On Engagement: Learning to Pay Attention

In an age of electronic and mental distraction, the ability to pay attention is a fundamental legal skill increasingly important for law students and the lawyers and judges they will become, not only for professional effectiveness, but also to avoid error resulting from distraction. Far from being immutable, engaged attention can be learned. More specifically, with an understanding of how the attention system of the brain works, carefully designed mental practice can over time enhance an individual’s capacity for focused attention, not only psychologically, but also apparently gradually altering the physical structure within the brain itself. The result can be an improved ability for law students to focus attention—to stay calmly on what is intended, without being distracted by irrelevant thought or sense experience—avoiding wasting scarce time and energy otherwise lost to internal or external distraction. Ironically, learning this attentional skill requires tempo* Copyright 2014, R. Lisle Baker, Professor of Law, Suffolk University Law School, and Daniel P. Brown, Ph.D., Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Professor Baker teaches property, negotiation, mediation, leadership, and law practice planning, and also serves on the Board of Aldermen in Newton, Massachusetts. Dr. Brown also is familiar first-hand with lawyers as litigators, since he frequently testifies as an expert witness on trauma and abuse issues, including testimony at the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. He is the senior author of Brown, Scheflin, and Hammond, MEMORY, TRAUMA TREATMENT, AND THE LAW (1999), which received awards from seven professional societies, including the Manfred-Gutmacher Award given jointly by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law for outstanding contribution to forensic psychiatry. Also, Dr. Brown has offered multiple courses for Massachusetts judges on performance excellence, including strengthening their capacity for focused attention. The authors can be reached respectively at [email protected], and [email protected]. The authors wish to acknowledge the help of Suffolk Law School student research assistants Laura Black, Michael Canova, Christine Griffin, Narine Karapetyan, and Shannon McGilvreay, as well as Jeanie Fallon and Ellen Delaney of the Suffolk Law Library reference staff, in the preparation of this article. The authors also wish to thank Professor Leonard L. Riskin of the University of Florida School of Law, and Professor Richard C. Reuben of the University of Missouri School of Law, for their helpful comments on early drafts of this article. 338 UALR LAW REVIEW [Vol. 36 rarily quieting the active process of elaborated thought that law students, lawyers, and judges pride themselves on having developed as part of their legal education. In honing this skill, however, a collateral benefit of this practice is also an enhanced ability to be self-aware, hopefully providing law students, lawyers, and judges an increased capacity to respond, rather than just react, to legal problems and the human thoughts and emotions that arise with them. “[A]ttention must be paid.”