switch, turn it off when we're done.

We may turn away from something because we're tired, but our attentive awareness is continuous. It is not a discontinuous thing that is on off on off, A B, A B, black, white, not like that. Our neurology is always taken in information by virtual perception, not only visually, auditorily, tactile, even by the station and olfactory sense. So if you can taste it and smell it, we are getting information. I was having a conversation today with a coworker and we were discussing

something along the lines of in the office where people will use artificial scent generators and some areas tend to be overdone. And it seems to me that the correlation is that they vape and they're insensitive to scent. I don't smoke, I don't drink, but I realized many years ago from just martial arts training and the deep breathing training that we would practice, not just deep breathing, but all types of breathing methodologies for.

certain results sensitize my ability to scent and smell and smell just run-of-the-mill garbage or food, no kidding, but scent as in let's say an animal marking I can actually smell where animals have marked on the air and that's a really interesting keen sense no less but uncommon it seems whenever I shared that that sounded like I was talking about a superhuman skill when in actuality it's a rather paleo human skill that I think some of us have.

either forgotten or desensitized our noses to. But just some things to think about. We have these skills, attention, and attention is something we're born with. An attentiveness that draws in information that we can act on. With a higher conscious mind, of course, as we get older, we're more apt to identify, that's my conscious mind. have feelings and an ability to have an opinion about now. So therefore, I am thinking. I'm doing cognitive process.

armando (10:07.096)
versus at the lower brain level where you are having some cerebral interactivity there going on. You have some areas firing, but not necessarily at their workmaker level of the brain, but all rather autonomic. And that's kind of cool. So what does this have to do with self-regulation and what we're talking about today? Well, we're making a progression towards a larger macrosense. We're talking about the individual microsense, wherever it impacts me and what my attention does.

and what do I do with it and who do I pay it to and from whom do I get it from? And we have the social interaction that values not only attention but attentiveness to certain things and devalues attention and attentiveness to certain things as well. And we get socially conditioned to respond to those things appropriately. So some things to think about about this. What does that do to when I interact with someone else? Whenever I start moving in the direction of the meso sense.

Social workers like that term, as it would have to do more with a social interactive, larger scale beyond the individual's home. And when we're going out in the public, when we're out in the marketplace, out in the policy and we're wearing the mask of the marketplace, are we lying? Well, some would say so. It's kind of unkind to say it that way, but it is definitely something to consider. So we are being disingenuous, not necessarily. It's just like putting on a smile to get along.

a little more effectively without letting somebody know I'm feeling bad because Dallas Cowboys didn't win a game or something, been acting out, so to speak. And I am making fun of that, by the way, to all you sports folks out there. But whenever we're working in the meso sense, that sense of attentiveness is always on, and we tend to draw in information from reading body language to taking in smells and body odors, that sort of thing. Not necessarily somebody that's dirty, but even somebody that's worn perfume.

if they're washed or whatever, all those things are signals, pheromones that are subconsciously intermingled with our air that we breathe will affect us as well. And being attentive to the signals that we get that we may not consciously know why I feel a certain way, we can determine whether or not it is maybe a phormonic type thing. And that is definitely cool to know too, as we get older. But at the meso level, how we interact and what we attend to,

armando (12:29.932)
will also determine maybe the groups that I might go see. If I go to see a theater show or maybe a movie, there is certain etiquette and behaviors that we may follow along. And there are certain ways of behaving that are considered generally acceptable. Notice I didn't say socially appropriate, because not everything is appropriate, of course, pending on context and where you're at and whom you're with. But on top of that, whenever things are socially appropriate and acceptable,

at the larger level and the individual level, they tend not to grate on people, but what is considered acceptable in public may not be something that would be considered acceptable at home, especially if somebody does it and you're not allowed to do that at home because it's not in line with your values and principles. Important stuff to know. So there's some important things that we have to pay attention to here. Much of what we learn in mind, you I'm using the term attention.

And it seems a little excessive, I know, but it's to make the point that when we intentionally intend to attend, then those are things we may be learning and picking up and maybe we'll emulate or even practice like a dance, for instance, to see if we can do the next coolest dance move. And that is something that has not changed in many thousands of years. Tribal level mating dancing, most people don't consider.

Dancing a mating exercise, but that's what it is That's where we go and couple up and find people of the nature that we might want to spend time with that sort of thing and If I call it a mating ritual again, someone may get upset. You know what? That's okay I kind of laugh at it now, but whenever I was involved in it, I didn't see it that way But then I realized three children later. Well That is true. That was a mating ritual. Good God

I got duped. Well, I didn't get duped. I got involved. It was all my fault, but that's okay. have three wonderful sons as a result, but I'm making fun of this whole thing because I think we need a little levity considering where at the macro level, we may be seeing what our nation is doing and we are seeing in our individual locales or our cities and towns and townships and villages and whatnot. We're seeing people getting upset with each other and where is our attention going?

armando (14:49.398)
Not only those things that what I would say are legacy media's wanting us to attend to, but they want us worried. And it shows because those are the things that not only get attention, they get news, but they get people riled up. And there are many people that have been hurt and many people that have been now killed that have been involved with certain rallies and protests and whatnot and done in here in these, these United States protest.

If just as long as it's a peaceful process, you're allowed, that's an extension or a reflection rather of one of your civil rights, the right to free speech. And you don't have to like what somebody's saying, but people are being positioned to be across from someone else that may have a different view that maybe whenever you get done with this, you go and work in the same building. Maybe you work for the same company and we're losing a large sense of kindness.

that's extended once we leave our politics on the field, so to speak. And we're being shown that we're supposed to take this personally and get honked off and upset. And there aren't things that we can necessarily do to change what is going on in the larger national sense. It doesn't mean we're powerless, Mike. But there are a lot of things that are generating unrest at home, tension and upset. And in the field that I work in, often we hear people

going beyond their typical normal upset and acting out and being assaulted and breaking laws and We've lost something there. We're supposed to be able to Tell people what we feel tell them what we believe and do so in a free-speak sense without necessarily Having to resort to physical harm and if somebody resorts to physical activity Because you hear something you don't like or disagree with

Then we have a lack of what this whole podcast is about. That's self regulatory skill, self control, so to speak. don't like using that term, but we need that. We need to be able to control ourselves, regulate ourselves and know what it is that we're seeing. Cause if we're seeing tension and we're going in the direction of where there is unrest and the rabble has been roused, then you're making a mistake in a larger sense because you move in the direction of where the danger is or

armando (17:09.55)
It may not be dangerous yet, but it could occur. Whenever emotions are very high, the Yerkes-Dodson rule shows that they inverted you that whenever heart rates reach about 110 beats a minute, not only like steady state cardio, you're able to talk, but it's almost like you're beginning to warm up to exercise. You get to about 140 beats a minute. This is a physiological aspect that kind of underlies all these ideals, political, religious or whatnot, and personal, interpersonal, and...

We start getting excited and we start losing some of the blood flow, the glucose that I mentioned in my prior podcast that is needed to do the requisite thinking that we do our cognitive processing and reasoning with. Where does that blood flow go? Well, one thing it does, it leaves the frontal cortex, the prefrontal cortex, and we drop IQ. An average IQ across globally is 100 to 105, and we drop about 10 to 14 % on an average stress. So that means that we dropped from

100 to 105 to about 94 to 86 and that's not so great. That means 1 plus 1 equals 2 not takes effort. Now it's required, a focal point is required to be able to make that happen versus just allowing it to roll off your frontal lobe. It's no longer easy. It's still the same thing you know and you've had it down since you were two. But we lose the capacity to be able to do that, the power and the fuel to do those things.

If we get really stressed to wherever it's from 140 to 160 beats a minute, now we're looking at a bigger drop. Whenever we can start getting towards our max heart rate and it'll vary. For some, might be 140, 150 if you're older and out of shape. If you're an elite athlete, you might be getting close to the 180 to 200 red line mark. And regardless of where your limit is, that's where you start seeing the largest drop of up to about 30 % of your cognitive capacity.

That means the blood flows leaving not only the front part of the brain, but your muscles get a lot stronger. You get the pump because your skeletal muscles are now the default option. You're in motion. Motion is the priority. Regardless of how important thinking is, it is no longer the priority and no longer does it have the fuel to do it. It doesn't mean you can't think you can, but very simply, very assumptively, very black and white. And by default, subjective reasoning, things look the way they are. Therefore they must be.

armando (19:37.602)
That is some dangerous thinking to be doing whenever things are stressful and when there's opposition and angry upset people that may be moving in a very abrupt quick fashion or getting really loud or moving around like a beehive very quickly in circles and the noise levels get high and we start not only feeling tension, we might even start participating in that localized tension. So we have to be careful. We're more have to do that.

Some of us think that just because we're intelligent, we're smart, we're educated, that somehow I'd be able to reason myself out of that. Nothing could be further from the truth. It doesn't matter how off the scale intelligent I can't measure it. I'm so smart that they have to guesstimate my intelligence. Whenever your proverbial poop hits the fan and your heart rate goes up and your assumption of safety is not met and you feel a threat or get agitated, you are now thinking like a very basic

paleo level human being. We're not only that, but more apt to be able to physically strike out. And we tend to be more apt to assume things to be the way they look. So we lose a whole lot of power there. This is what we're seeing whenever we see things on the news. And what are we doing? Who are we given the attention to? Is my question. My best attempt at not giving an attention is not watching this stuff.

It's going to continue anyway. There's nothing wrong with being informed, but you may want to limit that. And that's just my suggestion, not telling you what to do. But I most definitely will tell you that the less of that that you consume, the healthier you'll be generally speaking, especially if you chronically consume that. So just some thoughts I'd like to share is that attention for little ones is not only validation, but it's really important to their development to let them know that they're important. And it's still important to us as adults. And we need to remember that.

Whenever we pull attention away, that means we've done something wrong, or someone is trying to make it look like we've done something wrong by making us guilt and shame about things we may not even know that we've done. And it's manipulative. But in the more honest sense, what is that I lend my attention to is my question. And what I'd like you to do is consider this. If currently in this modern time, attention is currency, what can I do to lend attention to those things?

armando (21:57.826)
that are generative, life-giving and loving. My charge to you, and this is something I'm working with every day, is to see what we can do, what I can do as an individual to make my currency of attention, currency of kindness. What is it that I'm doing that I'm attending to? Do I ever give time to somebody or am I ever so in a hurry that, no, I gotta hurry, I gotta get from here to there, versus being able to lend somebody an opportunity, one, to be listened to, two, to be heard in the truest sense.

And three, to have somebody sit or stand in presence with them. Really be there. Not thinking about where you gotta do, what you're gonna say next while they're talking to you, but actively listening, actively being there. So you're an is-be, you are being, and that's why you is, so to speak, and you're experiencing that moment to moment, even as for a minute. Those validations by just providing a little time, one of the most powerful currencies that we exchange and that we gift.

And it is a gift, no less, that not only helps people feel better, but it also lends itself to future kindness being returned to you as well. And it doesn't cost you anything other than a moment and some presents. And those are good things. And it's a wonderful thing whenever we have somebody's undivided attention for a moment, even as for a thank you, maybe it's just a smile. And those are powerful things that we can share. So what I'd like to do is ask you, when is it?

And where is it that you provide the most attention that you don't have to think about it. You just very generously and willingly give. And where is it that you don't that maybe you could do that? That's an important thing. So what does this have to do with self-regulation? Well, I would tell you in a very subtle sense, a whole heck of a lot. Let me tell you why. Because the more we validate somebody, the more we are present with somebody and they feel more at ease. We are helping them reduce

whatever chronic tension they may be experiencing or any acute tension they may be experiencing. A very quick aside, the other day I was picking one of my sons up and he was a little tense and I shared Dr. Hooghman's double sniff technique, the double sniff technique and kind of told him about that and how effective it was with my patrons with whom I share it with and he tried it and he just broke out laughing because the tension he was holding in his chest, was suspending his breath.

armando (24:22.872)
But with a double sniff, it broke that and started getting them into the parasympathetic state. And it was wonderful. He has such a beautiful set of dimples when he smiles. Of course, he's a bearded man. I remember when he was a baby, but I love to see him smile and I love to hear him laugh because it's so genuine and so authentic. And we were all laughing in the vehicle after the fact, but we had a little fun as a result. So these things can cost you nothing out of your pocket money-wise, but they can make the biggest difference in somebody's life.

You just got to be willing to share that. with that, I want to say thank you for listening. Keep mindful. Take care. Don't allow yourself to stress chronically. And whenever you can, share your attention. Validate somebody. Make it a currency of kindness. Take care. Thank you. Walk well.