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Tldr
Chris Bailey — Hyperfocus
Portfolio (Penguin), 2018 · 241 pages · ISBN 9780525522232
Attention is finite and narrower than we think. Focused attention is the brain’s most productive mode, scatterfocus its most creative, and habits are what keep the small stuff from eating the limited space.
The limits of attention
- First, there’s a finite limit to how many things we can focus on. That limit is smaller than you might think. If we could actually focus on more tasks simultaneously, we’d be able to do far more in the moment: memorizing someone’s phone number while playing the piano, carrying on a conversation with two people, and responding to an email on our phone. Realistically we can, at most, do one or two of these things well at the same time.
- Habits take up very little attentional space, because they take little thought once we get going with them.
- Filling your attentional space with too many tasks can make you feel unsettled.
Multitasking changes the brain
When we multitask, we even process our work with an entirely different part of our brain. Take studying as an example. As Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford, explained to me:
“When we learn while we multitask, we rely more heavily on the basal ganglia, a brain system that’s involved in the learning of skills and habits.” However, “when we encode information in a more focused state, we rely more heavily on our brain’s hippocampus, which actually lets us store and recall the information.”
- In studies of typing, the more distracted participants were, the slower they typed and the more mistakes they made. When doing such habitual tasks, it’s best to not focus completely on what you’re doing.
Hyperfocus and scatterfocus
Just as hyperfocus is your brain’s most productive mode, scatterfocus is its most creative.
Selected highlights
“There’s a finite limit to how many things we can focus on. That limit is smaller than you might think.”
“Habits take up very little attentional space, because they take little thought once we get going with them.”
“Just as hyperfocus is your brain’s most productive mode, scatterfocus is its most creative.”