The Power of Concentration

I learned to concentrate the hard way. I grew up in Hong Kong with six siblings. We had four bedrooms in our apartment of about 650 square feet. The rooms were divided by wooden panels, meaning that there was no way to keep noise away. Even worse, the TV was in the living room, and when it was on, you could hear it from anywhere in the apartment.

I learned to read my books and study in high school in such an environment. I developed an unusual ability to tune out the noise when I needed to concentrate. Years later, when my spouse asked me why I didn’t respond to him while reading a newspaper or a book. I told him, “I didn’t hear what you said.”

I knew we had a generation gap when I saw my teenage daughter doing homework and listening to music on her laptop. I didn’t know how she could do two things at the same time.

Nowadays, we talk about multitasking all the time. But according to Edward Hallowell, who studied ADHD and wrote CrazyBusy, we could concentrate on one thing at a time. A recent Stanford study said that multitasking affects our memory and retention of knowledge.

The power of concentration became so real to me when I learned yoga. When we learned the tree pose and found it hard to balance in a yoga class, the instructor told us to focus on one spot on the ground or in the room. Then we could balance more easily.

One day, a yoga teacher said we had to guard our sensory gates. I have never forgotten this lesson. We are exposed to many attractions, distractions, and temptations throughout the day. This happens often in department stores or supermarkets. But this also happens when reading the New York Times online. There are hyperlinks, ads, and links to other articles or podcasts. You can’t leisurely read an article of about five minutes long without making many detours.

I didn’t know that the first 20 seconds of a podcast are so important until I watched some YouTube videos about marketing your podcasts. If the first 20 seconds or at most one minute of your podcast is not appealing, people will tune off and choose something else. Wow, I didn’t know you had to catch the audience’s attention within such a short period. So, podcasters need to have a killer beginning to attract listeners.

How does a short attention span affect teaching and learning? I learned that students only pay attention to 15-18 minutes of your lecture, and then their minds wander off. If we lecture for 45 minutes, they will start googling or answering emails.

Some professors forbid students from bringing their laptops to the classroom. This is too drastic, but I have not found clever ways to stop students from multitasking in the classroom. We should, perhaps, include discussions, group projects, and other activities more.

A most interesting experiment I have heard was that a professor taught a course on great novels with an extraordinary requirement. The students needed to read a thick novel in the library or a room in the school for one day. The idea was to train students to read for a longer span and appreciate the story. I don’t know if next time, when we teach Luther’s Works or the Summa, we should try this method.

Can we train them to slow down if our minds are so busy? Buddhist calls it the monkey mind. In Buddhist meditation, we are asked to breathe in, breathe out. We are to watch our thoughts as they arise. Instead of suppressing them, we would welcome them and let them pass. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh used chanting to help practitioners, and his chanting was so unique as if he were praying for the world, even though I didn’t know what he was chanting, for I didn’t understand Vietnamese.

When I taught students about the demands on our brains in modern life, I asked them to protect their brains, because it is the most important organ. They needed to control their sensory gates. One student decided to cancel a social media platform she was using. Another composed a poem describing how her mind wandered during meditation. Become aware is the first step to taking action.

Our modern devices are created to hook us onto all kinds of apps and distractions. I have had a hard time stopping the notifications of emails, etc., on my laptop. Fortunately, a younger colleague figured that out for me. I only keep the reminders of appointments 15 minutes before they happen. I still haven’t found out how to stop my Android phone from sending me an Instagram or a new PDF alert. I tried to block notifications from some apps, but I still get the alerts!

I strongly believe that we have to add an eighth habit to the seven habits of highly effective people. They learn to develop a habit of protecting their brains and concentration.

I didn’t check emails or listen to music, and I could write this blog in 40 minutes.