Most of us spend the day in a kind of mental squint. Eyes locked on a screen, attention pinned to the next task, shoulders slowly rising toward our ears. It's useful. It gets things done. But it's only one way of paying attention, and living in it all day is exhausting.
In the late 1960s, a young psychologist named Les Fehmi stumbled onto another way. He was experimenting with EEG biofeedback, trying to help people produce more alpha waves, the rhythm associated with calm, alert relaxation. Nothing he tried worked especially well, until he asked people to imagine space.
First, what is brain coherence?
Your brain's electrical activity rises and falls in rhythms, measured in cycles per second. Faster beta rhythms go with active, focused thinking; alpha (roughly 8–12 Hz) with relaxed wakefulness; slower theta with drowsiness and deep absorption. Coherence is a measure of how closely two regions' rhythms move together. Think of an orchestra: the same notes played in step, instead of each section doing its own thing.
Les Fehmi's discovery: Open Focus
When Fehmi asked people to imagine the space in a room, the space between their fingers, or the distance between their eyes, their EEGs showed large, synchronized alpha across the brain. Objects pull attention to a point. Space has no edges to grab onto, so attention relaxes and widens.
He spent decades refining this into Open Focus, described in The Open-Focus Brain (with Jim Robbins). His central idea: we have several styles of attention, from narrow (a laser on one thing) to diffuse (a wide, panoramic awareness), and from objective (holding things at a distance) to immersed (merging with an experience). Chronic stress, he argued, comes from getting stuck in narrow-objective focus. Health comes from flexibility: being able to move among all of them.
You can't grab space. And the moment you stop grabbing, something in the nervous system seems to let go.
Sensing space
- Sit comfortably. Don't try to do anything with your breathing or thoughts. Just let each question land, and notice what happens.
- Can you imagine the space between your eyes?
- Can you imagine the space inside your throat, as your breath moves through it?
- Can you feel the space between your fingers, all at once, without choosing one?
- Can you sense the space around your whole body, in front, behind, above and below, all at the same time?
- Can you notice that this space was already here before you asked, and that sounds, sensations and thoughts are all happening within it?
- Rest in that wide awareness for a minute. When attention narrows onto a thought, ask one of the questions again.
There's no right answer to these questions, and it doesn't matter whether you can "see" anything. The act of trying to imagine space, rather than a thing, is the exercise.
Joe Dispenza and the space beyond the body
Joe Dispenza teaches a close cousin of this practice. In meditations like those in Becoming Supernatural, students sense the space around the body and in the room, then keep expanding that sense of space outward. In his framework, shifting attention from objects ("somebody, something, somewhere") to open space and "no thing" moves the brain out of narrow, stressed beta and toward slower, more coherent states. That's a doorway, as he puts it, to changing old habits of mind.
At his advanced workshops, his team measures participants' brain waves and heart rhythms, and often shares striking recordings of brains shifting into highly coherent states during these meditations.
What you might notice
- Your body lets go. Many people feel the jaw, eyes and shoulders soften within a minute or two.
- Pain and discomfort change. Fehmi used Open Focus with chronic pain: rather than fighting a sensation, you include it in a much larger space.
- Your attention gets more flexible. You can still narrow in when you need to; you just stop getting stuck there.
- It works almost anywhere: on a bus, before a hard conversation, or when you can't sleep.