Your brain is the most powerful yet the most sensitive part of your body. It captures your entire intellectual identity. The catalyst and inhibitors for this strong innovation of nature is attention and distraction, respectively.
^93bb33The following are notes on attention and distraction.
Attention
- Attention is the spotlight of awareness. It is the element that allows you to navigate information and stimuli.
- The prefrontal cortex controls attention and goal-directed behaviour.
- The working memory, which is your brain’s mental whiteboard, is the part of your focus which stores information.
- Working memory has a limited capacity for both storage and processing.
- Cognitive load refers to the demands placed on working memory and mental processing.
- High cognitive load means placing excessive demands on attention. This leads to fast depletion of attentional resources.
- Attention is a precious and limited resource.
- Attention can be voluntarily directed (top-down) or involuntarily captured (bottom-up).
- In the top-down approach, our goals influence attention. You decide in advance what tasks you need to do, and what your direction and goal are.
- In the bottom-up approach, external agents and stimuli (like a loud sound or external disturbance) impacts our attention.
- Top-down and bottom-up attention often compete with each other all day for different activities.
- Becoming more focused and productive is a function of strengthening top-down, goal-directed behavior.
- We live in an age where attentional demands are beginning to overwhelm our attentional system.
- Adrenaline, acetylcholine, and dopamine are the key neurochemicals that support focused attention.
Attention is not a switch you flip; it is a resource you budget. The practical takeaway is to protect your top-down, goal-directed attention from the endless bottom-up pulls of notifications, and to treat focus as the scarce asset it is. Deep work is mostly the disciplined defence of that single resource.