The best way to get better at focusing is to use the mechanisms of focus that you were born with. And the key principle here is that mental focus follows visual focus. We are all familiar with the fact that our visual system can be unfocused, blurry, or jumping around, or we can be very laser focused on one location in space.
What's interesting and vitally important to understanding how to access neuroplasticity is that you can use your visual focus and you can increase your visual focus as a way of increasing your mental focus abilities more broadly. So I'm going to explain how to do that. Plasticity starts with alertness.
That alertness can come from a sense of love, a sense of joy, a sense of fear, doesn't matter. There are pharmacologic ways to access alertness too. The most common one is of course caffeine.
which reduces this molecule that makes us sleepy called adenosine. Caffeine can be a relatively safe way to increase epinephrine. Now, many people are now also using Adderall.
Adderall chemically looks a lot like amphetamine. And basically, it is amphetamine. It will increase epinephrine release from locus coeruleus.
It will wake up the brain. And that's why a lot of people rely on it. It does have a heavy basis for use in certain clinical syndromes prescribed, such as attention deficit. However, it also has a high probability of abuse, especially in those who are not prescribed it.
Adderall will not increase focus. It increases alertness. It does not touch the acetylcholine system.
And if those of you that are taking Adderall say, well, it really increases my focus overall, that's probably because your autonomic nervous system is just veering towards what we call parasympathetic. You're really just very sleepy. And so it's bringing your levels of alertness up.
As I mentioned, Adderall is very problematic for a number of people as it can be habit forming. Learning on Adderall does not always translate to high performance off or on Adderall at later times. And the Adderall discussion is a broader one that perhaps we should have with a psychiatrist in the room at some point, because it is a very widely abused drug at this point in time.
The acetylcholine system and the focus that it brings. is available, as I mentioned, through pharmacology, but also through these behavioral practices. And the behavioral practices that are anchored in visual focus are going to be the ones that are going to allow you to develop great depth and duration of focus. So let's think about visual focus for a second.
When we focus on something visually, we have two options. We can either look at a very small region of space with a lot of detail and a lot of precision, Or we can dilate our gaze and we can see big pieces of visual space with very little detail. It's a trade-off.
We can't look at everything at high resolution. This is why we have these, the pupil more or less relates to the fovea of the eye, which is the area in which we have the most receptors, the highest density of receptors that perceive light. And so our acuity is much better in the center of our visual field than in our periphery.
And that's because the density, the number of pixels in the center of my visual field is much higher than it is in the periphery. When we focus our eyes, we do a couple things. First of all, we tend to do that in the center of our visual field, and our two eyes tend to align in what's called a vergence eye movement towards a common point.
The other thing that happens is the lens of our eye moves so that our brain now no longer sees the entire visual world, but is seeing a small cone of visual imagery. That small cone of visual imagery, or soda straw view of the world, has much higher acuity, higher resolution than if I were to look at everything. Now you say, of course, this makes perfect sense, but that's about visual attention, not mental attention.
Well, it turns out that focus in the brain is anchored to our visual system. I'll talk about blind people in a moment, but assuming that somebody is sighted, the key is to learn how to focus better visually. Not only do we develop a smaller visual window into the world, but we activate a set of neurons in our brainstem that trigger the release of both norepinephrine epinephrine and acetylcholine norepinephrine is kind of similar to epinephrine so in other words when our eyes are relaxed in our head when we're just kind of looking at our entire visual environment moving our head around moving through space we're in optic flow things moving past us or we're sitting still we're looking broadly at our space we're relaxed when our eyes move slightly inward toward a particular visual target our visual world shrinks our level of visual focus goes up and we know that this relates to the release of acetylcholine and epinephrine at the relevant sites in the brain for plasticity. Now, what this means is that if you have a hard time focusing your mind for sake of reading or for listening, you need to practice and you can practice focusing your visual system. Now this works best if you practice focusing your visual system at the precise distance from the work that you intend to do for sake of plasticity.
So how would this look in the real world? Let's say I am trying to concentrate on something related to, I don't know, science. I'm reading a science paper and I'm having a hard time.
It's not absorbing. I might think that I'm only looking at the paper. that I'm reading. I'm only looking at my screen, but actually my eyes are probably darting around a bit. Experiments have been done on this.
Or I'm gathering information from too many sources in the visual environment. Now, presumably because it's me, I've already had my coffee, I'm hydrated, I'm well rested, I slept well, and I still experience these challenges in focusing. Spending just 60 to 120 seconds focusing my visual attention on a small window of my screen, meaning just... on my screen with nothing on it, but bringing my eyes to that particular location increases not just my visual acuity for that location, but it brings about an increase in activity in a bunch of other brain areas that are associated with gathering information from this location.
So put simply, if you want to improve your ability to focus, practice visual focus. Now, if you wear contacts or you have, or you wear a... corrective lenses, that's fine.
You of course would want to use those. You don't want to take those off and use a blurry image. The finer the visual image and the more that you can hold your gaze to that visual image, the higher your levels of attention will be.
So you absolutely have to focus on the thing that you're trying to learn. And you will feel some agitation because of the epinephrine in your system. If you're feeling agitation and it's challenging to focus and you're feeling like you're not doing it right, chances are you're doing it right. And you can practice this ability to stare for long periods of time without blinking. I know it's a little eerie for people to watch, but if your goal is to learn how to control that visual window for sake of controlling your focus, it can be an immensely powerful portal into these mechanisms of plasticity because we know it engages things like nucleus basalis and these other brainstem mechanisms.
I get a lot of questions about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, and attention deficit disorder. Some people actually have clinically diagnosed ADD and ADHD, and if you do, you should certainly work with a good psychiatrist to try and figure out the right pharmacology and or behavioral practices for you. Many people, however, have given themselves a low-grade ADHD or ADD because of the way that they move through their world.
They are... Looking at their phone a lot of the time, it's actually very easy to anchor your attention to your phone for the following reason. First of all, it's very restricted in size, so it's very easy to limit your visual attention to something about this big. It's one of the design features of the phone.
phone. The other is that just as you've probably heard a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, a movie is worth 10,000 pictures. Anytime we're looking at things that have motion, visual motion, our attentional system will will naturally gravitate towards them, towards those movies. It's actually much harder to read words on a page than it used to be for many people, because we're used to seeing things spelled out for us in YouTube videos or videos where things move and are very dramatic.
It is true that the more that we look at those motion stimuli, the more that we're seeing movies of things and things that are very dramatic and very intense, the worse we're getting at attending to things like text on a page. or to listening to something like a podcast and extracting the information. If you think about the areas of life that dictate whether or not we become successful, independent, healthy individuals, most of those involve the kind of boring practices of digesting information on a page.
Boring because it's not as exciting in the moment perhaps as watching a movie or something being spoon-fed to us. But the more attention that we can put to something, even if it's fleeting and we feel like we're only getting little bits and pieces, shards of the information as opposed to the entire thing, that has a much more powerful effect in engaging this cholinergic system for plasticity than does, for instance, watching a movie. And that's because when we watch a movie, the entire thing can be great. It can be awesome. It can be this overriding experience.
But I think for all those experiences, if you're somebody who's interested in building your brain and expanding your brain... and getting better at various things, feeling better, doing better, et cetera, one has to ask, how much of my neurochemical resources am I devoting to the passive experience of letting something just kind of overwhelm me and excite me versus something that I'm really trying to learn and take away? And now there's another, I enjoy movie content and TV content all the time. I scroll Instagram often, but We are limited in the extent to which we can grab a hold of these acetylcholine release mechanisms or epinephrine. And I think that we need to be careful that we don't devote all our acetylcholine and epinephrine, all our dopamine for that matter, to these passive experiences of things that are not going to enrich us and better us.
So that's a little bit of an editorial on my part, but the phone is rich with movies. It's rich with information. The real question is, Is the information rich in for us in ways that grow us and cultivate smarter, more emotionally, you know, emotionally evolved or people or is it creating it? How's what's it doing for our physical well being for that matter? So I don't want to tell people what to do or not to do.
But think carefully about how often you're focusing on something and how good you are or poor you are at focusing on something that's challenging. So once you get this epinephrine, this alertness, you get the acetylcholine released and you can focus your attention, then the question is for how long? And in an earlier podcast, I talked about these ultradian cycles that last about 90 minutes. The typical learning bout should be about 90 minutes. That learning bout will no doubt include five to 10 minutes of warmup period.
I think everyone should give themselves permission to not be fully focused in the early part of that bout. But that in the middle of that bout for the middle hour or so, you should be able to maintain focus for about an hour or so. So that for me means eliminating distractions. That means turning off the wifi.
I put my phone in the other room. If I find myself reflexively getting up to get the phone, I will take the phone and lock it in the car outside. If I find myself going to get it anyway, I am guilty of giving away the phone for a period of time or even things more dramatic. I've thrown it up on my roof before, so I can't get to it till the end of the day.
That thing is pretty compelling and we come up with all sorts of reasons why we need to be in contact with it. But I encourage you to try experiencing what it is to be completely immersed in an activity where you feel the agitation that your attention is drifting, but you continually bring it back. And that's an important point, which is that attention drifts, but we have to re-anchor it.
We have to keep grabbing it back. And the way to do that, if you're sighted, is with your eyes. That as your attention drifts and you look away, you want to try and literally maintain visual focus on the thing that you're trying to learn.
Feel free to blink, of course, but you can greatly increase your powers of focus and the rates of learning.