Джон Харгрейв - Mind Hacking [How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days]

Reclaiming and Retraining

The great psychologist William James once said that the skill of “voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence .” 1In the following pages, I will lay out that education, par excellence (which is French for “very good at golf”).

It may help to think of your attention in two ways. First, you have what is called “voluntary” or “top-down” attention, which is where you choose to direct your mind. 2Right now it is focused on these words. We don’t have a good vocabulary for attention, so the best analogy I can give you is the proton pack from Ghostbusters , the concentrated energy guns they use to capture ghosts. That “stream” of positively charged energy is like your voluntary attention: you can point it at this, and this, and this. (Just, please, don’t cross the streams .)

You also have a “reflexive” or “bottom-up” attention, which is when something “catches” your attention. Though sometimes this is exceedingly useful, such as when we hear someone call our name in the middle of a noisy public square, it is also what we might call “being distracted by shiny objects.” METALLIC SQUIRREL!

The great challenge of our time is to strengthen our “top-down” attention (our ability to concentrate), while weakening our “reflexive” attention (our tendency to become distracted). Therefore, developing your powers of concentration involves two components: reclaiming attention through reducing distractions, and retraining your mind through concentration exercises.

Reclaiming attentioninvolves taking an inventory of all the avoidable distractions that surround you, then reducing or eliminating them. These are lifestyle changes, usually small and incremental, that add up to a huge difference over time, because they help keep you focused on a daily basis.

Retraining your concentrationinvolves a specific set of Mind Games that will help you not only calm the mind but also harness its power. Your success with mind hacking will depend largely on how seriously you take these games and how deeply you integrate them into your lifestyle. Everything else builds on these games: they’re your mental fundamentals.

These are not just one-time lessons but core life skills that will make you better at everything you do. If you’re an entrepreneur or businessperson, these concentration games will give you an edge, a competitive advantage. If you’re involved in a relationship or a parent of young children, they will bring you greater calm and mental clarity. They will bring you focus, poise, and confidence, and create a mental environment where you can train your mind to accomplish incredible achievements.

The exercises in this chapter are meant to become habits . If you’re learning how to live a healthy lifestyle, you don’t just do a month of ab crunches and then call it quits: you integrate exercise and movement into your everyday life. Similarly, the more you can work these skills into your daily routine, the more powerful you will become at mind hacking.

You may not learn how to levitate objects with your mind like Luke Skywalker, but you could very well develop a levitation technology, then license out the patent. Anything is possible!

Reclaiming Attention

The sixteen people gathered at the Dart NeuroScience Convention Center in San Diego have the best memories on the planet.

These “memory athletes,” as they are known, are here to compete in head-to-head “memory battles.” They stare at computer screens that rapidly flash names, numbers, or words. The athletes memorize these random lists with amazing speed, then recall them with pinpoint accuracy. The annual Extreme Memory Tournament, or XMT (also a great name for a memory drug), offers $60,000 in prize money to the winners.

My favorite competitor is Ola Kåre Risa of Norway, who wears not only sound-canceling headphones that you might see on a flight runway but a cap with a long visor and side flaps . His side flaps are hilarious, ensuring that no distractions enter his peripheral vision as he stares at the computer screen. He looks like a horse that’s wearing blinders while landing a plane.

But there’s science behind this approach. As Henry L. Roediger III, one of the psychologists studying these memory athletes, tells the New York Times , “We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention ” 3(my emphasis).

The fundamental skill these memory athletes have developed is known as “attentional control,” or the ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore. We might also call this your ability to concentrate .

Sometimes you’ll say, “My attention was wandering,” which is an excellent phrase that shows that you have something called an “attention,” which is sometimes under your control but sometimes goes for a brief walk. This “attention,” this focused point of consciousness, is under continual assault, much of it by the environment you create for yourself.

Some distractions cannot be avoided. If you work in an office, for example, your coworkers may be motorized disturbance makers. Unenlightened bosses may expect you to be available via chat twenty-four hours a day. Parents, especially new parents, may find it especially challenging to focus, since young children are interruption machines. (My wife gave a name to her bewildered, sleep-deprived mental state when our kids were small: “mom brain.”)

What we’re targeting is the unnecessary distractions, the interruptions that we allow into our lives either out of habit, ignorance, or laziness. “We are easy to distract, and very bad at doing two or more things at the same time,” says Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu. “Yet our computers, supposedly our servants, constantly distract us and ask us to process multiple streams of information at the same time. It can make you wonder, Just who is in charge here ?” 4

Getting rid of these distractions will make you happier, since your mind sees digital distractions as unfinished tasks . Productivity guru David Allen, the best-selling author of Getting Things Done , warns of the “mental clutter” of unfinished tasks, and there’s research to back up his claim. In the 1960s, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik showed that starting any kind of task gives your mind a mild psychic anxiety until that task is complete. 5Unfinished tasks nag at you.

Unwanted digital distractions add to that “mental clutter”: each one reminds you there’s another task needing your attention. Part of our Pavlovian response to jump at those notifications is the need to close that open task loop, to consider the project “complete,” no matter how trivial (“Well, now I have to get my social media profile to 100 percent!”). Get rid of the notifications and you’ll reduce your mental clutter—and your anxiety. More important, you’ll be able to focus on what’s more important.

• Instant messaging.If you’re in the habit of messaging frequently throughout the day, stop . Uninstall IM apps or set them to “Away” by default. The problem with messaging is that distractions create more distractions: when you respond, another response comes back. In between, you are trying to get fragments of work done. It’s a high-interruption environment.

• Text messaging.Just like instant messaging, text messages distract our concentration over a longer period of time because of the slow pace of a conversation carried out over text. Few of us are willing to turn off text messaging on our phones, but you can set aside times of the day to respond to messages, or wait until you’re between tasks, rather than answering immediately.