Focus Attention.
Attention is priceless. Pay accordingly.
Life can be distracting, full of countless details crying out for attention. Some things, though, deserve more attention than others, and the ability to selectively attend to these tasks represents a critical cognitive area.
It’s no surprise, then, that everyone can benefit from a stronger ability to focus. Regardless of whether you’re trying to process the details of a lecture or driving your car safely through traffic, you’re distributing a finite amount of attention over a potentially infinite number of objects. Improving our focus helps us not just when we need to pay single-minded attention to a singular project, but also when we need to effectively manage three or four major tasks.
Whenever we pay attention to something in our environment, we enhance the neural representation of that thing. Attention, in a sense, serves as our brain’s volume control. By turning up your attention, you can get a better signal on the information you wish to process or remember.
Thankfully research shows that cognitive training can improve our ability to dynamically allocate attention and thus sharpen our memory and processing skills. Lumosity.com, in particular, sharpens attention with a variety of exercises, including Birdwatching and Space Junk, which exercise the brain’s ability to distribute attention across the visual field, an important skill for driving. Games like Lost in Migration and Playing Koi, on the other hand, enhance your ability to focus on something for an extended period of time, a sorely needed skill in our fast-paced, technology driven world.
