Almost every useful feature of your brain begins with attention. Attention determines what you are conscious of at any given moment, and so controlling it is just about the most important thing that the brain can do.
To make any sense of the world around us we need to filter out almost everything and focus solely on what is relevant. Not only that, but focused attention is essential for learning or memorising. So it follows that if you can boost your ability to pay attention, you can improve at almost anything.
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In simple terms, the brain has two attention systems. One, the 鈥渂ottom-up鈥� system, automatically snaps awareness to potentially important new information, such as moving objects, sudden noises or sensations of touch. This system is fast, unconscious and always on (at least when you are awake).
The other, the 鈥渢op down鈥� system, is deliberate, focused attention, which zooms in on whatever we need to think about and, hopefully, stays there long enough to get the job done. This is the form of attention that is useful for doing tasks that require concentration.
Unfortunately distractibility comes as both a bug and a design feature. Top-down attention requires effort and so is prone to losing focus, or being rudely interrupted by the bottom-up system.
鈥淭op-down attention is prone to losing focus, or being rudely interrupted鈥�
The good news is that we can tweak our attention settings to stay focused more easily. As well as cutting down on bottom-up distractions by turning off email notifications, putting your phone on silent and so on, Nilli Lavie, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, suggests actually giving your brain more to do.
Lavie鈥檚 work has shown that better control of top-down attention comes not by reducing the number of inputs, but by increasing them. Her load theory says that once the brain reaches its limit of sensory processing, it can鈥檛 take anything else in, including distractions.
This seems to work for both distractions and mind wandering, says Lavie. In real life, she suggests thinking about adding visual aspects to a task that make it more attention-grabbing without making it more difficult 鈥� putting a colourful border around a blank document and making the bit you are working on purple, perhaps. It works with all the senses, she says, so choosing somewhere with a bit of background noise might also help.
There are also signs that cognitive training might help. Researchers working with people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and brain injuries have found that cognitive training, combined with non-invasive magnetic brain stimulation, can improve focus on a task that needs sustained attention ().
Wider studies are under way, and initial results seem to suggest that the right kind of brain training could help more or less anyone.
While we wait, the next best option is learning to chill out in exactly the right way. Long-term meditators have been , while other studies have found that attention test scores improved after a short course of meditation. So learning to focus better may be as simple as making time to sit still and focus on not very much.
Read more: 鈥�Mind expanding: 7 ways to fine-tune your brain鈥�
