"The essential achievement of free will is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind."
WILLIAM JAMES, 19th-century psychologist
W
hat skill could be more essential to mental fitness than the ability to concentrate? Concentration, the ability to tune in some things and tune out others, underlies every other skill. It enables you to reason, to think clearly, to drive a car through a busy intersection, to plan your finances, to learn a new dance step, and to solve a differential question. It lets you hear the distant call of a willow warbler above the sounds of rustling leaves and to distinguish the fine flavors in a Bordeaux wine.How did you do with the Two-Minute Mind? Was it easy to con- centrate at first, then progressively more difficult? Did you find your- self thinking about how well or how poorly you were doing? How long a stretch could you hold before something else caught your at- tention?
No matter how well or how badly you think you did in your first try, you probably noticed that, after awhile, your mind wanted to move on to something else. While passive attention — the kind of attention that's involved in noticing movement, listening with half an ear — happens automatically, active attention demands deliber- ate exertion.
The truth of the matter is that your attention constantly shifts. It's dynamic, ever on the move, focusing on one thing one moment and on another the next. It is the nature of attention to wander, recall, and anticipate. This mental movement gives a sense of continuity, context, and perspective to your world.
In this way, attention is like eyesight. Both attention and vision are selective: at any one instant, you see details within the central
portion of your entire visual field. What is at the center of your vision — like the sentence you are now reading — is clear and distinct, and what is at the periphery of your vision — like the rest of the room — is vague until, of course, you look directly at it. Similarly, what you attend to — like what you are now reading — is clear in your consciousness, and what you don't attend to — say, the weight of your clothes — is less clear.
To build up a full picture of what you see, your eyes dart around, set- tling here for a moment, there for another moment, painting in a complete wide-angle image. Similarly, to get a sense of context, your attention moves around, focusing on one thought at one instant, zooming in on something else the next instant. It anticipates, shifts, and moves to get a full perspective on what's going on.
There are definite limits to our attention. We can concentrate only so long on something before our mind skips on to something else. Another limitation is that we can juggle only so many items at one time. To demonstrate this, try the following exercise. Read each of the following series of numbers to yourself. After each series, close your eyes, and repeat the numbers. How long a series can you hold in your mind?
3 5 4 8 4
5 7 9 1 3 2
2 5 4 7 7 0 4
8 5 7 1 3 2 7 0
2 4 6 5 8 4 2 4 5
1 2 6 1 9 4 1 7 2 1 1969
If you're like most people, you may find that juggling five num- bers in your head is manageable. Seven numbers becomes fairly dif- ficult, and fourteen numbers seems to be next to impossible. Psychologists suggest that most of us can carry, at most, about seven discrete bits of information at once. We can deal fairly easily with a seven-digit telephone number, with seven countries in a continent, with seven new people in a meeting. Any more than that and we need either to write things down or to rearrange the information in a more manageable way.
One way to increase attention span is to organize information into meaningful groups. For example, if you think of the sequence of twelve digits as some important dates — with the first seven num- bers, 12-6-1941, representing the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the second six numbers, 7-21-1969, representing the first manned lunar landing, you will probably have less difficulty recalling it.
Because our attention can hold only so much, and because our attention shifts from one thing to another, we must deal with one inevitable consequence: our mind tunes in what we want tuned out, and tunes out what we want tuned in. Our attention wanders.
However, we can use this tendency to enhance our concentration. Psychologist William James summed it up this way: There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time. What is called sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which brings back the topic to the mind. The topic once brought back, if a congenial one, develops: and if its development is interesting it engages the attention passive- ly for a time." The trick is to set up a mental rhythm.
When you have a specific task to perform — it can le anything, mowing a lawn, writing a memo, painting a door frame, listening to a lecture — first decide how long and how well you want and need to concentrate. Then keep your mind focused. If ; ou discover that your mind is beginning to wander to daydreams or distractions, gently return it to the task at hand. Make it a habit to pay complete attention to what's happening, and what you're doing, first for a short duration, and then for longer, and you'll find it increasingly easy to flex your mental muscles when you really nee; them.
The Two-Minute Mind is one of the best exercises to train atten- tion. Curiously, if you begin practicing the Two-Minute Mind, you may discover that the exercise soon becomes harder. This is because with practice you become more discerning of your own attention. You know exactly when your attention is murky and when it's clear. You become more critical and demand of yourself a higher degree of mental clarity. After a couple of weeks of steady practice — say five or ten minutes a day — you'll feel a remarkable improvement in your attention. You will be able to concentrate for longer periods. Your mind will feel clearer, and it will take less time to gather and focus the full hundred volts of mental energy.
To make the basic exercise more interes'ing and more challeng- ing, here are a few variations:
• Place the clock or a watch directly in front of a television playing a sit-com, the news, or better yet, commercials. Try to focus your attention on the movement of the second hand for two solid minutes. Don't allow the television to steer the focus of your attention.
• Focus half of your attention on the motion of the second hand and half on your hands. Split your attention down the middle.
• Place half of your attention on the motion of the second hand and half on a number series. Mentally recite the numbers 2,4,6,8,10,8,6,4, 2,4,6, and so on, juggling both items in your mind. If you start thinking about something else, or if you lose your place in the series, start again. Strive for two minutes or longer.
• Concentrate on the' motion of the second hand with a third of your attention. With another third, focus on reciting a verse, like Mary Had a Little Lamb, or Row, Row, Row Your Boat. With the remaining third of your attention, focus on a num- ber series.