Concentration
Improving reach, duration, and flexibility of attention
When you solve mathematical equations, do dishes, walk in the street, talk to a friend, or watch a movie, you employ your attention. It is very flexible and adjusts its “shape” to what you interact with, and you use it to a different extent in each case. But the underlying mechanism is the same. Well, probably it isn’t exactly the same, but let’s not dig too deep into theory (it may be unreachable since we still don’t have a general theory of consciousness). Instead, we will highlight three aspects of attention: reach, duration, and flexibility. It’s up to us how we break down the phenomena we observe, and I don’t insist on the correctness or uniqueness of this specific taxonomy.
Reach is approximately what people mean when they say about the limits of our working memory, the 7±2 items hypothesis, and similar ideas.
Duration is simply the time during which you can focus your attention on a specific set of items. Reading a book is tightly connected to this aspect, meditation is the epitome of it.
Flexibility says how quickly you can switch the content of your “memory slots.” The infamous multitasking is the primary derivative of flexibility.
Now, these three counterparts would perfectly fit a trilemma triangle:
The implications are obvious. You can attain the maximum of X only if you give up on Y and Z. The space within the triangle may be non-uniform, both per se and because of any given person’s individual traits. That’s the space for you to explore. But enough theory for today, let’s dive into practice.
Though let me slip a brief note first. There is the notion that not all people perceive things the same way in their heads. This is most probably true indeed, but no one knows to what extent. I’ll proceed with descriptions as someone who sees a pretty much normal apple in his mind’s eye. If you have any variations that would adjust the experience for those having other types of visualization, please comment!
Reach
Arguably the hardest way to stretch your reach is through games that require you to remember long sequences of objects or numbers. One such game is Tidal Treasures from Lumosity. It’s possible to get good at it by employing mnemonic techniques or grouping objects but to take the most out of it in order to increase reach, you should drop any strategies and try to remember as many objects as possible with the raw, unassisted power of your working memory.
There is another technique that primarily targets sensory input channels. Try focusing either on as many 1/ different senses as you can (smell, touch, vision, etc) or 2/ similar objects within the domain of one of your senses: listen to several sound sources at once while making sense of what’s going on with each of those, or pour a handful of seeds on a surface and keep all of them in your attention span as separate objects.
Another Lumosity game that may help you with that is Playing Koi where you should feed each fish in the pond strictly once while said fish are moving around.
Duration
First of all, any kind of meditation helps with this immensely. If you’re meditating regularly, this section certainly won’t teach you anything new. For those of you who don’t do meditation, it’s probably one of the most efficient investments of time you can make right now if you want to progress with any sort of mental practice.
There are tons of material on meditations of all sorts, including my personal favorites: this book (hat tip to
) and this video on jhanas, just to touch the tip of the iceberg. You can do watchful meditation (term uncertain) where you just sit and stare at an object for a long time (described here in more detail). You can be meditative during most of your routine activities or when you’re going for a walk.Finally, here’s an exercise that can be described precisely, something that most meditation manuals often lack. Take a watch with hands (you probably don’t have one at your place, in which case this webpage will help you) and look at the end of the minute hand for, well, one minute. But you’re not allowed to think about anything else. Only the end of that hand, for a full minute. You probably will have to try several times until you get it right, but that simple exercise is totally worth it.
Flexibility
The difficulty with flexibility is that you cannot train it with the same exercise over and over. Anything you get good at quickly becomes stale as a means of increasing your flexibility. The best and most straightforward way is to learn new things all the time. Any exercise will only substitute that for a brief period of time.
Still, you can try: any novel video game (not merely new but one where the gameplay is unfamiliar to you), any exercise from any platform (though I again will refer to the one I’m familiar with, namely Ebb and Flow from Lumosity), and any new software tool that has a rich UI that requires some effort from you (3D modeling is great for that).
At the end of the day, you can try to transform imaginary objects in your head which may be not as exciting but it will train your reach at the same time as you will have to keep the properties of those objects in your attention. First, you can imagine simple shapes: a disc, a square, a triangle — and transform them into each other, changing color or brightness. Then you can go for 3-dimensional objects and, finally, for real-world ones: attempting to transform a chair into an owl may feel like something directly from the Harry Potter universe.
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