What is your orienting response?

How to keep your focus and save your time in the long run

What is the orienting reflex?

The year is 2019. You are in a café in the middle of Paris, rue des Rosiers street, and working remotely on a really important project with a deadline approaching. Suddenly in a corner of your eye is some red object. You give it a gaze, and it is a stunning woman in the red dress. The dress is the avant-garde piece of the latest fashion show and you have completely lost focus. You just want to watch her move gracefully and kindly smile at all the strangers.

That is the orienting reflex. It is a mechanism that orients you towards the area of interest, and that happens unconsciously. It is your “searchlight of attention” and directs the focus of your brain to investigate. Usually, it is something you do not expect or somewhat chaotic. Understanding and questioning this behavior through the lens of your values and spirit may give you a way to proper being. Thusly setting in proper order what you are investigating would scale your sense of meaning and save your time for what truly matters.

The orienting reflex (OR) is a complex response of the organism to a novel stimulus. The phenomenon was first described by Russian physiologist Ivan Sechenov in his 1863 book Reflexes of the Brain, and the term was coined by Ivan Pavlov ([1927] 1960) as an interruption of ongoing activity by the presentation of an unexpected stimulus (external inhibition). This inhibition of the ongoing activity, accompanied by somatic, vegetative, electroencephalographic, humoral, and sensory manifestations, was termed as the “what-is-it reflex” by Pavlov. Sounds familiar? It is the “what-is-it reflex” that keeps you awake at night in that two-hour loop of wasting time on your Instagram.

Schematized structure of the functional organization orienting reflex constructed as the general conditional reflex system (following Sokov‘s representations, 1963, 1975).

The purpose of reflex is primarily to protect us and manage a fast response to changes in our environment, for example spotting a cobra in a cave. You will pay attention to it even before identifying it. This gaze fixates your attention where the stimulus is being present. And, it is followed by a decision on what to do with new information. Therefore it is argued that this gaze supports decision-making mechanisms and causing a preferential bias. The orienting response is believed to play an integral role in preference formation. Nowadays, this may be the cause of a preferential bias towards interruptions that encourage wasting time and social media consumption. Specifically, the emotional level of stimulants defined by its level of pleasantness can frequently affect OR intensity of orienting response towards focusing the attention on a particular subject.

“Orientation reflex is what orients 2-year-olds attention to TV screens or mobile phones and makes them watch it. That does not mean they are observing or learning from it. This creates stimulus poor environment which screen give us. “ — Dr. Michael Rich, Founder, and Director of the Center on Media and Child Health (CMCH)

The theory of the OR describes it as a fundamental pre-requisite for adaptive behavior in constantly changing environments. In short, the OR manifests an immediate response to changes in the environment on a physiological, behavioral, and cognitive level (4, Lynn, 1966)

How to manage your “what-is-it reflex”?

With complex behavior like this, it is always good to separate them into solvable small chunks, to begin with. You want to prevent involuntary orientation of attention as much as it is possible and to improve your comparator.

This comes from understanding what is important to you in the long run and what is not. Huh, sounds simple. Right? I made a visual representation of the intersection for observation and named it The flower of life sense.

The flower of life sense 2020, Jovic Anita, All rights reserved

This is for understanding a higher perspective and as a second tool, you can use some tips to guide you towards the sense of meaning.

Tips:

• Make a list of what is in the category of good and bad human behavior for you
• Make a list of people who inspire you
• Create a cross-section of your values and the people you look up to
• Make a don’ts list to prevent wasting time
• Use the timeboxing technique to increase productivity (Google Calendar is perfect to get started)
• Write life goals by category in The flower of life canvas

This would give you the North Star to answer the question during the orientation reflex:

Should I further investigate this and invest my time?

It is a similar situation when you have a reflex response to catch falling/thrown objects with ridiculous speed. You need to calculate in milliseconds whether the value of that object, the angle of moving, speed and the probability of harming yourself is actually worth it. But to do that, you need to have some serious ninja skills. It is the same thing with understanding your orienting reflex. You need to develop the skill of 5–10 sec span of evaluating your pull towards doing something and your probability to fail in creating a meaningful life. Why is that so?

Bad daily decisions would get you stuck, but a gradual improvement would take you far.

For example, to trivialize it: Would a Jeniffer Lopez, with her commitment to a healthy lifestyle, which I am trying to achieve in accordance with my health goals, choose to snack a carrot or this delicious choco crispy muffin that just triggered my orienting reflex?

By deciding to stick to carrots is the beginning of achieving a healthy lifestyle in the long run and respect for your own North Star. The same goes for evaluating if you dedicate time to anything that has caught your attention. You can solve it by awareness of your power to create the collision of emotional attraction towards interruptions and what is really important for your meaningful life in the long run.

The catch is: “You need to conduct yourself honestly, because if you conduct yourself dishonesty than you pathologize the mechanisms that orient you.“ — Canadian clinical psychologist

You can choose to work on this or continue to indulge in contributing money to companies that have built an empire on your poor attention allocation. It is your own responsibility. This would liberate your brain to invest time and energy in what really matters. A by-product of that would be to have a sense of meaning and live a happy life.

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. “ — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 6th-century BC

Where your orientation reflex took you after or during this article? :)

Sources:

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1015820025297
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266824080_E_N_Sokolov's_Neural_Model_of_Stimuli_as_Neuro-cybernetic_Approach_to_Anticipatory_Perception
3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/orienting-reflex-habituation#:~:text=The%20orienting%20reflex%20(OR)%20is,unexpected%20stimulus%20(external%20inhibition)
4. Lynn, R. (1966). Attention, Arousal, and the Orientation Reaction. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
5. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01780/full#B35
6. https://ideas.ted.com/4-simple-exercises-to-strengthen-your-attention-and-reduce-distractibility/

A good read: Science Says These 7 Attention Exercises Will Instantly Make You More Focused and books to improve your focus.