A novel technique of using externally directed visual attention to treat psychological illnesses

This paper puts forward a potentially path breaking approach for alleviating symptoms of psychological illnesses. In this paper, the author would also like to state with supporting evidence that inward attention style plays a major role in the maintenance or even onset of psychological illnesses ranging from as varied as depression to schizophrenia. For the purpose of this paper, the term "inward attention" has been defined as a form of attention where one's awareness is mostly focused on internal cognitive processes rather than the stimuli from the external environment. The term "Self focused attention" is used interchangeably in this paper. The author hypothesizes that a style of predominantly inward attention makes a person extra attentive to inner stimuli (e.g. thoughts, emotions or other mental events) and thus lead to the reinforcement of such cognitive processes in the brain and result in the exacerbation of dysfunctional cognitive processes in the long term. The author would like to emphasize that it is the attention-mediated neurobiological reinforcement of the cognitive process that is maladaptive more than the attentional focus on the subjective content of the cognitive processes. For instance, the experience of negative affect in depressed subjects could be intensified (magnified) by the tendency of inward attention. Hence, such an intensification of negative affect may result in the further neurobiological reinforcement of the cognitive processes of negative affect in the brain leading to higher future recurrences and subsequently resulting in the maintenance or exacerbation of depression. This paper advocates a therapeutic approach of counteracting the tendency for inward attention by using frequent and conscious acts of externally directed visual attention.