Goldstein - The Brain Fog Fix: Thinking Fast and Slow: New Release 2016

If only you could concentrate more, you could probably accomplish almostanything.This might sound somewhat hyperbolic but its true.

Ultimately, success often comes down to who is willing to work the hardestand the longest and if you put more effort into anythingthen youll be morelikely to succeed.

Imagine for a moment that you are a writer who earns $2 for every 100 words you write. That might not seem like much, but now imagine that you were able to write 25,000 words a day. Nowyoure earning a lot, right?Thats $500 a day!

In your job, you probably arent paid based directly on your output but thatdoesnt mean that you cant achieve more by working harder or longer. Askyourself this: how many hours of your working day do you really spend producing your optimal amount of output? For most of us, we only reallywork our very best for a couple of hours a day. The rest of the time we spend looking at e-mails, we spend surfing the web or we spend on Facebook.

Imagine if you had infinite concentration. Imagine if you could work solidlyfor the full eight hours. Youd accomplish more than the rest of your teamput together and it would only be a matter of time before your salaryreflected that. Youd never have to stay late and in fact youd probably getto go home early a lot of the time.

Its not just in our careers where concentration really matters though either.In the rest of our lives concentration is equally important. Imagine howmuch better your relationship would be if you were always giving your partner your full attention. Imagine how much youd improve as a parent ifyour mind wasnt on other things. Concentrating on what is going on around you even makes you more alert and more focusedwhen youre outand about. This makes you better at responding to a crisis situation and iswhat the Special Forcescall situational awareness.

In other words, being able to concentrate on what matters and being able to stay focused at all times is the secret to doing more and to doingeverything better.

How does that sound?

This book, as youve probably guessed by now, is all about putting you back in the driving seat and giving you full, unflinching mastery over your mental faculties. Once youve read this book to its conclusion, youll be ableto harness the full power of your brain at all times and put your focusexactly where it needs to be.

To do this though, youre going to need to know what focus really is and what all that actually entails. That means were going to delve very quicklyinto some neuroscience, which is going to serve as the basis for everything else youll learn over the course of this book. Dont worry if any of it doesntmake sense you dont actually need to understand it to take fulladvantage of thetips well be looking at.

Executive Control and the Salience NetworkSo what exactly happens in the brain when you concentrate? Actually, anumber of things are at play.

Firstly, you have an increase in specific neurotransmitters such asdopamine, norepinephrine and acetylcholine. These are similar tohormones that are produced in the brain and which alter our mood, our memory and more.

The neurotransmitters associated with attention and concentration are called the catecholamine neurotransmitters and are similar to those produced during a fight or flight response. When you have an abundanceof these chemicals in the brain, it causes you to stay more engaged, toremember what happens better and to generally be more alert andswitched on.

These neurotransmitters will be produced where they are needed and inthe case of most tasks that require our concentration, that means the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain contains the various different areasthat are required for higher order cognitive tasks that involve planning,memorizing and deep thought. In fact, this more specifically involves a network of brain areas that are together called the attention network orthe executive control network.

This change in neurochemical profile alters the action of the neurons (braincells) in that region. These are all excitatory neurotransmitters which means that they increase the amount of electrical activity (action potentials)among cells. Conversely, you also have inhibitory neurotransmitters whichinclude the likes of GABA and adenosine.

As neurons change their rate of firing, this alters the brainwaves in thatregion. When were concentrating hard, this tends to result in beta waves in the prefrontal cortex. Caffeine also increases the amount of beta wave activity in the brain.

But how does our brain know that something is important and worthy of ourattention? While the answer to this isnt fully understood, what we do knowis that it involves anothernetwork of brain areas called the salience network and which includes the anterior cingulate cortex.

Essentially, the salience network and the ACC allow us to identifysomething as important consciously and this then allows us to direct the executive control network to things that matter. In turn, this causes a flood of dopamine and norepinephrine and encourages the limbic system and hippocampus to move more of the experience into long term memory.

Interestingly, the salience network is also related strongly to motivation and the will to keep going. Mice with their salience networks removed find themselves giving up much more quickly when looking for food in a mazeand ultimately this seems to be whats responsible for the will to go on.Also interesting, is that our attention can be directed by either internal orexternal factors. For instance, if you decide that something is important andopt to focus on it, then this is called top down attention and it will activate the brain across the dorsal attention network. On the other hand though,your attention can also be triggered by a noise or distraction in your environment which will cause you to switch your focus reflexively. In thiscase the information flows from the bottom up via the ventral attentionnetwork.

Confused yet? Dont worry. Just keep all this information roughly in your mind and well be looking at how it relates to some of the differentstrategies and techniques you can use to increase your focus andattention.

So now you know what focus is, why it matters and how it works in thebrain.The next question is how you can make it work for you and maintain your focus as long as you need it on any given thing.

Most people unfortunately will go about this in entirely the wrong manner.Thats because they are constantly trying to fight their natural inclination topay attention to certain things and in turn they end up struggling to stayfocused.

When you try and force yourself to focus on the Word document youre working on rather than on your Facebook page or whatever else is trying to steal your attention, youll essentially be engaging your salience networkand trying to actively force yourself to focus on that thing and block out theother distractions from the ventral attention network, or from the otheractivity firing in your brain elsewhere.

Something else to bear in mind here too, is that maintaining such intense focus is very tiring and actually requires a lot ofenergy. Its easy to become worn out as a result and to flag.

So what do you do instead?
Simple you ensure that what you need to focus on is genuinelyfascinating and engaging. To do this, you just have to find something thattruly motivates you and that drives you.

If you manage to find something that really matters to you then you will have intrinsic motivation without even trying. In other words, your brain will produce the reward hormone (dopamine) automatically bringing your focusstrongly to what youre doing.