Most of us think of attention as one thing. You focus on something, or you don’t. Open Focus Theory shows it is more interesting than that. Attention varies along two dimensions: how wide your focus is, and how separate you feel from what you are attending to.
This gives us four distinct styles. Each is recognisable, each is useful, each has its own texture.
Narrow–Objective What most people mean by paying attention. You zoom in on one thing, a task, a problem, a screen, and you remain clearly separate from it. You and the object. This style drives analysis, decision-making, and precise work. Doctors, engineers, lawyers spend long hours here. It is effortful and high-energy. Stay in it too long and you feel it.
People who favour this style tend to be reliable, precise, and calm under pressure. They are the ones who read the instructions, notice the error, and finish what they started. They often find rest genuinely difficult, not from lack of trying, but because their attention, when unpointed, goes looking for the next problem to solve. Life can feel like a sequence of tasks, each completed before the next begins.
Narrow–Immersed You are still focused on one thing, but the distance between you and it dissolves. You are not watching the film; you are in it. You fight alongside the character, feel their fear, lose track of time. This is the style behind flow states, creative absorption, and the joy of a really good book. It arrives naturally when you let go and stop trying.
People who favour this style tend to be passionate, deeply engaged, and extraordinarily good at what genuinely interests them. They remember specific details others missed entirely and can produce remarkable work when the conditions are right. The challenge is that ordinary life, the unremarkable stretches between things that catch them, can feel like a waiting state. They are either fully in or barely present, with very little in between.
Diffused–Objective Your focus widens and you take in everything at once, from a slight distance. Standing on a gallery in a shopping mall, aware of both hands simultaneously, hearing sounds from all directions, seeing the whole visual field rather than any single point in it. Internal chatter quiets down. It cannot be sustained for long, but while it lasts it is a remarkably clear kind of awareness.
People who favour this style tend to be strategic, pattern-oriented, and good at seeing what is coming before others have noticed it. They connect information from different sources into a coherent picture and often understand a situation quickly, sometimes before the people inside it have finished explaining. The distance that gives them this clarity can occasionally make them appear detached, when in fact they are simply watching from further back.
Diffused–Immersed Wide focus, and you feel connected to everything in the field. Not separate, not analysing, not tracking. Time distorts. Internal chatter stops. The brain, when asked to attend to the space between objects rather than the objects themselves, slows down and synchronises. This is what Les Fehmi’s research identified as whole-brain alpha synchrony, and it is the state cultivated in Open Focus training. It feels like deep rest without being sleep.
People who favour this style tend to be warm, perceptive, and deeply attuned to others. They notice shifts in a room before anyone has spoken. People tell them things they had not planned to tell anyone. The challenge is that absorbing the emotional field so completely can make it hard to know where others end and they begin. They give a great deal, and do not always find it easy to ask for the same in return.
No style is better than the others. Each has its place. The aim of Open Focus practice is flexibility. Being able to move between styles consciously, rather than staying locked in whichever one your life happens to demand most.
