LetterE are bombed regularly with information about the sharp drop in attention. According to its specific data in 2015, Microsoft reported that the average attention length of 12 seconds for the millennium was reduced to eight seconds for the General Z.
And with the start of the new Premier League season, UEFA announced the new “eight -second law” and stated that a goalkeeper could not hold the ball for more than eight seconds or win a corner kick. Random? The law was introduced to prevent waste of time. It may be that the average attention required to kick the ball is an average of eight seconds. And maybe how long the viewers can pay attention when nothing happens.
But how does attention really work? How can we improve it?
Attention is very important. Who has experienced in the middle of the conversation and suddenly forgot what they said. However, what is sometimes lost is that there are a lot of attention, and not all of them are necessarily declining.
The law of football is closely linked to the name of visual scanning. For a goalkeeper, this can scan the field to move the ball to it. There are many studies on visual scanning in football, although the goalkeepers are not much.
In one article, scanning and performance was studied in English Premier League football players. They found that using a ten -second scanning time to give players a little but positive performance.
Other studies have shown that among the elite players, the best players spend more time scanning than others unless a player is close to the vicinity.
Scan is a kind of attention that allows a footballer to take a limited opportunity, where decisions about who should be transferred or where to move in the field must be made very quickly.
This is a kind of “hot cognition” – a social and emotional way of thinking, a bit like a bowel instinct. This is very different from the recognition of “cold” or “logical” which is very different in the decision that footballers make with their managers and coaches, which are analyzed.
In such circumstances, we are likely to use “sustainable attention”, which focuses on something for a lasting period. It ultimately requires mental focus.
Likewise, there are other forms of attention, such as “divided attention” or “alternating attention”, which involves changing attention between different things in a sustainable period. These are usually used for cold decisions.
Different parts of the brain are working when we use different types of attention. Hot decisions include a brain network that includes the front cortex of the brain or orbit, which supports emotional adjustment and decision making. On the other hand, cold decisions include a different neural network, which includes the front cortex of the back brain, of executive functions such as control or inhibition or short -term memory.
Once again we make hot and fast decisions with the first harvests. Again, the attention used is a kind of instant intestinal instinct. Surprisingly, the front of the brain is an important area of the brain that is accompanied by the first harvest.
When we see or meet someone for the first time, we implicitly form the notion of their charm and possibly other attributes. We may adjust this initial impression later using a variety of stable or divided attention, as we learn more about the person.
A striking example of this is provided by Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett in pride and fanaticism of Jane Austein, where the first negative perceptions are formed immediately. Only later they will modify them to positive impression because of more knowledge of the two main characters.
First positive perceptions tend to stick to people. Also, if the first perceptions are very positive, it has been shown to lead long -term relationships, which in some cases may be the effect of “love at first glance”.
Improves the motivation of attention
All this means that there is generally not a brain area in “attention”. It can be improved in one form of attention and worse than the other.
For example, the General Z has the highest daily display time with many daily costs on social media – which requires sustainable attention. So eight seconds are likely to scan visual or surf for something interesting. Young people also spend long periods of listening to podcasts and increasingly consuming audio books, indicating that they can focus for a long time, but they may prefer media that allows them to have several tasks. Therefore, if the content is interesting, motivation can improve sustainable attention.
I have been told several times by mothers of children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that they do not understand why their children cannot focus on their school work when they can spend hours of computer games. The answer is motivation. When enjoying yourself, the time passes quickly and can easily keep your attention for a long time.
It also shows a solution to improve attention domains. We need to do things that need more motivation or fun attention.
Sustainable attention
According to this, this is not just a attention that seems to be reduced. There have also been a number of studies on reducing sustainable attention. So some psychologists argue that lectures to students should be shorter.
However, a study by medical students showed that the information provided between 15 and 30 minutes was called to the best, while the contents have the worst of the worst in the first 15 minutes. So can you hack the attention and design of people’s lectures in a way that makes them better remember the content?
Interestingly, where the student was sitting in the lecture hall also influenced it. Experiments were conducted shortly after lectures to students sitting in front, middle and behind the lecture hall. They recalled 80 %, 71.6 % and 68.1 %, respectively. However, where you decide to sit down, it can also reflect your natural motivation for the subject of the lecture.
Neil Bradbari, a biophysical researcher, expresses a convincing case that the motivation of students and teachers’ passion, along with good quality content and images, the main factors in determining the duration of a teacher are able to pay attention to the audience. It may also allow students to change the attention between listening, observing, and writing.
Choosing content should not be everything about making a cold decision, you also need to consider hot knowledge in your mind and consider what may be more interested in them.
Barbara Jacqueline Sahakian is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Cambridge. This article is published under the Creative Commons licenses. Read Main article
