
Why can't we concentrate? - robg
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/04/29/rapt/print.html
======
RiderOfGiraffes
I had to keep dragging my attention back to the article and force myself to
finish it. Sometimes we are distracted because what we're supposed to be doing
is genuinely of little (and declining) interest.

Why force yourself to watch the film all the way through?

When I'm doing mathematics, or programming, or designing, or drawing, I have
no problem. When I'm reading tedious articles that provide little or no
insight, my attention wanders.

I wonder why?

~~~
csomar
This happen with me also, I don't read text, I just scan it quickly. If the
author didn't interest me from the starting that there's a result he wants to
get, then I'll leave (and I have done so in this one)

~~~
jlefo7p6
Limiting yourself to works with a narrative hook in the first few sentences is
a mistake.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Narrative hook is not the point. Having a sense of real contentand cogent
argument leading to a useful conclusion, is.

All too frequently missing.

~~~
imajes
without sounding pretentious - one of the biggest things I've found is that
today's authors suffer from a lack of eloquence. Communicating well is not
something that's simple to master, and few are truly good at it - in the same
way that computer science is a discipline, there are myriad courses in
university devoted to communication.

But we're trying to glean insight and information from blog posts and articles
often produced by time starved writers, first time bloggers or similar. The
art of communication is being lost in search for the sound bite, the skim
reader- the 20 second attention.

Perhaps we should all commit to reading a book a week- or how about writing a
short story: surely the better we are at communicating then the more enriched
we will be as a society?

~~~
randallsquared
It seems to me that eloquent writing actually makes it _harder_ to skim and
decide that it's worth reading. I used to read things because I liked how they
were written, but now that it's become clear to me that there's more than I
could ever hope to get to in years, I just want to get to the point and on to
the next thing; I find myself skimming even novels I'm reading while on public
transit, looking for the conclusion.

My point is just that great writing takes more attention and time, and so will
simply have a smaller audience. I wish writers would worry less about putting
together just the right turn of phrase and simply say what they want to say.

~~~
Confusion
_I find myself skimming even novels I'm reading while on public transit_

Well, I think this is all very personal and our experiences cannot be
generalized into a trend. In direct opposition to your experience, I've
recently started to actually _read_ books, instead of just skimming them for
the story. The balance was tipped by the first book of the Gormenghast trilogy
"Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake... really wonderful prose.

------
csomar
The internet is the thing that distract me most, the problem is that you want
to always "keep on the loop".

I can only concentrate, sovle a problem or code when I disconnect, I have a
"fear" that every moment something is happening in Twitter, Gmail, Facebook
and that I need to be up-to-date.

The solution: I still thinking.....

~~~
svat
Donald Knuth says: [<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html>]

> _Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of
> things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do
> takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. [...]_

And Richard Stallman doesn't use a web browser:
[<http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/>]

> _For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also
> have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a
> demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient
> use of my time, but it is slow in real time._

Closer to here, Paul Graham also recommends Disconnecting Distraction.
[<http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html>]

Maybe we should try learning from them.

~~~
mtoledo
I totally agree with their perspectives.. (maybe not going as far as not using
a web browser, but I'm sure concentration is not his only reason for this).

If you have a cellphone on which you received calls from people you follow on
twitter everytime they tweeted, and a cellphone on which you received calls
everytime you received an email, chances would be that you wouldn't be able to
do around 5 minutes of work without being interrupted by a phone call.
Therefore, if your activity required a longer period of concentration, chances
are you wouldn't be able to achieve/complete it.

Curiously, most people use the internet like they were those cellphones and
then complain about it. The beauty of the internet and the computer is that
you can bend it to your will, so you could turn it into a newspaper if you
wanted to pay the 1 day delay, for instance.

------
jrp
I'm skeptical about there actually being a decrease in attention. I hear this
kind of stuff about "the good old days" in quality X all the time and I
suspect people are just forgetting that they were also distracted back then.

------
jseliger
I wrote about a lot of the "concentration desert" articles in a post on
laptops, students, and distraction at [http://jseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-
students-distraction-...](http://jseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-
distraction-hardly-a-surprise) . Maybe the answer is disconnecting ourselves
from the Internet when we need to really, deeply work.

------
asciilifeform
This may be why:

[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab918...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab91864?dmode=source&output=gplain)

 _"with a culture that is becoming more impatient and managers demanding ever
more blind _effort_ to maintain ever stricter bottom lines, it's sadly obvious
that we are moving into a way of working that is predominantly _conscious_,
for which I believe the human brain was never prepared."_

------
biohacker42
Concentrate? But this article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603314>

claims we should strive to have ADD!

I guess this means life ain't simple and no single strategy works 100% of the
time.

------
morbidkk
through "forced" repeated and rapid decision making we tend to pass on the
things too fast without much deliberation by considering oneself smart. But
stick to some things very well like music/twitter/ etc etc. Its not actually
question of concentration; we are trying to cope up with information overload
and sifting and filtering is required or at least such requirement is
perceived

