Why we should pay more attention to our ability to focus

Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A (person) tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided. [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]

An eighth-grade teacher tells me that for many years she has had successive classes of students read the same book, Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Her students have loved it — until five years or so ago. "I started to see kids not so excited — even high-achieving groups could not get engaged with it," she told me. "They say the reading is too hard; the sentences are too complicated; it takes a long time to read a page."

She wonders if perhaps her students' ability to read has been somehow compromised by the short, choppy messages they get in texts. One student confessed he'd spent two thousand hours in the last year playing video games. She adds, "It's hard to teach comma rules when you are competing with World of WarCraft." [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]

The onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts, like triaging email by heading, skipping much of voice mails, skimming messages and memos. It's not just that we've developed habits of attention that make us less effective, but that the weight of messages leaves us too little time simply to reflect on what they really mean. [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]

What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

The sensory distractors are easy: As you read these words you're tuning out (our sponsor and all of the text on the right). Or notice for a moment the feeling of your tongue against your upper palate — just one of an endless wave of incoming stimuli your brain weeds out from the continuous wash of background sounds, shapes and colors, tastes, smells, sensations, and on and on.

More daunting is the second variety of lures: Emotionally loaded signals. While you might find it easy to concentrate on answering your email in the hubbub of your local coffee shop, if you should overhear someone mention your name (potent emotional bait, that) it's almost impossible to tune out the voice that carries it — your attention reflexively alerts to hear what's being said about you. Forget that email. The dividing line between fruitless rumination and productive reflection lies in whether or not we come up with some tentative solution or insight and then can let those distressing thoughts go — or if, on the other hand, we just keep obsessing over the same loop of worry. [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]

That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence, more able to stay unflappable in a crisis and to keep on an even keel despite life's emotional waves.

Failure to drop one focus and move on to others can, for example, leave the mind lost in repeating loops of chronic anxiety. At clinical extremes it means being lost in helplessness, hopelessness, and self-pity in depression; or panic and catastrophizing in anxiety disorders; or countless repetitions of ritualistic thoughts or acts (touch the door fifty times before leaving) in obsessive-compulsive disorder. The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being. [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]

As we focus on what we are learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know, making new neural connections. If you and a small toddler share attention toward something as you name it, the toddler learns that name; if her focus wanders as you say it, she won't.

When our mind wanders off, our brain activates a host of brain circuits that chatter about things that have nothing to do with what we're trying to learn. Lacking focus, we store no crisp memory of what we're learning. [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]

As we read a book, a blog, or any narrative, our mind constructs a mental model that lets us make sense of what we are reading and connects it to the universe of such models we already hold that bear on the same topic. [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]

When we read a book, our brain constructs a network of pathways that embodies that set of ideas and experiences. Contrast that deep comprehension with the interruptions and distractions that typify the ever-seductive Internet. [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]

Way back in the 1950s the philosopher Martin Heidegger warned against a looming "tide of technological revolution" that might "so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be… the only way of thinking." That would come at the loss of "meditative thinking," a mode of reflection he saw as the essence of our humanity.

I hear Heidegger's warning in terms of the erosion of an ability at the core of reflection, the capacity to sustain attention to an ongoing narrative. Deep thinking demands sustaining a focused mind. The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections; likewise, the shorter our reflections, the more trivial they are likely to be. Heidegger, were he alive today, would be horrified if asked to tweet. [Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence]