Wanna Double Your Attention Span?
What's The #1 Secret of Personal Productivity (Success)?
How Can You Get More of it?
Speed Reading is your unique tool for beating the competition.
Let's cut to the chase ' kids today have the Attention Span of a Texas mosquito,
while Text-Messaging, Video-Games, TV reality shows, are destroying what little of
their brain they have left.
Not your kids of course, but the rest of their misbegotten generation.
Our generation who did not grow up with Virtual-Reality Videos, six-hours
of daily TV, and staying in touch with their friends every second of the day, are
doing just fine, thank you very much. Aren't we lucky our computer was a
add-subtract, multiply-dividing calculator?
Scientific Facts
Both kids and adults, from age 6, college, and in their career, have an average
Attention Span of 18 minutes, then painful descending for another 18 minutes..
The aforementioned has not changed ' 18 minutes and our concentration begins
to recede ' since 1959 ' 50 years ago. How do we know?
fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery) measures the triggering of our brain structures when we concentrate, and when we get distracted.
What part of the brain?
Your Prefrontal Cortex, on the left Hemisphere, involved in logic, organization, and
planning, and of course language and memory, runs Attention (concentration) Span.
So What
Executives who hold team (corporate) meetings with long, boring reports,
lasting one-hour each, lose their audience after 18 minutes. After that, we
are thinking of the coming weekend vacation, buying a suit on sale at
Bloomingdale's, and ' admit it ' s-e-x.
How about the eighth grade English teacher explaining Shakespeare for a solid
50 minutes, or the economics professor at Hofstra interpreting the Gross
Domestic Product? After the first 18 minutes ' it's in-one-ear-and-out'.
Concentration
If you absorb what's coming, you will know more about concentration that
the next one-million folks. Why bother? Answer: he or she who has the greatest
level of consistent concentration (Attention Span) wins promotions, advances
their career, receives rewards from their Significant Other and children.
Rewards
Humans have two primary orders of business in life: we are hardwired to
pursue Pleasure, and avoid Pain. Our brain requires a flood of Dopamine,
the neurotransmitter (brain chemical) that reward us for concentration.
But when our PreFrontal Cortex is not awash in Dopamine, and there are no
rewards because we are bored, stressed, angry, or sleepy, our Dopamine level
drops and we are distracted and lose our attention span.
Picture in your mind's eye the monkey working to push the Red Lever or button.
Male or female monkey works to get rewarded with cookies or dose of sweet juice. We think we work for the holy paycheck, but it is really for the next Dopamine fix.
Inquiring Minds Need to Know: Google: Ventral-Tegmental Area, and Nucleus
Accumbens, the human reward (pleasure centers). What happens there?
Dopamine!
Boosting Dopamine
a) Stand up, walk around and do a quick exercise, and your brain takes in more
oxygen. We use a strategy that takes 60 seconds called 'Breathe, stretch, shake,
and let-it-go!' It helps raise the level of Dopamine.
b) Eat a small apple, drink some fruit juice, or a Granola Bar, and you provide your body with Glucose, sugar that enters your bloodstream for energy renewal. Within minutes, your brain is in Attention mode, and Dopamine is flowing again.
Stress
When we are rejected by associates or superiors at work, or have a bitter argument with our Significant Other or family, get caught in traffic, we lose our concentration span to stress. When it happens daily, it becomes chronic stress and it is serious.
Two brain chemicals are released by stress negatively affecting your entire body and mind. One is Cortisol: called the Stress Hormone, and its sidekick, Two, Norepinephrine (adrenaline) both cause Dopamine to cease flowing.
These two cause Hyperfocus (Fight-or-Flight), and we cannot concentrate on what we were originally doing. We suffer Analysis-Paralysis until the Dopamine rewards us.
Fighting Stress
If you can stop for five minutes to sit-down and meditate, you can extinguish the
stress symptoms. Close your eyes and your brain moves into Alpha Hz (brainwave
Rhythms).
Another practical strategy is focusing your mind on your own face. Get a mirror.
When we are chronically stressed, we sustain a lack of Dopamine, hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), and don't laugh resulting in a negative posture and facial expression. We lose our ability to Smile ' specifically a Duchenne Smile.
If you concentrate for 60 seconds on creating and maintaining a Duchenne Smile
on your puss ' the Stress dissipates, and your ParaSympathetic Nervous System
releases Acetylcholine to counteract the adrenaline and cortisol. Like System Restore on your computer.
Forget the science and remember a Duchenne Smile means to exercise the muscles
at the sides of your teeth (social smile), and add the muscles lateral to both eyes.
You eyes have to get crinkly and twinkle (crow's feet), together with showing
your sparkling teeth. Think it's easy? See how long you can maintain a authentic,
real, and genuine smile. You can build up to 30, then 60 seconds.
Why?
Smiling releases positive brain chemicals into your bloodstream. Yes, really. When you READ the word S-m-i-l-e, see someone else smiling, or mentally imagine anyone, even a dog ' smiling ' you feel better and juiced up for better concentration. Google: endorphins, and opioids.
Google: Action Verbs, and Memory Neurons. It's all about human Empathy.
Monkey see, monkey do.
More later, See ya,
Endwords: would you be more competitive if you could read-and-remember
three (3) books, articles and reports, in the time your peers can hardly finish one?
Speed Reading rules.
copyright © 2009 H. Bernard Wechsler
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