An article by John Tierney from the NYT titled “Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration” notes the work of Winifred Gallagher and her book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Penguin Press, 2009. Her research and insight is important to what we are doing because it helps pierce through layers of negative thinking, the constant buzz of noise, and an avalanche of information coming at us everyday. I spend most of my time trying to get people focused or to stay focused on the task(s) at hand in an effort to get them to make better decisions and shift. The concept of choice is central to achieving focus. If we understand the choices we are making, not viewing our lives as happening to us, then we are clearer, having a better chance at success. It is not that there is so much negativity, in reality there is, or that there is too much information, we know this to be true. We choose to engage too much, not deciding what is or is not worth our time, effort, and attention. Here is an excerpt:

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.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

And, here is Winifred Gallagher. Look through the different clips of this lecture and interview for what interests you, or watch the whole video. I find my own perspective and work with clients is closely aligned to what she shares, it’s worth your time, effort, and attention:

Hat tip to Maggie Jackson for this NYT article I missed when it came out and more importantly for her pioneering work in this field and her book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. In her post titled “Tuning Out – The Social Politics of Distraction” she comments on the article by John Tierney where he references/quotes Winifred Gallagher. Here is the conclusion of Maggie Jackson’s response:

There are times to tune out the world, of course, but a much better way to pushback on our climate of distraction is to find ways to respect one another’s right to focus, as well as to strengthen our own skills of attention. No ear plugs can do that.

I think this is true and again gets back to the idea of choice when it comes to focus, but adds the fundamental elements of an awareness of others and the respect for personal, virtual, and physical communal spaces. As boundaries are being blurred and crossed through new technologies, which includes social media, ear plugs and meditation will not be enough, although at times they can help. I would propose that we need to move into the age of discernment where we train ourselves to filter through and tune out what we do not need or what does not belong to us, narrowing our choices through discipline, allowing others to do the same. Here is Maggie Jackson making her point:

What she says here is so vital to our understanding of the anxiety we feel in age of seemingly limitless options, or what she calls “optionality” saying “optionality means you never actually have to be satisfied with the limitations of anything or anyone, but that is highly corrosive to human life.” We find out who we are, where our boundaries lie, the value of the choices we make, through our limitations. We cannot choose everything and everyone. This is not only unsustainable it is self and communally destructive. As Maggie Jackson suggests, so many options affects our capacity to go deeper. In order to have deep relationships, community, and knowledge that is lasting we have to choose something or someone. In a time where it feels like we have all the choices in the world, believing this is true and continuously acting on it can lead to our individual and collective destruction.