Chapter 3: No such thing as concentration
I wandered down along that river last night
You can call me romantic but I say I couldn’t sleep,
Until the first light of day shot me down.
One long day
Cold Chisel
Concentrate!
Go on – try to concentrate.
Right now you are possibly thinking “concentrate on what exactly?”. So let’s say that the challenge is to concentrate on reading and taking out the key idea from this section. That should make it easy, because you can just get on with reading this! Right now, you should be specifically paying attention to the end of the third paragraph.
To make sure you are on top of the task, you should have just skipped momentarily back to the start of the section to make sure the previous paragraph was indeed the third one. You might have been distracted for a moment or two wondering whether one word can really be a paragraph, or even a sentence for that matter. You might have also wondered whether I should have counted the lyric at the start as a paragraph – and maybe toyed with the idea that I was wrong. You might also have reread the lyric and started thinking about it, what it means and why I chose it. Actually, I chose it specifically because it has no relevance to the topic at all, but rather in the hope that it would distract some readers at the end of the fourth paragraph…
Yes, I did just try the same trick again. And interestingly, do you know the etymology of the word “trick”? I don’t, but it would be very interesting to find out, and we should go and look it up at some point.
Anyway, if we are ever going to get through this section, by now you should be back attending to the main text and I promise no more diversions. The point of the last one was simply to show that what we attend to at any given moment is what we can control. What we need to attend to at any given moment will vary by the person and the task. Generally, when reading, the point we should focus our attention on is the unfolding sequential words wherever we are up to. However, when we need to see if a particular point really is the third paragraph for example, then we need to flick our attention a bit wider for a moment and check.
When we are doing some tasks, our attention actually needs to be flicking around to all the things that are correct at that moment. Take driving as a great example. When we are in stop-start close traffic, we probably need to focus closely on the car immediately in front of us and very little else. When the congestion frees up and we are in fast moving traffic our attention might need to be much broader, taking in the whole scene with our peripheral and distance vision so we can anticipate danger or the need to alter our ‘strategy’ well in advance. When someone suddenly pulls across in front of us and brakes, our attention needs to snap back to what is going on right in front of us again for a moment – and we can no longer keep up a conversation until the immediate demand on our attention lessens again (though we may have utilised some easily recalled adjectives related to the other driver’s parentage in the background).
For other tasks, we need to stay focused on the one key thing for the whole duration. That might be just for a few seconds while we catch something thrown to us, or it might be several minutes while we complete some small, complicated task that can’t be put down until complete.
In any of these situations, the challenge is not to concentrate, but rather to keep our attention where it needs to be at that moment for the whole task. That might change from moment to moment as the task unfolds or it might stay put for the duration, but one of the keys to a quality performance of any task is that our attention is just right from start to finish.
If we succeed in doing that, be it for a few seconds or a few minutes, then voila – we have just concentrated.
Concentration itself isn’t something we can do though – it is something that we can only retrospectively say we have achieved. What we actually do is to pay attention correctly for a relevant period of time. All we can control and do is to pay attention to the right thing right now. And then do it again, and again, and again. The only moment we can do anything about is the present. Concentration happens over time, but we obviously can’t pay attention in the future, and we sure as heck can’t go back in time and pay better attention. Put another way – concentration is the outcome, paying attention is the process. Unlike concentration, which gets broken, if your attention does wander or falter for a moment then it can just refocus as soon as you notice it.
Why bother to make the distinction? I think the words we use are important. Asking our minds to “do an outcome” (concentrate) is always going to feel a lot harder and odder than asking it to “follow a process” (pay attention). In fact, I think it is impossible, and if our brain thinks something is impossible it probably isn’t going to be that committed to trying.
If you have trouble concentrating, instead just try to be paying attention to what is important at that particular moment. In the end it will work out to be the same thing, and it might feel much easier to actually do.
The Key Take Out: Don’t try to concentrate, just think about where to pay attention and let the concentration take care of itself.
Everything in one place 