Split Attention

Muscle memory develops when you do a physical task often enough that you learn to do it without thinking about it. You’ve learned to perform the task automatically.

Here’s a question for you: who does that task if it’s not being done by the part of you that watches? Could you ask that part to do other things directly instead of waiting for them to get the memo?

Learning to Pass the Task

It’s possible to split a task so that chunks of it don’t have to be done by your conscious / language-thinking mind. Instead, they can be passed off to another agent or part of you. I think of this as “splitting your attention”, but I think that there’s something else entirely going on (more on that at the end of this page).

Physical Tasks

I learned to do this by playing rhythm games. There are a lot of rhythm games that ask your hands to do different things at the same time- one hand might be keeping a steady beat, while the other does some wacky off-beat rhythm. Trying to pay full attention and take full control of both hands tends to end in failure. The tactic that works is asking one hand to keep doing what it’s doing while you handle the other. You learn to move your attention away from the hand that’s doing the same thing over and over, and some other part of you keeps that going while you focus on the less predictable patterns.

You might have something else that works to teach you this skill. Physically, any tasks that ask two parts of your body to do things that interfere with the other’s rhythm or direction might work.

Some ideas:

• Blink your eyes at different rates.
• Tap your hands against things with different rhythms (look into polyrhythms- there’s some good practice material in those).
• Use a drumset or play on a keyboard.
• Point your index fingers. Rotate your left hand counterclockwise. Slowly, try to rotate your right hand clockwise without switching the direction of your left hand. This is ridiculously hard, but it is possible. I find that it’s easier if you move one hand slower than the other.
• Pat your head while rubbing your stomach in alternating directions (if you’re not used to doing that).
• Hum, sing, or whistle a tune while drumming along with a different one (headphones recommended for the drumming song).

Many of these things are difficult. You’re likely to struggle with them at first. Keep doing them until it clicks.

Writing and other art forms can also work well for this if done as a stream-of-consciousness activity. Start writing/drawing/etc. Do whatever the first thing to come to mind is, and watch what happens. As you continue, it should take less conscious thought to come up with the next thing to put on paper. Let it happen and watch as it continues. (The art can be absolutely shitty; the quality doesn’t matter. What matters is watching it happen.)

Mental Tasks

Mentally, there are a few tasks that can also work for this. Some that I’ve tried or seen work:

• Count in your head, recite the alphabet, or otherwise repeat a sequence of thoughts that take minimal effort to come up with. Continue with your day while keeping this in the back of your mind. It takes some practice, but you may find after a while that you’re thinking that sequence without putting conscious effort into it.
• Meditation, mindfulness, self-hypnosis, and other altered states of attention. The part of your mind that actively does the thing can continue semi-independently of the part of you that watches it happen; watch for the latter.
• Make a list of every color/animal/etc. you can think of. When you run out of ideas, imagine moving that thought process to the back of your head and letting it continue back there. Then, get up and do something else for 5-10 minutes, then come back to your list. See if you suddenly get a wave of colors/animals/etc. that you’d forgotten about when you come back to it.
• Throw yourself some simple arithmetic. 2 + 2 = what? Can that part of you do harder math? How much harder? How about while you do something else that needs you to pay attention to it? Can it still give you correct answers?
• Directly ask yourself to remind yourself of something. Think it loudly and push the thought at yourself; something like “remind me that I need to do laundry when it’s sunset” works well. You need an action and a trigger. Wait to see if you suddenly get a reminder to do the thing when your trigger condition happens.

Any Task

Regardless of what sort of task you choose, do the following and see what you notice.

1. Start doing the (ideally repetitive) thing. Keep doing it.
2. Wait until it stops feeling effortful. Let your attention drift for a bit while it happens. Think about other things.
3. Bring your attention back without taking over; notice the thing continuing to happen without your conscious effort to make it happen.
4. Don’t take over the task. It’s more like you’re trying to watch it from closer up. Mentally feel at the edges of it happening. Pay attention to the feelings (physical and mental) of your mind or body while they’re not entirely under your conscious control.

If you’ve done this right, you should be able to notice at least one split in your attention. One part of you is watching another part of you do something. It should all feel like it comes from you, but the you doing the thinking should be noticeably distinct from the you actually performing the action.

You can add two more steps to get an even better idea of the difference between conscious control and splitting your attention:

5. Take over and stop doing the thing.
6. Do the thing consciously. Put effort into it. Notice how the feeling of doing it with your thinking mind differs from when you were doing it without thinking a moment ago.

Do this a few times and get a really good sense of what that split in your attention feels like. Play with it, if you can. How many splits can you maintain? How long can you hold that split while the thinking part of you is aware of it happening? Can you carry on a complex train of thought while still letting that other part of you carry on with the task? Can you do math problems while your hands do something else? Can you draw different things with each hand?

Doing it on Purpose

The above tasks were meant to help you figure out what it feels like to split your attention unintentionally: part of you is doing one thing while part of you does another. What if you could do this at will instead of waiting for it to happen?

If you’re lucky, you’ll figure out how to do this on your own after enough repetition. If not, there are a few things you can try.

• Try any of the above activities, preferably a physical one. Instead of waiting for the task to automate itself, try deciding to automate it. Move your attention away from the task and to something else. Distract yourself just enough to multitask. It might help to imagine that your attention is a camera or spotlight: imagine it moving to point somewhere else. Things still happen, but you’re not focused on them anymore.
• Imagine yourself or your conscious control as light, energy, or whatever other metaphor you prefer. Picture that stuff spread throughout your body. Imagine drawing a line that splits your body at that point, leaving part of you controlling it and part of you cut off from it. Alternatively, try withdrawing yourself from it, leaving space for something else to come in. See what happens either way.
• Play chess, Connect 4, or another simple game against yourself; don’t question one half of the moves that come to you. Let them happen instead. If they’re physically possible within the game rules, then play them. If your body moves or you have the urge to make a move, do it. This may take some practice; you’re still learning to listen to that subdivision of yourself, and that subdivision of you doesn’t always know the rules yet!
• Overwhelm yourself with tasks on purpose. Give yourself too many things to do at the same time, and keep trying to do them. Wear yourself down. Keep going past the point of “I can’t do this”. If you’re lucky, you’ll hit a point where it clicks and suddenly everything is just happening. Notice that point and what changed at that moment. This is not an ideal way to do this long-term, but it might help you find the mental switch you need to press to make it happen.

General Advice

• Splitting your attention into parts will probably change how you understand your mind, even if you’re familiar with IFS or Plurality. A lot of cultures understand the mind or self as a singular, indivisible thing. It’s hard to believe this when you’re watching some other agent in your mind do something without your conscious input.
  • Some folks are used to this experience of watching actions happen outside of conscious action, especially plural groups, but splitting attention within a self is different from splitting it between selves. When you find that you can do things without consciously directing them while still seeing those actions as fully yours, then you’ve gotten the idea. (Congratulations, you’re infinitely subdivisible. Make of that what you will.)
• Be nice. The part of you doing these tasks can stop doing them at any time, and it’s certainly not going to do what you ask it to do if you’re a jerk to it. If it seems to hesitate, suddenly stops, or refuses to take up a task, pay attention to that.
  • Don’t overload it, either. Learn its limits and respect them.
• Be thankful. Even if it sounds crazy, think a “thank you” to the part of you that took up the task. It may not respond in words, or at all, but a “thank you” can go a long way to creating a relationship between you that works out well. Again, it doesn’t have to do any of this.

Theories on What’s Happening

This section is my own speculation- feel free to ignore it and move on if you’re not interested in my ramblings about mental structures.

There are a handful of theories out there about the mind being composed of subagents- these theories range from the theraputic (e.g. IFS) to the philosophical to the rationalist, but the idea that parts of minds can have their own autonomy can be found in a lot of different areas if you do some reading.

Some folks think that brain hemispheres are their own (often competing) individuals- we still don’t know if they have their own consciousness. Others break the mind down along different lines, tying parts to specific mental functions / modules, or identifying parts as adaptive developments in response to varying life demands or traumas. There are a bunch of different understandings beyond these, too. Some of them date back 40 years or more.

I suspect that split attention relies on a top-level subagent (one usually identified as a social or thinking self- the outward, language-using “face”) delegating tasks to other mental subagents.

Moreover, I think that these subagents have their own subagents. In other words, parts have their own parts (and those parts have parts, which have their own parts… all the way down to neurons). This would explain some experiences that play with the intersections of the two. An IFS part can seemingly delegate within themselves, for example, instead of outsourcing it to another top-level part in the system. (Try it for yourself!)