I’m on my way to the fridge. My intention: to bring out the cheese. This action is part of a larger contextual frame of “having lunch” which I decided on some minutes ago. Before this, my attention and actions fell within the contextual frame of “working”. To transition from a “work” frame to a “lunch” frame, the sense that it was approaching “lunchtime”, and the sense of my being somewhat hungry, needed to enter my awareness. If all is running smoothly this might feel quite effortless; but it wouldn’t be happening without executive functioning processes running in the background.
In the above, intention is defining the context of my actions and is shaping attention. Within a “work” contextual frame, certain things are foregrounded, others backgrounded, bringing a kind of 3d topology to the field of awareness.
Some things become easier to perceive than others. If the frame successfully shifts to “having lunch, the salience of things like the fridge, the kettle and, of course, the cheese increases and these things are foregrounded. My laptop is still there to be seen but my eyes pass over it, unperturbed. An insight of John McWhirter’s is that it is more accurate to say that such processes involve a filtering into attention of salient material from awareness rather than a costly process of filtering out everything that is not relevant.
How might this look if we add ADHD, and the attendant difficulties with executive functioning, into the mix? Someone might wish to be “working” but be struggling to enter the “work” frame. The range of things they might do and attend to remains flat; undifferentiated. Nothing stands out for attention to take hold of more than anything else – attention is not being shaped such that the laptop is easier to attend to than the ticking of the clock or the snoring of the dog. Someone might try and force their attention to grip onto the frictionless surface of the task at hand. Seen in this way, it is as if the prefrontal cortex is struggling to successfully impose a context onto the flow of experience. In such a circumstance there is little available to counter anything that a promise of dopamine may cause to stand out from the flow. By default ,anything “new”, be it a sound or a thought, is likely to capture the attention.
Hyperfocus is another possibility here. A contextual frame can become locked-in and relatively impermeable. With a locked-in “work” frame, hunger and the passage of time are not being monitored, and someone might keep working until the fact that they are “starving” finally comes into awareness.
A picture of nested contexts or frames suggests itself. A successfully applied frame allows someone to focus on what is salient to that frame whilst also allowing information relevant to wider frames to be recognised. The executive function of mapping multiple contexts needs to be running in the background.
Everything we do can be seen as a frame in itself or as part of a wider frame. My typing is a frame in itself and is also part of the wider frame of writing a blog. The blog is a frame in itself but also part of the wider contextual frame of my professional practice - and so on. For someone to work towards a long-term purpose, they need to be able to focus on the immediate frame they are in but also track that they are staying consistent with the wider frames, the overall direction or purpose. Without such integration of frames, life might feel like a series of side quests, interesting in themselves, but not directly leading anywhere. We can see a self-similarity at different scales: I may ask myself “why did I come into the kitchen?” or “Why did I become an accountant?". In each case I’m searching to recall the larger frame I was operating within.
Whilst the ideas I’m pondering here have arisen as I reflected on working with folks with an ADHD diagnosis, the experience of losing touch with wider context is likely broadly shared. The availability of distraction in today’s world is such that anyone can struggle to keep “on task”. Scrolling down our feeds is like flicking through potential side quests to see which might grab out attention. The demands this places on our executive functioning will be most keenly felt wherever such functioning is compromised.