Neuroscientist: How To Boost Your Focus PERMANENTLY in Minutes

if ever there was a tool that stood to

rewire our attentional circuitry in a

powerful way this seems to be it a

simple practice taking 17 minutes can

forever rewire your brain to be able to

attend better and offset some of that

attentional drift regardless of whether

or not you're a child or you're an adult

whether or not you have ADHD or not the

effects are significant they are long

lasting and they appear to exist after

just one session of this quiet 17-minute

interoception

so let's take a step back and think

about

how we focus and how to get better at

focus and I'm going to share with you a

tool for which there are terrific

research data that will allow you in a

single session to enhance your ability

to focus in theory forever and no I'm

not going to try and convince you to

meditate what we're about to talk about

is when attention works and when

attention falters and what we are

specifically going to talk about are

what are called attentional blinks we do

this all the time and people with ADHD

tend to have many more attentional

blinks than people that don't and this

is true for children and for adults

if you see something that you're looking

for or you're very interested in

something you are definitely missing

other information in part because you're

over focusing on something and this

leads to a very interesting hypothesis

about what might go wrong in ADHD where

we've always thought that they cannot

focus and yet we know they can focus on

things they care very much about well

maybe just maybe they are experiencing

more attentional blinks than people who

do not have ADHD and indeed there are

data now to support the possibility that

that's actually what's happening and

that should be exciting to anyone that

has ADHD it should also be exciting to

anyone that cares about increasing their

focus and their ability to attend what

this is saying is that these circuits

that underlie focus on our ability to

attend and our ability to eliminate

distraction they aren't just failing to

focus that's just a semantic way of

describing the outcome they are over

focusing on certain things and thereby

missing other things and so our

distractibility or the extractability of

somebody with ADHD

could exist because they are over

focusing on certain elements and they

are therefore missing other elements

that they should be attending to so what

they really need is this property that

we call open monitoring now open

monitoring is something typically is

associated with people who have done a

lot of meditation so-called vipassana

meditation or have spent a lot of time

learning how to do what's called open

gaze visual analysis and open gaze

thinking but there's a simpler version

of this that allows us to bypass all

that your visual system has two modes of

processing if you're very excited about

something you're that soda straw view of

the world and you're missing other

things okay that's high levels of

attention however there's also a

property of your visual system that

allows you to dilate your gaze to be in

so-called panoramic vision

panoramic vision is something you can do

right now no matter where you are and I

can do it right now you won't know that

I'm doing it but even though I'm still

looking directly at you I'm consciously

dilating my gaze so that I can see the

ceiling the floor and the walls all

around me that panoramic vision is

actually mediated by a separate stream

or set of neural circuits going from the

eye into the brain and it's a stream or

set of circuits that isn't just wide

angle view it also is better at

processing things in time its frame rate

is higher so this is something that can

be trained up and people can practice

whether or not they have ADHD or not

what it involves is learning how to

dilate your gaze consciously that's

actually quite easy for most people

whether or not you wear corrective

lenses or contacts or not you can

consciously go into open gaze and then

you can contract your field of view as

well there are now published accounts in

the literature of a simple practice done

for about 15 minutes where subjects were

asked to just sit quietly eyes closed

and do what is sort of akin to

meditation but to not direct their mind

into any particular state or place but

simply to think about their breathing

and to focus on their so-called

interception focus on how their body

feels their mind drifted to bring it

back for about 15 minutes

that might not seem like a significant

or unusual practice or that it would

have any impact at all but remarkably

just doing that once for 17 minutes

significantly reduce the number of

attentional blinks that people would

carry out in other words their focus got

better in a near permanent way without

any additional training

there's something about that practice of

reducing the amount of visual

information coming in and learning to

pay attention to one's internal State

what we call interoception that allow

them an awareness such that when they

needed to look for visual targets when

they need to focus on multiple things in

sequence they didn't experience the same

number of attentional blinks and I

should mention not incidentally as

people age and their working memory gets

worse and their ability to focus gets

worse the number of attentional blinks

that they carry out goes up and there

are now studies exploring whether or not

this simple meditation-like practice of

15 to 20 minutes or so of sitting and

just quietly resting and paying

attention to one's breathing and

internal State can also offset some of

that age-related what is called

cognitive decline so what these data

tell me is that regardless of whether or

not you're a child or you're an adult

whether or not you have ADHD or not

whether or not you're experiencing

age-related cognitive decline or you

would simply like to avoid age-related

cognitive decline

simple practice of taking 17 minutes

sitting and paying attention to your

internal State just intercepting

registering your breathing registering

the contact of your skin with whatever

surface you're on

can forever rewire your brain to be able

to attend better and possibly even

offset some of that age-related

attentional drift

now I don't expect anyone to start

meditating regularly

I don't expect anyone to do anything

they don't want to do but I think most

of us could handle one meditation's

session of 17 minutes or so and so if

ever there was a tool that stood to

rewire our attentional circuitry in a

powerful way

this seems to be it and

in addition the ability to engage in

panoramic Vision to dilate our gaze the

so-called open monitoring that allows

the brain to function in a way that it

can detect more information faster

that's a powerful tool as well and the

beauty of that tool is that it works the

first time and it works every time now

how exactly it works is a little bit

unclear nonetheless the effects are

significant they are long lasting and

they appear to exist after just one

session of this quiet 17-minute

interoception which to me makes it seem

like a very worthwhile thing to do for

everybody

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