Concentrating on Concentration

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I would have noted John Tierney’s column on concentration earlier, but I was having trouble concentrating.

Okay, no, I just had it come up in my RSS feeds (a constant source of my inability to concentrate). So, now, I’m here to excerpt its most practical advice. Winifred Gallagher is the author of a new book, Rapt, on the science of paying attention:

Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”

She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

Of course, it’s easy to say, not so easy to do. Today, I’m planning to switch between roughly six separate tasks (one of them blogging). Will the quality of all of them be diminished? Errr… let’s say maybe.

Ear plugs, though, are a good idea. I do a lot of writing in coffee shops. While a blend of voices and background noise usually doesn’t bother me (actually, I think it even helps me concentrate), if one loud jerkoff starts breaking through the din — well, then my concentration’s shot. So, I got an application called Ambiance for my iPhone. It uses the headphones to pump white noise into my ears (static, rain, waterfall — whatever I choose from a long list) and helps me get back to work.

What to do about Facebook and Twitter? Question for another day.