What to take to save scarce attention? Senior American psychologists say, don't fall into the trap of "overload"

Children's lack of concentration is a headache for many parents. Lucy Jo Palladino, a senior American psychologist who focuses on attention research, has also found in decades of research that attention is becoming the most scarce resource in this era, and deep learning is becoming more and more difficult. In this increasingly efficient information age, saving children's attention also requires some new ideas and methods.

Wen 丨 Edited 丨 Luna

Distractions, procrastination, distractions... Have you ever been angry with your child's attention problems? Especially in the new semester, this question is even more worthy of digging deeper.

Lucy JoPalladino, an American psychologist who has been practicing for more than 40 years, has increasingly felt that in today's digital age, attention problems are not unique to children, and even adults are often difficult to focus - from time to time at work to stop to listen to new needs and respond to new emails; The little red dot on WeChat is not uncomfortable for a day; Buying books is like a mountain, but going home to read is like a thread...

In the book Mastering Attention, Lucy writes that now that human stimulation and anxiety have reached a new level, the staggering amount of information online is simply too late for us to process, the old methods of maintaining attention have failed, and we need new tools.

Lucy Jo Palladino (source lucyjopalladino.com) and book cover

Lucy believes that at a time when the "attention economy" is in vogue, children are constantly facing distractions and information overload, so their problems are not only insufficient concentration and easy distraction, but also more subtle situations where children are too nervous and excited to focus.

Attention is becoming an increasingly scarce resource, and whether or not you can control it has a huge impact on children's learning, life, and even later life.

Sometimes the child is not inattentive

Rather, it is hyperconcentration, cognitive overload

It should not be difficult for you to imagine such a scene:

In the 100-meter race of the Games, after the referee shouted "ready", both the athletes and the spectators became highly nervous, waiting for the moment when the starting gun sounded.

During the preparation phase, the athlete is undoubtedly in a state of high concentration. However, this state is not long-lasting, if the starting gun does not go off, the excitement of the body will decrease, the attention will be involuntarily lost, and the reaction power will also decrease.

There is a special term in psychology to describe the degree to which people remain alert - arousal. Lucy JoPalladino proposed an inverted U-shaped attention curve, which is actually consistent with the law of arousal.

The position of your attention zone in the inverted U-shaped curve (Source: "Mastering Attention")

On the left side of the curve, people receive less external stimuli and naturally have poor attention. Just like when people are drowsy, the degree of arousal is low, let alone attention.

The middle part of the curve is a more ideal state, moderate arousal, and high concentration.

More interesting is the right part of the curve. In the past, every time the problem of children's attention was mentioned, parents always felt that their children were not attentive enough, but in many situations in life, children are actually in the right side of the curve. Don't look at the high degree of arousal of the nervous system at this time, but this will make the child's emotions particularly anxious and tense, but it is difficult to achieve good concentration.

The relationship between attention and stimulation (Source: "Mastering Attention")

This is actually related to selective attention, that is, filtering information. Especially in this era of information flooding, everyone has to process more information every day than before, which makes it easy to feel stress and fear. The information here does not just refer to information on the Internet.

Let's start with an example of an adult. Have you ever popped up with a bunch of chores and new tasks while the deadline burned your eyebrows? An emergency department doctor once shared in a TED Talk that she suddenly encountered a leak in her house before the deadline for her book manuscript, a one-year-old child went into the emergency room, and a four-year-old child waited for her to plan a charity fundraising for her school. Everything was waiting for her to deal with immediately.

At this time, the stress level rises sharply, and the adrenaline level also rises, and the result is that people have difficulty concentrating on one thing, and they are constantly distracted back and forth between different tasks, falling into cognitive overload.

It's the same with kids.

A father shared with the Bund Jun that he originally wanted to raise a baby in Buddhism, but after adding some parent groups, his anxiety skyrocketed. The group shares various resources every day, and asks how to register for various activities and competitions. The children of these families naturally cannot be idle, and they also follow the arrangements of their parents, although they cannot make up for homework, but they also have to "roll" the interest class of sound and body beauty, and there are also "roll" competitions and activities.

The father finally sighed, I really don't know how other people's children have so much time and arrange so many things. Sometimes, parents in the group will also sigh that when they encounter activities and things, their children are too busy and irritable. This is actually a manifestation of cognitive overload.

Image source: Pexels

Lucy also mentions a particularly common, but long-misunderstood, situation: children's procrastination in writing homework can also be due to cognitive overload.

Many parents have reported to Lucy that tutoring their children with homework is particularly irritating. Let him go east, he will go west, and the more he wants the child to sit down and concentrate, the more counterproductive. The result is that the more parents discipline, the more angry they are, yelling at their children, and some also cancel their children's right to play with tablets, but the children just can't enter.

As an expert, Lucy sees children resisting and fleeing on the surface, but in fact because they feel scared and nervous inside. What are the children worried about?

It may be that the homework is too difficult, afraid that I will write wrong and be criticized, it may be that there is too much homework and I feel that I can't finish it, or I am worried that my homework will not be completed as well as my classmates. These reasons may be nothing for parents to say, but they make children feel great pressure.

Some parents are distressed that their children are very engaged in playing games, and learning is boring. In fact, sometimes children are prone to enter the right side of overstimulation when playing games. Like the fear of homework, children are nervous, have difficulty controlling their emotions, and feel particularly irritable if they lose a game or ask them to stop.

The Harvard Business Review once published an article titled "Line Overload, Why Smart People Behave Poorly", which is exactly what happened.

Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell found in his research that when a person struggles to complete a task that a normal person cannot complete, he is in a state of hyperkinesia, and in order to cope with this state, his brain and body are locked in an echoing line.

This includes absolute thinking (black and white), difficulty keeping organized, difficulty setting priorities, difficulty managing time, and constant panic and guilt. In his later books, this condition was also referred to as "pseudo-attention deficit disorder."

It can be seen that children's attention problems have also had different symptoms with the times.

addictive social software,

Make it harder and harder to focus

In addition to selective attention, another particularly important category of attention is sustained attention. Simply put, attention span refers to the long period of attention paid to a particular stimulus.

In fact, everyone should also feel this change from the growth of children: for every year the child's age increases, the attention span will be extended by 3-5 minutes. 2-year-olds should be able to maintain attention for at least 6 minutes, and kindergarteners can concentrate for almost 15 minutes.

Some parents asked, watching children swipe their mobile phones, watch videos, chat when they are quite engaged, why can't they study and can't sit for a few minutes?

This is another attention problem that developed networks bring to children. Brushing the phone seems that the child stays focused for a long time, but in fact this is not the case at all, because this process is not actively chosen by the child, but because the instinctive reaction is used.

Image source: Pexels

The brain's attention has a property that if something novel happens, the brain immediately stops what it is doing and pays attention to the new stimulus. This principle is easy to understand, imagine that our ancestors in the Neolithic period are sitting in a circle listening to the story, when there is a rattlesnake sound behind us, if the brain does not have this mechanism, the ancestors will not notice the threat of the rattlesnake, which is very dangerous.

And this instinct is being abused. Researchers have done an experiment in which the subject's head is placed in front of the TV at an angle (looking at any point next to the TV screen) and waiting for the advertisement to be broadcast. Although the participants were asked to try not to look at the TV screen, this was basically impossible, and the rapidly changing images on the screen were constantly causing the brain's instinctive response.

Now, TV is more replaced by network TV and mobile phone APP, but the principle is similar. It is better to say that once the various APPS on the mobile phone are opened, adults and children are vulnerable in the face of the intelligent push mechanism.

The most obvious problem with this is that it is difficult for people to do only one thing for a long time. Some studies have brought some shocking data:

An observational study of typical offices and people found that employees were disturbed every 11 minutes on average over 700 hours of work, and it would take them an additional 25 minutes to return to work if these distractions were not related to their original work.

An Australian telecommunications company says most employees can only focus for 10 minutes, compared to an average of just 3 minutes for the entire company.

The results of research on multitasking are also not encouraging.

Studies have shown that the average time for students to stick to a single learning task is only 6 minutes.

The University of Melbourne once had 1249 students participate in an experiment in which they studied alone, and 99% of the students logged on to Facebook during the period and spent 9.2% of their time on it.

Stefan van der Stiger, a professor of cognitive psychology at Udel University in the Netherlands, believes that this is actually an addiction. In Pavlov's experiments, mice discovered that when they pressed a button, there was food, and they pressed the button endlessly. The same is true for mobile phones, whether it is a message sent by a friend, a new news shared in the social circle, or a new video pushed by a video website, receiving this information is a reward in itself.

In contrast, the rewards and pleasures of boring learning are not comparable at all. Children who are taken away from concentration by social software and mobile apps day after day pay the price of the ability to clean up irrelevant information is gradually degraded, and the original ability to concentrate and efficiency are gradually reduced.

Attention is strong, and if it is not used, it is weak

Children also need more opportunities to exercise

With so many theories, is there anything there is anything that can help children regain their ability to focus?

In fact, Lucy Jo Palladino's inverted U-shaped attention curve already hints at the logic of attention:

When the level of stimulation is not enough, the brain needs more stimulation;

When stimulation is overdone, the child needs to calm down;

Only when children are in the attention zone can they truly focus.

Previously, Bund Jun wrote about learning methods under the principles of brain science, one of which is very important - the brain is plastic, when we continue to adhere to a habit, new synapses will form, learning will be effective.

The same applies when it comes to exercising concentration. If the child can get used to being in the attention zone, it will strengthen the brain's ability to stay focused; Conversely, if the child is always not concentrated enough or excited, then the ability to maintain concentration will also be weakened.

Lucy has consulted for a large number of individuals and families, and while each case is different, she summarizes several common principles:

01

Self-discipline is the first lesson parents teach their children

A mother once told Lucy that she would decide when the TV was on and when it was off, completely unaware of what was important about her child's own decisions. "Aren't other parents controlling their children like this?"

When Lucy learned that her children were nine and eleven, she thought that the mother had no idea what kind of storm the family would be in the next year or two.

This example is a bit extreme, but it also reflects the problems that many parents have when facing their children: although they want their children to concentrate, they often act passionately and stand on the opposite side of their children. The more one side tries to control, the more the other side resists.

Image source: Pexels

Therefore, the first item in the parent advice, Lucy emphasizes self-discipline.

Just like parents can't learn for their children, exercising attention always requires children to act on their own. Even if children are young, what they need is the role model, respect and trust of their parents.

Lucy once helped a little girl named Sasha, who was smart but couldn't concentrate on her homework. Upon arriving at her home, Lucy found that Sasha's mother was a particularly busy role model – cooking while responding to her siblings' questions and requests. Although she says she is listening, in fact she can't multitask, and as a result, Sasha argues with her brother every day to attract her mother's attention.

And the change is not asking Sasha to do anything, but Sasha's mother first changed her habits. In order to concentrate on preparing dinner, she would ask her brother to play alone for a while. After dinner, she would sit at the table with Sasha, her mother would concentrate on bills and emails, and Sasha would learn to concentrate on homework. The environment at home has also changed from noisy to calm.

Another father also asked Lucy for help, he wanted his son Doug to watch less TV, but the relationship between father and son was tense and neither could convince anyone. Lucy uses the scene where the police issue speeding tickets as an example, the police do not yell, but just write the ticket you deserve in a respectful and realistic manner.

Doug and his father openly exchanged ideas at Lucy's suggestion. Surprisingly, in fact, Doug knew very well that he watched too much TV, and in the end, Doug himself proposed that he would set a time to watch TV. The little boy eventually kept his promise and turned off the TV when the time came.

Lucy said:

There's nothing more effective than taking the time to listen to your child and help him develop his or her own self-control tools. The more deeply he is involved in the plan, the more likely he is to succeed.

02

Rest appropriately, but don't run away from problems

The brain is a physical structure with certain limits, and too much information and distractions can destroy the time and rest it needs, making it difficult to recover. Therefore, rest is also necessary.

However, Lucy made it a point not to let children escape in the name of rest.

Lucy once hosted a boy named Dolly. He is a computer wizard, but since his student days, he has always had a hard time getting things done: looking up information while writing a thesis quickly turns into surfing the Internet, and as a result, he doesn't even finish the beginning by the deadline; When I want to change jobs after work, I was looking up employment opportunities and changing resumes, but I was always attracted by more interesting things, and the deadlines were pushed back and forth...

This is similar to the situation mentioned earlier when some children do not want to write homework. For various reasons, children do not want to start studying and devoting themselves to homework, so they avoid changing the law.

Finally, Lucy had a piece of advice for Dolly: the interrupt power method. In fact, it is a proper rest, but Dolly must ensure that he will return to work after the rest is over, otherwise he will always avoid the problems that should be solved as before.

In the interrupt power method, you must come back within a set amount of time. Then, you must be as punctual as you promised an important person.

After allowing your child to rest, start learning from the content they are interested in; They can also be allowed to leave a little fruit; You can even plan what you want to do during the next break to give yourself a little more to look forward to.

But no matter what, you must be punctual.

03

In the flood of information, insight is particularly needed

In addition to providing specific advice to parents and children, Lucy also mentioned a particularly important ability: insight.

As she said, times are changing, and we need new tools for attention. The most striking feature of this era is the sheer volume of information, and almost everyone is in excess of it. Especially parents who raise children are very easy to fall into a "fear of missing out" mentality.

Lucy herself was a "fear of missing out" student and mother:

In college, in addition to classes and experiments, lectures, concerts, sports activities, and parties on campus, she did not want to miss any of them, for fear that if she missed any of them, she would miss any precious opportunities.

After becoming a mother, she did the same. If you don't sign your child up for football, dancing, swimming, and pottery early, you will worry that your child will lose at the starting line. Seeing that parenting theory says that it is time to learn the piano at the age of xx / xx years old is the critical period of the second language... Many "xx years old", how to choose?

When parents are in this anxiety all the time, children will also hear it. Lucy had participated in a television talk show with his two daughters at the University of California, San Diego, and one boy said he had been frustrated that he had to give up basketball that year's spring.

Linda Stone, who has served as an executive at Apple and Microsoft, once said that the times are pushing us into an era of "insight into opportunity", and what we need to do is screen for the most valuable opportunities for individuals, rather than looking around and worrying about missing an opportunity.

Attention is our scarce and most valuable resource, and how we use it will determine our destiny.

So Lucy's advice is to learn to say "no." Parents and children alike should realize that we can't do everything, but we should do important things and sometimes give up some unimportant things.

On the talk show, her daughters thought the same way. They encouraged the boy to think differently, "You're not going to be devastated just because you didn't compete this year." Instead, you're a winner because you've prioritized your own things. Good decision-makers do this. ”

Lucy has studied attention for more than 30 years, both studying theories and cases, and thinking about the root causes behind problems. In the current era, information appears in large quantities, the speed of dissemination is rapid, everyone can be expected to have higher efficiency, but sometimes they will neglect to become a "normal person", children's attention problems are actually the embodiment of anxiety in this era.

When we talk about attention problems, we are actually talking about the long-term ability of children to adapt to this era. As child psychologist Lee Salk puts it, "The most basic task of parenthood is to help children develop their own talents, skills, and wisdom so that they can cope with life's challenges without their parents." ”

Resources:

1. "Mastering Attention - Defeating Distraction and Anxiety"

2. "Attention: How to Stay Focused When Distracted"