Hyperfocus

by Chris Bailey

  When it comes to holding information in our temporary memory, though, the magic number of which our brain is capable shrinks from forty to four. Try to memorize the following list of names and then write them down:

  Ardyn

  Rick

  Ryan

  Lucinda

  Luise

  Martin

  Kelsea

  Sinisa

  Dwight

  Bryce

  We can use this concept of “chunking” things together to better remember any number of practical things throughout the day. This morning I was listening to an audiobook while getting groceries—a difficult combination to do simultaneously. I needed to buy three things: celery, hummus, and crackers. When I walked into the store, I visualized a triangle with the location of each of the three items as one of its points. Instead of struggling to remember my grocery list independently, I was able to walk the triangle. Visualizing a meal consisting of the same three ingredients would have done the trick too and is probably an even simpler idea.

  When asked to write the names they remember, some people are able to recall only three, while others can manage five, six, or even seven. The average number, though, is four.

  In this context the number four refers to unique chunks of information. For example, if you can find a way to connect a few of the names into such chunks—such as visualizing a few friends who have the same names as the ones on the list—you’ll be able to process them more deeply and remember more. In my case, I can remember all ten names and still have room to spare. I’m not some supergenius, though—to create the list I picked the names of the ten people I emailed the most this week, which enabled me to effortlessly group them together for memory’s sake.

  Our lives are generally structured around the fact that we’re able to hold, at most, seven pieces of unique information in our short-term memory. You need look no further than the world around you to see evidence of how we organize data into mentally orderly units. Start with the number two—there are countless examples in pop culture that show the power of the pair. We can easily hold two things in memory at once, so it’s no accident that combinations of two are found everywhere, from dynamic duos like Batman and Robin to Bert and Ernie to Calvin and Hobbes. The number three also fits comfortably in our attentional space: we award three Olympic medals and grow up with stories like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Three Blind Mice,” and “The Three Little Pigs.” The list goes on: we divide these stories into three parts (the beginning, middle, and end) and have sayings like “Good things come in threes,” “Celebrities die in threes,” and “Third time’s the charm.” We also group ideas into fours (the four seasons), fives (the five “love languages”), sixes (the six sides of a die), and sevens (days of the week, deadly sins, and Wonders of the World). Even most phone numbers fit comfortably within this attentional limit: one set of three numbers (or maybe four, if you’re in the United Kingdom), followed by another four digits, making the full number easy to hold in your mind as you dial. You have to dig deep to find common examples of groups larger than seven.

  MEET YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE

  “Attentional space” is the term I use to describe the amount of mental capacity we have available to focus on and process things in the moment. Our attentional space is what we’re aware of at any given time—it’s the scratch pad or clipboard in our brain that we use to temporarily store information as it’s being processed. Attentional space allows to us hold, manipulate, and connect information simultaneously, and on the fly. When we choose what to pay attention to, that information occupies our short-term memory, and our attentional space ensures it’s kept active so we can continue to work with it. Together, our focus and attentional space are responsible for most of our conscious experiences. If your brain were a computer, your attentional space would be its RAM. (Technically speaking, researchers refer to this space as our “working memory” and the size of this space as our “working memory capacity.”)*

  We’ll discuss attentional space in considerable depth in Hyperfocus. Given that this space is so small and can hold only a few things at once, it’s essential we manage it well. Even when we’re daydreaming and focusing on nothing in particular, we fill our attentional space. When we focus on a conversation we’re having, that conversation claims our complete attentional space (at least when it’s interesting). Streaming a video while cooking dinner crams both these tasks into our attentional space. When we retrieve a memory or fact (like a friend’s birthday or the name of a song) from our long-term memory, this information is temporarily loaded into our attentional space for when we need it. The space holds everything that you’re aware of—it’s your entire conscious world.

  I find reading—and the science that studies how it fills attentional space—a particularly fascinating subject. If you’re truly paying attention to the words on this page, you have almost no attentional space remaining for other tasks. Just as you don’t have sufficient attentional space to both text and drive, you can’t text while you read—either of these two tasks alone requires too much focus to fit comfortably in your attentional space. At best, you might be able to drink a cup of coffee while reading, but there’s a chance it could get cold if you become too immersed in the text—or you might spill some on the book when you try, and fail, to do both.

  As you read, your brain is hard at work converting the raw bits of perceptual information into facts, stories, and lessons that you remember and internalize. After your eyes register the waves of light emanating from the page, your mind generates words from them. These words temporarily fill your attentional space. You then begin connecting the words to form syntactic units and clauses—the fundamental building blocks of sentences. Finally, using your attentional space as a scratch pad, your brain groups those combinations of words together into complete ideas so you can extract their higher-level meaning.

  Sentence structure can influence this process and slow down or speed up how quickly you read. Much as the world doesn’t combine many groups of data into sets greater than seven, every book is structured to accommodate a reader’s restricted attentional space. Sentences have a limited length and are punctuated by commas, semicolons, and dashes. According to one study, the period at the end of a sentence is the point when our attentional space “stops being loaded, and what has been present in it up to that moment, must be in some way stored in a summarized form in a short-term memory.”

  Your attention is constantly synced to what you’re reading or doing. Here’s an interesting example: you even blink in accordance with where your attention is directed. You normally blink fifteen to twenty times a minute but do so during natural breaks in your attention—such as at the end of a sentence when reading, when someone you’re speaking with pauses, or at breakpoints when watching a video. This blinking rhythm happens automatically—all you have to do is pay attention to what you’re reading, and your brain’s attentional space takes care of the rest.

  WHAT’S FILLING YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE?

  Let’s do a quick check-in. What’s occupying your attentional space at this moment? In other words, what’s on your mind?

  Are this book and your thoughts about it consuming 100 percent of your attentional space? If so, you’ll process it faster and better. Are you devoting a third of your attention to thinking about the smartphone by your side? Is part of your mind planning what you’ll do after completing this chapter or distracted by something you’re worried about? Are these concerns or anxieties popping out of nowhere?

  Directing your mental gaze to what is currently occupying your attentional space can be an odd exercise, as we rarely notice what has taken hold of our attention but spend most of our time totally immersed in what we’re experiencing. There’s a term for this process: meta-awareness. Becoming aware of what you’re thinking about is one of the
best practices for managing your attention. The more you notice what’s occupying your attentional space, the faster you can get back on track when your mind begins to wander, which it does a remarkable 47 percent of the time.

  Whether you’re writing an email, taking part in a conference call, watching a TV show, or having dinner with your family, you’re essentially spending half of your time and attention on what’s not in front of you, lost in the past or calculating the future. That’s a lot of time and attention to waste. While there is immense value in letting your mind scatter, most times we’d do better to focus on the present.

  This is essentially what mindfulness is—noticing what your mind is full of: what you’re thinking, feeling, and perceiving at any given moment. Mindfulness adds another important dimension to the mix: not judging what you’re thinking about. When you become aware of what is occupying your mind, you realize it can come up with some pretty crazy stuff, not all of which is true—like the negative self-talk that sometimes takes root in your head. Everyone’s mind does this on some level, so you shouldn’t sweat it too much or take all of your thoughts too seriously. As one of my favorite writers, David Cain, puts it, “All thoughts want to be taken seriously, but few warrant it.”

  Simply noticing what is occupying our attentional space has been shown to make us more productive. One study asked participants to read a detective novel and try to solve the crime. It compared readers whose minds wandered without awareness with those whose minds wandered consciously. Solve rates were substantially higher for the group that was aware that their minds had wandered. We perform significantly better on every task when we’re aware that our mind is wandering.

  If you pay attention to what’s on your mind—which is admittedly hard to do for more than a minute or so—you’ll notice that the content of your attentional space is constantly changing. You’ll understand that it truly is a scratch pad, with thoughts, tasks, conversations, projects, daydreams, conference calls, and other objects of attention continually passing through. You’ll also find that your attentional space expands and shrinks depending on your mood. Objects of attention fade from this space just as quickly as they came—usually without your awareness. For all the power it provides, the content of your attentional space is ephemeral; its memory lasts for an average of just ten seconds.

  TASKS THAT PAIR WELL

  So what exactly can fit comfortably within attentional space?

  Tasks take different amounts of attentional space depending on their complexity. A meaningful conversation (as opposed to a casual one) fills up most, if not all, of it. That conversation will suffer as a result of trying to cram too many other things into your attentional space. When you leave your phone on the table during a conversation, for example, you’re bound to be distracted by the possibility of incoming messages.

  Not all tasks require this much attentional space. There are two kinds of tasks in our life and work: habits, which we can perform without much thought and require minimal attentional space, and complex tasks, which can be done well only with dedicated focus. Many experts argue that we can’t multitask, which is often true for tasks that require focus to do properly and thus occupy a larger amount of attentional space. But the same is not true for habits—in fact, we’re able to multitask surprisingly well with habits. Though we may not be able to carry on two conversations simultaneously, we can walk, breathe, and chew bubblegum while we listen to an audiobook—the last task being one that will easily occupy what’s left of our attention.

  Habitual tasks like cutting your nails, doing the laundry, archiving emails you’ve already read, and grocery shopping don’t require nearly as much attention as more complex tasks. This makes it possible to multitask without compromising the quality of your actions. Every Sunday I like to lump my personal, relatively rote “maintenance tasks” together—tasks that help me maintain who I am, like preparing meals, trimming my nails, and cleaning the house—and do them all in an allotted period of time while listening to podcasts or an audiobook. It’s easily one of my favorite weekly rituals. You can do the same, for example, on your daily commute: if you listen to an audiobook during that routine, hourlong trip, you’ll be able to read an extra book each week by utilizing the attention freed by a habitual task.

  Habits take up very little attentional space, because they take little thought once we get going with them. As cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, author of Consciousness and the Brain, told me, “If you think of habits such as playing the piano, dressing, shaving, or driving on a familiar route, these are so automatic that they do not seem to prevent any conscious thought.” He says that while habits like these may require some level of conscious initiation, once we begin the behavior, the rest of the process takes care of itself. We may need to make conscious decisions occasionally—such as when we’re getting dressed and our usual Tuesday outfit is in the wash—but after that intervention we can switch back to the rest of the habit sequence without much thought. Dehaene believes that this process is “presumably driven by sequence-related activity” in the brain. The brain even assists when we try to do more than one habitual thing simultaneously, by rerouting blood flow away from the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s logic center—to the basal ganglia, which helps us run through the habitual sequences of daily routines.

  Our attentional space can process even more when we’re working on unrelated tasks. Take sorting and putting away the laundry while talking on the phone, for example. These activities tap into several senses—sorting laundry into our motor and visual senses; the phone call into our auditory sense. Because we use different brain regions to process them, the tasks aren’t competing for the same mental resources. There is a tipping point to attentional space, of course—doing too many habitual tasks at the same time will cause your attentional space to become overloaded. This is especially true if what you’re doing isn’t totally automatic and requires frequent mental intervention. Ultimately the point is this: the number of habitual tasks we can fit into our attentional space is much higher than the number of demanding ones.

  Tasks that we can’t do out of habit—such as reading a book, having a deep conversation, or preparing a progress report for our boss—consume significantly more attentional space, because doing them well demands that we consciously manipulate information on the fly. If we tried carrying on a conversation with our significant other out of habit, we’d probably not process or remember it and find ourselves falling back on statements like “Yes, dear.”

  If you divided your work tasks into the four categories I described in chapter 1 (this page)—an activity I highly recommend because I’ll be referencing it later—you’ll notice that your most necessary and purposeful tasks can’t be done out of habit.* This is exactly what makes these tasks so productive. You accomplish more in doing them because they require focus and brainpower and take advantage of unique skill sets. Anyone can do mindless work out of habit. This is one of the many reasons why distracting tasks are so costly: while these tasks are attractive and stimulating (think watching Netflix after a long day at the office instead of grabbing dinner with a friend), they steal precious time from your most productive work.

  Spending time on our most productive tasks means we usually have very little attention to spare—if there’s any left at all.

  Unlike habitual tasks, we aren’t able to fit two complex activities into our attentional space at the same time. Remember, we can focus only on forty bits of information, and a single complex task requires most of these bits—and on top of this limit, we can process only so much at one time. Since even moderately complex tasks consume most of our attention, we’re at best able to pair something habitual with a more complex task.

  There is no easy way to predict how much attentional space a task will consume—for example, driving will demand much less if you’re an expert than if you’re a driver’s ed student. You’re better able to chunk together information on t
he fly when you have experience with a given task, which provides more freedom to focus on other things. Another variable is the actual size of your attentional space—a measure that’s different for everyone.

  In summary, there are generally three combinations of tasks that fit comfortably within your attentional space.

  1. A FEW SMALL, HABITUAL TASKS

  We’re able to breathe while we run, pay attention to our heart rate, and enjoy music—all at the same time. As mentioned earlier, initiating these habits requires attention, and then another attention boost if we need to intervene to stay on track (or, if we’re listening to music, to change the track).

  2. A TASK THAT REQUIRES MOST OF OUR FOCUS, AS WELL AS A HABITUAL TASK

  Our attentional space is powerful but it’s also very limited. At best, we can do one small, habitual task plus one other activity that requires most of our attention. Two examples: listening to a podcast or audiobook while doing maintenance tasks, or playing a simple, repetitive video game on a phone while listening to an audiobook.