It's Never Too Late to Change the Past

"We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us." – Yuval Noah Harari *

In a similar way, our nervous system is domesticating therapy, not us.

Attention – how we direct, use and infer from it – is central to all therapeutic methods.

In 2011, Graziano published his first account of Attention Schema Theory (AST). ✳ It is contested, but has a growing following among cognitive neuroscientists. I am drawn to it as it elegantly connects attention to awareness by postulating that awareness is a product of attention — a model of it. In other words, awareness is a map of attention, not attention itself, although it feels very real to us.

Why is AST relevant to Trauma-Informed Alexander (TIA) work?

Because it underlines the scientific validity of Alexander's declaration:

"All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing."

One thing that convinces me is that you can compare Graziano's proposed Attention Schema in your brain with the already well-established Body Schema brain network. Body Schema, as you may remember, is also in the business of making things up. Phantom limbs are the most dramatic example — you can lose your arm, but if Body Schema somehow doesn't know about it, it will happily create another arm. This arm feels real: you can be itchy or feel painfully clenched; you may even keep reaching for the phone. Yet it's all a fiction. You have no arm.

Graziano ascribes the same eerie modelling qualities to Attention Schema. It can make a "darned fool" of you by using your attention to construct an awareness of something that feels real to you. It may not be. Conversely, you may be putting your attention on seemingly disconnected sensory experiences which have yet to coalesce into an awareness of their origins, as we shall soon see.

Generally, neuroscience categorises attention as coming in two varieties: top-down attention or bottom-up attention.† There is a continual contest going on‡ to decide how the limited resources of your brain will be allocated. Conventional Alexander lessons are all about top-down attention. You "give directions" and this changes your awareness. It is cognitively driven from higher-order areas of the brain.

However, Trauma-Informed Alexander (TIA) harnesses bottom-up attention. This includes letting your attention go to any sensory experience you are having, moment to moment. It is not driven by an agenda; instead, you are drawn into subcortically driven sensory experiences that are not consciously associated with the episodes that may have originally triggered them.

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For example, in Korea recently a woman said that her Alexander practise didn't seem to be stopping her neck pains. We started talking about this, and I noticed she kept extending her hands out in front of her while raising up her mouth (which pulled back her head).

Instead of more top-down attention on her issue — I suggested she hold the gesture she kept repeating and bring bottom-up attention to the sensations it was producing in her. After doing this for a little while, she remarked:

"It reminds me of being with my father at the swimming pool."

Her father had been holding her hands in the exact same position she was now holding them. She was young and had been learning to swim. Her father let her hands go when she had begged him not to, so that she fell under the water. Suddenly her pattern with the arms, and bringing up her mouth for air, made complete sense. It was a moment she was continuing to re-experience, without the awareness of why.

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As sometimes happens when I explore TIA work, I wasn't sure what to do next. So I brought it up during a recent ZOOM session with the Alexander teachers group studying with Betsy Polatin, founder of HUMANUAL Trauma Resolution.

Betsy suggested two clear steps. First, start holding her hands to give her back an experience of the safety she lost. Second, ask her what she wants to do. It appears her father did not listen to her. What does she want to tell him?

This is the way we are now feeding bottom-up attention into Attention Schema to construct an awareness that will resolve her unchecked fear responses in the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). It's not real, but it is real. Echoes of Body Schema again.

As Byron Katie often likes to say:

"It is never too late to change the past."

The power of being able to change a story is something Byron Katie works with all the time. Her work utilises top-down attention. As do conventional Alexander lessons.

So how does top-down attention work when dealing with addictive trauma: are we "domesticated" again by our nervous system, or do we get to have a choice?

NEXT: How TIA Works With Addiction

Stay Tuned.

NOTE

This is the 9th in a series of 12 emails as a prelude to my Trauma-Informed Alexander workshop in London (August 23rd) and New York (October 25th). You can book at the link below. Email me for a discount if you are an AT trainee or financially challenged:

www.atsuccess.com/workshops-2026

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* Harari, Sapiens (2011), Ch. 5, "History's Biggest Fraud."

✳ Graziano, M.S.A. & Kastner, S. (2011). "Human consciousness and its relationship to social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis." Cognitive Neuroscience, 2(2), 98–113. This is the paper generally credited as Graziano's first published account of what became Attention Schema Theory.

† Neuroscience draws this distinction along two separate, mappable brain networks, not just two styles of paying attention. Top-down attention is goal-directed and voluntary — you decide what to look for, and a dorsal frontoparietal network, running along the top of the brain, holds that goal and biases what gets processed toward it. Bottom-up attention is stimulus-driven and involuntary — something grabs you before you've decided to look, via a ventral, right-lateralised network tied closely to the amygdala and insula, the same circuitry that flags threat and bodily salience. (Standard reference: Corbetta & Shulman, 2002.) The distinction matters here because dorsal and ventral are architecturally separate pathways — which is part of why "giving directions" and bottom-up sensory noticing aren't just two moods applied to the same material, but two different routes into the nervous system.

‡ Desimone, R. & Duncan, J. (1995). "Neural mechanisms of selective visual attention." Annual Review of Neuroscience, 18, 193–222. Attention Schema Theory (AST) needs something real happening from which to build its model. This is what Biased Competition Theory describes: at any moment, far more signals — external and internal — are competing for limited neural processing than the brain can handle at once, and nearby or similar signals compete hardest. That competition doesn't resolve on its own; it's biased toward a winner by two forces leaning on it simultaneously — top-down bias from goals held in the prefrontal cortex, and bottom-up bias from raw stimulus salience (a sudden movement, a threat cue, something that "pops out" and wins on its own terms). The two networks named above aren't running in parallel, separately — they're pulling on the same contest from opposite directions, and whichever pull is stronger in the moment is what gets through.