Introduction to the Focused and Diffuse Modes

What do you do when you just can’t figure something out?

For zombies, it’s pretty simple. They can just keep bashing their brains against the wall. But living brains are a lot more complex. It turns out, though, that if you understand just a little bit of some of the basics about how your brain works, you can learn more easily and be less frustrated.

Researchers have found that we have two fundamentally different modes of thinking. Here, I’ll call them the Focused and the Diffuse modes. We’re familiar with focusing.

It’s when you concentrate intently on something you’re trying to learn or to understand. But we’re not so familiar with diffuse thinking. Turns out that this more relaxed thinking style is related to a set of neural resting states.

We’re going to use an analogy of the game of pinball to help us understand these two thinking modes. Incidentally, both metaphor and analogy are really helpful when you’re trying to learn something new.

If you remember, a pinball game works by, you pull back on the plunger, release it, and a ball goes boinking out, bouncing around on the rubber bumpers, and that’s how you get points. So, here’s your brain, with the ears right here, and the eyes looking upwards. And we can lay that pinball machine right down inside it. So, there you go. There’s the analogy for the focused mode.

The blue bumper bumpers here are placed very close to one another. See this orange pattern here towards the top? It represents a familiar thought pattern.

Maybe involving something simple like adding some numbers, or more advanced ideas like literary criticism or calculating electromagnetic flows. You think a thought, boom, it takes off, moves smoothly along.

And then, as it’s bouncing around on the bumpers, you’re able to figure out the problem you’re trying to solve, or. The concept you’re trying to understand that’s related to something you’re rather familiar with. So look at how that thought moves smoothly around on the fuzzy underlying orange neural pathway. In some sense it’s as if it’s traveling along a familiar, nicely paved road. But what if the problem you’re working on needs new ideas or approaches? Concepts you haven’t thought of before.

That’s symbolized here by this neural pattern towards the bottom of the pinball machine area. But if you haven’t thought that thought before, you don’t even know how that pattern feels or where it is.

So how are you going to develop that new thought in the first place? Not only do you not know where the pattern is or what the pattern looks like, but see all the rubber bumpers that are blocking your access whatever direction you do decide to move in? To get to this new thought pattern, you need a different way of thinking. And that’s represented here, by the diffuse mode. Look at how widely spaced the rubber bumpers are. Thought takes off, look at how it moves widely, bounces around.

It could travel a long way before being interrupted by hitting a bumper. In this diffuse mode of thinking, you can look at things broadly from a very different, big-picture perspective. You can make new neural connections traveling along new pathways.

You can’t focus in as tightly as you often need to, to finalize any kind of problem solving. Or understand the finest aspects of a concept. But you can at least get to the initial place you need to be in to home in on a solution. Now as far as neuroscientists know right now, you’re either in the focused mode or the diffuse mode of thinking.

It seems you can’t be in both thinking modes at the same time. It’s kind of like a coin. We can see either one side, or the other side of the coin. But not both sides at the same time. Being in one mode seems to limit your access to the other mode’s way of thinking.

In our next video we’re going to see how some extraordinary people access their diffuse ways of thinking to do great things.

Thanks for learning about learning, I’m Barbara Oakley.