Final Post on Focusing Your Attention
Today I will be wrapping up the topic of focusing our attention from Optimizing Brain Fitness by The Great Courses. I have been sharing my notes from this DVD course and offering ideas to implement the concepts in the lives of children.
So, let’s get to it…
We can train our ability to pay attention. Sometimes we are moving through life and not really paying attention. We are missing a lot. The aim is to balance (and improve) attention with multitasking demands. Attention and memory are highly related. By enhancing one, you’re enhancing the other. Think of attention as a conduit for sharpening other cognitive skills.
Our greatest challenge that we face in our culture is to enrich our powers of attention while accommodating to our society’s increasing demands for multitasking. We don’t really have a choice with multitasking, we have to do a little of it, but we don’t want it to drive away our attentional powers.
Here are a couple of attention exercises:
- Pop Quiz! At some point in your day with your kids, whether at the breakfast table or in the car on the way to the library, ask them to close their eyes. See if they can remember what one of the others was wearing. What color shirt? Which pair of shoes?
- Visual exercise- have them look at a series of pictures rapidly. Then ask them to close their eyes and try to describe them. This measures both attention and memory.
Well, I hope you have gained some nugget of knowledge or practical application through these posts on attention, and the brain in general. Here are the previous posts on attention:
I am going to take the next few days off from sharing posts on the topic of the brain in order to catch up with posts on the Letter-of-the-Week fun I’m having with my little ones. Here’s an example of what we did during ‘B’ week.
Thanks for joining me for this series on the brain! I can’t wait to hear if you have gone through any of the exercises with your kids!
Hosanna