Keeping Focused As you’ve seen, your brain keeps your gaze on the move, shifting your eyes to take in a full scene and moving your head to fix on important-seeming objects. This automatic movement creates a sticky problem. It means that it’s much more difficult to focus on something that doesn’t use the dynamics of sound, flashes of light, and bursts of movement to catch and hold your attention (for example, Gorillas in the Mist the book, rather than King Kong the movie). This difference is particularly prominent in many business environments, where distractions abound and everything you’re expected to do is monumentally boring. In this situation, focusing on a task like data entry is an epic battle between the paranoid parts of your brain, which are constantly on alert and waiting for the cues that indicate danger, and the conscious parts, which just want to get the job done so you can head off to the pub. So what can you do to win the war and keep your attention where you want it? First, recognize what you can’t change. Studies show that it’s all but impossible for the brain to tune out distractions by sheer willpower. In other words, if people are given a task and told to ignore something unrelated, they can’t. For example, experiments show that if you work on a computer monitor that has a background with a slowly moving starfield, the part of your brain that processes motion remains continuously active. Or, if you’re shown pictures of famous faces while working on word problems, the face-recognition region of your brain lights up like a Christmas tree. The same is true when unimportant sound intrudes on your senses—whether it’s a ringing telephone or a foul-mouthed coworker, it all gets processed. This is annoyingly inconvenient, but it makes sense. In our deep evolutionary past, tuning out a sound as loud as a hip-hop cellphone ringtone was likely to get you eaten. With this in mind, here are a few good tips to keep your brain on task: • Don’t try to fight distractions; eliminate them. Unplug your phone, turn off your radio, and close the door to your workroom. If you insist on doing your taxes in front of the television, you’re asking for an audit. It’s a skewed battle because the television has the help of your superior colliculus to reel you in. • Make boring tasks just a little bit harder. Studies show that the brain will start to tune out some superfluous information when it’s wrestling with a challenge. (In the previously described studies, that means the parts of the brain that would ordinarily process the starfield’s motion or the famous faces become less active when you’re struggling with a tough task.) Obviously, this advice only lends itself to certain chores. 74
Chapter 4