Attention Skills
The Role of Attention
Attention is necessary in nearly all our daily tasks. It enables you to focus on the work at hand, learn data, and understand information, written or oral, and think about something. Your capacity to concentrate highly depends on changes in the environment or in yourself (noise, stress, concern, tiredness, disruptive thoughts, etc.). Shifting attention can be made willingly (for instance looking out for something or focus on something) or automatically (a sudden noise draws your attention for instance).
Attention capacities may be really strong if you can concentrate on something by cutting by allowing you to concentrate in an extremely noisy environment, like an open plan office setting. You can also divide your attention between several activities. For instance you can drive and at the same time have a discussion with your passenger. But when your attention is divided on several tasks, it requires more brain resources. Aging implies a decreasing in attention resources and a higher sensitivity to inference, which results in people being less efficient with age, on multiple simultaneous tasks.
Attention is the also brain process necessary for learning. Think about it: in order to learn anything, you have to pay enough attention to what experts or teachers have to say or have enough attention to read a book so that the information and new knowledge can be memorized. Without attention, there would be no new material to memorize or master!
Have you ever found it difficult to remain focused during a long speech or presentation or to solve a problem when there was too much going on around you? We've all been there. No one is able to stay perfectly focused for any long period of time-it's physically impossible. However, while there might be nothing that can keep us from falling asleep in the middle of a boring opera, it is possible to improve our attention capabilities and ability to focus-and HAPPYneuron will show you how. Like any other mental skill.such as remembering or doing math in your head.you can increase your ability to focus and to pay attention if you work on those skills. That is precisely what you will find in the HAPPYneuron program: more than 6 different games, each with multiple challenge levels, scientifically designed to improve your attention and focusing skills.
To fully benefit from these exercises, it is recommended that you find a nice, quiet place to do them-no children, pets, or loud spouses allowed! and give them your full attention. Whatever you do, don't try to rush through these exercises or to do them all in one sitting! As you do the exercises, if you feel your focus start to drift significantly, stop and do something else and come back to them later. Trying to forge ahead when your mind is tired doesn't do your brain cells any good. Ready? Set? Concentrate!
Improving and Increasing Your Attention Skills
It's clear that all these different kinds of attention are essential to our daily lives and happiness, and as a result, each one requires rigorous training. That's what the HAPPYneuron training program is for, and thanks to the varied exercises and difficulty levels, you'll soon be able to boost your attention and focusing abilities!
We've all been through times when we haven't been able to focus on the task at hand or have found ourselves drifting off and daydreaming while something else was going on. But why does this happen? What are "attention" and "focus" exactly, and how do they work? How can we improve them?
Attention and Focus
The terms attention and focus are often used interchangeable, but do they refer to the same thing? Surprisingly, the answer is no. Although attention and focus are interdependent and complementary to one another, the mechanics of each process are significantly different.
Attention relies on the sensory receptors in our brain that process hearing, sight, smell, touch, and taste. Attention corresponds to the way the mind processes an external event (a sound, image, smell) or an internal event (a thought or feeling) and then sustains this event at a certain level of awareness. For example, when you see someone on a stage and hear them singing a song that reminds you of your childhood, you pay attention.
Focus, on the other hand, is a process that requires a higher degree of this kind of awareness. Its role is to make an abstraction of non-relevant data to block out the unnecessary background noise of the people sitting next to you unwrapping a piece of candy or of the heads of the people in front of you. Therefore it can drastically reduce the scope of the field of attention necessary for a given situation. Focusing is a willful act, one that maintains attention at its highest level. These processes are interdependent: the more focused you are on something, the less aware you are of what is going on around you; and if you are very aware of everything that is going on around you, you will find it very difficult to focus on something in particular.
The Various Components of Attention
Attention is a complex cognitive function and is a major area of interest in neuropsychology and cognitive psychology and with good reason. It is absolutely necessary to the correct cognitive functioning of all individuals. As we will describe below, there are several components to the phenomenon of attention.
