Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration

[groovedaddy]

Imagine that you have ditched your laptop and turned off your smartphone. You are beyond the reach of YouTube, Facebook, e-mail, text messages. You are in a Twitter-free zone, sitting in a taxicab with a copy of “Rapt,” a guide by Winifred Gallagher to the science of paying attention.

The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly.

Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life. It can sound wonderfully appealing, except that as you sit in the cab reading about the science of paying attention, you realize that ... you’re not paying attention to a word on the page.

The taxi’s television, which can’t be turned off, is showing a commercial of a guy in a taxi working on a laptop — and as long as he’s jabbering about how his new wireless card has made him so productive during his cab ride, you can’t do anything productive during yours.

Why can’t you concentrate on anything except your desire to shut him up? And even if you flee the cab, is there any realistic refuge anymore from the Age of Distraction?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tier.html?th&emc=th

[Sequoia]

1. If I have a good book to read I can easily tune others out.

TV too. And then people get mad at you because you're not paying attention to their wonderful and awesome selves, or some lame tv show like COPS. And then there's non-stop yakking. So much so I swear it hurts my ears and my brain starts to buzz like the WARP drive going ballistic and Scotty saying: But Cap'n I can't turn her off!