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The ability to focus is an important driver of excellence. Focused techniques such as to-do lists, timetables, and calendar reminders all help people to stay on task. Few would argue with that, and even if they did, there is evidence to support the idea that resisting distraction and staying present have benefits:
Practicing mindfulness for 10 minutes a day, for example, can enhance leadership effectiveness by helping you become more able to regulate your emotions and make sense of past experiences. Yet as helpful as focus can be, there’s also a downside to focus as it is commonly viewed.
The problem is that excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy and make you lose self-control. This energy drain can also make you more impulsive and less helpful. As a result, decisions are poorly thought-out, and you become less collaborative….Continue reading…
By: Srini Pillay
Source: Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus
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Critics:
Attention or focus, is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is the selective concentration on discrete information, either subjectively or objectively. William James (1890) wrote that “Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.
Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.” Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in terms of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, less than 1% of the visual input data stream of 1MByte/sec can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness.
Attention remains a crucial area of investigation within education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology. Areas of active investigation involve determining the source of the sensory cues and signals that generate attention, the effects of these sensory cues and signals on the tuning properties of sensory neurons, and the relationship between attention and other behavioral and cognitive processes, which may include working memory and psychological vigilance.
A relatively new body of research, which expands upon earlier research within psychopathology, is investigating the diagnostic symptoms associated with traumatic brain injury and its effects on attention. Attention also varies across cultures.
The relationships between attention and consciousness are complex enough that they have warranted philosophical exploration. Such exploration is both ancient and continually relevant, as it can have effects in fields ranging from mental health and the study of disorders of consciousness to artificial intelligence and its domains of research.
Prior to the founding of psychology as a scientific discipline, attention was studied in the field of philosophy. Thus, many of the discoveries in the field of attention were made by philosophers. Psychologist John B. Watson calls Juan Luis Vives the father of modern psychology because, in his book De Anima et Vita (The Soul and Life), he was the first to recognize the importance of empirical investigation.
In his work on memory, Vives found that the more closely one attends to stimuli, the better they will be retained. By the 1990s, psychologists began using positron emission tomography (PET) and later functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the brain while monitoring tasks involving attention. Considering this expensive equipment was generally only available in hospitals, psychologists sought cooperation with neurologists.
Psychologist Michael Posner (then already renowned for his influential work on visual selective attention) and neurologist Marcus Raichle pioneered brain imaging studies of selective attention. Their results soon sparked interest from the neuroscience community, which until then had been focused on monkey brains. With the development of these technological innovations, neuroscientists became interested in this type of research that combines sophisticated experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology with these new brain imaging techniques.
Although the older technique of electroencephalography (EEG) had long been used to study the brain activity underlying selective attention by cognitive psychophysiologists, the ability of the newer techniques to measure precisely localized activity inside the brain generated renewed interest by a wider community of researchers. A growing body of such neuroimaging research has identified a frontoparietal attention network which appears to be responsible for control of attention.
A definition of a psychological construct forms a research approach to its study. In scientific works, attention often coincides and substitutes the notion of intentionality due to the extent of semantic uncertainty in the linguistic explanations of these notions’ definitions. Intentionality has in turn been defined as “the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs”.
Although these two psychological constructs (attention and intentionality) appear to be defined by similar terms, they are different notions. To clarify the definition of attention, it would be correct to consider the origin of this notion to review the meaning of the term given to it when the experimental study on attention was initiated. It is thought that the experimental approach began with famous experiments with a 4 x 4 matrix of sixteen randomly chosen letters – the experimental paradigm that informed Wundt‘s theory of attention.
Wundt interpreted the experimental outcome introducing the meaning of attention as “that psychical process, which is operative in the clear perception of the narrow region of the content of consciousness.” These experiments showed the physical limits of attention threshold, which were 3-6 letters observing the matrix during 1/10 s of their exposition. “We shall call the entrance into the large region of consciousness – apprehension, and the elevation into the focus of attention – apperception.”
Wundt’s theory of attention postulated one of the main features of this notion that attention is an active, voluntary process realized during a certain time. In contrast, neuroscience research shows that intentionality may emerge instantly, even unconsciously; research reported to register neuronal correlates of an intentional act that preceded this conscious act (also see shared intentionality).
Therefore, while intentionality is a mental state (“the power of the mind to be about something”, arising even unconsciously), the description of the construct of attention should be understood in the dynamical sense as the ability to elevate the clear perception of the narrow region of the content of consciousness and to keep in mind this state for a time. The attention threshold would be the period of minimum time needed for employing perception to clearly apprehend the scope of intention.
From this perspective, a scientific approach to attention is relevant when it considers the difference between these two concepts (first of all, between their statical and dynamical statuses). The growing body of literature shows empirical evidence that attention is conditioned by the number of elements and the duration of exposition.
Decades of research on subitizing have supported Wundt’s findings about the limits of a human ability to concentrate awareness on a task. A significant inference from the Wundtian approach to the study of attention: the scope of attention is related to cognitive development. As the mind grasps more details about an event, it also increases the number of reasonable combinations within that event, enhancing the probability of better understanding its features and particularity.
For example, three items in the focal point of consciousness have six possible combinations (3 factorial), and four items have 24 (4 factorial) combinations. This number of combinations becomes significantly prominent in the case of a focal point with six items with 720 possible combinations (6 factorial). Empirical evidence suggests that the scope of attention in young children develops from two items in the focal point at age up to six months to five or more items in the focal point at age about five years.
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