Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

Mindfulness of others at the societal level, Sachs says, means paying attention to the suffering of the poor and to the social safety net, which is badly fraying in the United States and many other advanced economies. He argues that while now the poor are helped just enough to barely survive, that simply creates intergenerational poverty. What’s ne

One study taught attention skills to four- and six-year-olds in just five sessions of playing games that exercise visual tracking (guessing where a duck swimming underwater will surface), spotting a target cartoon character within an array of distractions, and inhibiting impulse (clicking if a sheep comes out from behind a bale of hay, but not if a

the social and emotional circuitry of a child’s brain learns from contact and conversation with everyone it encounters over the course of a day. These interactions mold brain circuitry; the fewer hours spent with people—and the more spent staring at a digitized screen—portends deficits.

mindfulness meditators show symptom lessening in a remarkable range of physiological disorders, from sheer jitters to hypertension and chronic pain. “Some of the biggest effects found with mindfulness are biological,” says Davidson, adding, “It’s surprising for an exercise that trains attention.”

“The expert performer,” says Ericsson, “actively counteracts such tendencies toward automaticity by deliberately constructing and seeking out training in which the set goal exceeds their current level of performance.” Moreover, “The more time expert performers are able to invest in deliberate practice with full concentration, the further developed

Global economic data shows that once a country reaches a modest level of income—enough to meet basic needs—there is zero connection between happiness and wealth. Intangibles like warm connections with people we love and meaningful activities make people far happier than say, shopping or work.

I just watched my four grandchildren, one by one, play the beta version of a game for the iPad called Tenacity. The game offers you a leisurely journey through any of a half dozen scenes, from a barren desert to a fantasy staircase spiraling heavenward. The challenge: Every time you exhale, you tap the iPad screen with one finger. And for every fif

The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation. Hijacks are the superglue of attention. But the question is, How long does our focus stay captured? That depends, it turns out, on the power of the left prefrontal area to calm the aroused amygdala (there are two amygdalae, one in each brain hemisphere). That amygdala-prefrontal neuronal superhigh

Mindlessness, in the form of mind wandering, may be the single biggest waster of attention in the workplace. Focus on our experience in the here and now—like the task at hand, the conversation we’re having, or the building of consensus in a meeting—demands that we tune down the all-about-myself murmurs of mind stuff irrelevant to what’s going on ri