Brain training...Finding focus amongst the distractions

Brain Neurons

Every now and then, I carpool with a friend of mine.  When we do, I usually pick him up at 7:30 am in front of the Starbucks off the freeway.  Last week, I happened to arrive 5 minutes late.  In my friend's haste to multi-task a coffee in one hand and a live call coming through the cell phone in his other, when 7:30 am came, he mistook another person's car for mine.  We both shared a good laugh after he told me that he actually attempted to get into the stranger's car while on his cell phone.  The driver of the vehicle was taken back as my friend kept trying to open the locked handle with frustration. Racing through his mind were thoughts of "Why won't Vic open the door for me?" "Can't he see my hands are full?!"  To his credit, the wrong vehicle was of similar make, model and color, but similarities only go so far.  The driver of the other car was a good sport about it all while my friend explained his mental fumble. 

 The world moves at a fast pace.  As technology advances so does the expectation for our own ability to keep up with the fire hose information flow.  Your attention is always on call and in demand.  If not careful, the implications of each moment could misrepresent your good intentions.  Managing the moment isn't a new phenomenon, it's just that we live in a day and age whereby the value of the moment is inflated in relation to the pace at which we move.  Business transactions are global, and the market is always open somewhere.  Yet, no matter how confident we believe we are with our ability to multi-task, a recent finding called the "Cocktail effect" suggests otherwise.

As a matter of survival, when distractions are all around us, we only have the ability to focus in on one thing.  Our selective attention described by the cocktail effect, infers that we are limited to one constructive objective with each moment.  Consequently, our ability to discern what matters most with each moment becomes all that more valuable.  Some may feel like they do just fine with being decisive in a fast paced world, but just moving things along to check a to do list can be even more disastrous then doing nothing at all.  Activity for activity's sake often overlooks the big picture and just leans upon personal biases.  Take a step back and ask yourself "Do I have all of the information for that moment?" Maybe, maybe not. Fortunately, our brains can  adapt to this 21st century phenomenon.  However,  requirements for maximizing the moment is a skill that requires incremental training.

Similar to the an athlete taking the next step up in levels, the brain can learn to adapt to the pace of information if in fact it is being trained properly. When an athlete moves up, their performance is limited in relation to the learning curve it takes to get used to the advanced speed of the game. The jump from high school to college may be fundamentally the same schematic load, but the speed at which a player processes the information exponentially increases as the athletic mean of the competition increases. First experiences for a newcomer to college athletics can make them feel like a squirrel trying to cross the freeway.  Eventually, given time and experience, the game appears to slow down for the newcomer.  Now we all know the game didn't compassionately slow down to accommodate, in actuality the newcomer adapted by becoming faster!  By embracing the challenge, the athlete competed with focus and attention in the moments that were presented, since they refused to be left behind.

While we can all agree that training and athletics go hand in hand, it begs the question "Why do we feel intruded upon when the game of life takes us to a new level?" Instead of leaving your personal and professional moments to chance, take an approach to lean into your new limitations.  As an athlete makes training a norm for their weekly schedule, we too can benefit from a daily regiment of mental training.  A great tool that I recently found is Lumosity.  Lumosity is a mental training website that provides me with exercises that help to train my moment by moment strategic awareness.  Thus far, I've found their prescribed training methods to be fun and challenging as they take me through a variety of mental awareness puzzles and games.  I hate to sound like an add, but in my brief time of using their service, the mental training is making the game of life is appear to slow down for me.  My daily challenges haven't left me, but the intentionality is making me more aware of the flavor and value of the moment.  I will be sure to suggest the site to my commuter friend so that he can excel in his next Cocktail Effect moment.  (Below is a video discussing the findings of the Cocktail Effect.)

Win Today!

Victor