WIN FACTOR #3

Focus

Locking on to What’s Important

FOCUS

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to maintain the flexibility to use the type of Focus you need for each particular situation. Winners have a wonderful ability to focus on the most important details. And by incorporating details into your broad Focus, your brain will become more innovative, flexible, and creative.

 

 

 

Boost Your BrainPower: Your Goal Laser and Effort Accelerator rely on Focus to stay locked on your goals and to create the synergy needed to keep moving forward.

Strong Focus skills also mean you are watching the screen when the right blip appears on your Opportunity Radar screen.

AS THE LAST U.S. PERFORMER in the vault finals of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, 17-year-old Kerri Strug was the U.S. women’s gymnastics team’s final hope of capturing their first-ever Olympic gold medal in the all-around competition.

Her first attempt ended in disaster: Strug landed unevenly, her legs buckled, and she fell backwards, severely spraining her left ankle and tearing two ligaments in the process.

Strug was in trouble and obviously in a great deal of pain. But unless she aced the second vault, her dreams, as well as the team’s collective hopes, would vanish. The world watched and waited to see what she would do.

Strug opted to do the final vault. The television cameras recorded the wince of pain as she hopped on one leg to the start position. A tight close-up on her face revealed deep concentration as she paused to gather herself before sprinting towards the vault. The crowd went silent as her hands hit the top of the horse.

Her vault was virtually flawless, and she nailed the landing, raising her hands high in the air to salute the judges before lifting her injured leg off the mat. As she went to her knees in pain, the crowd roared. The U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Team now owned a gold medal. Kerri Strug’s face relaxed just a little.

What Is Focus?

In one of the most memorable moments in Olympic history, Strug provides a beautiful example of the Winner’s Brain trait we call Focus. William James, 19th-century Harvard psychologist and philosopher, alluded to a definition of Focus by saying, “It is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneous possible objects or trains of thought. . . . Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. . . .” Focus involves attention and concentration. Thus, a simpler way to define it is in terms of the mental energy required to gather significant details and tune out unnecessary distractions.

“I’ve always been focused,” says Strug, now 29 and a special adviser in children’s affairs to the Department of Justice. “Even as a child I was never a procrastinator.” Hearing a statement like that from someone as obviously focused as Strug tends to confirm most people’s belief that Focus is something you either have or you don’t. But that’s not true. Practice and training can dramatically improve your powers of concentration. Innate though her Focus may have been, years of gymnastics training helped Strug hone those gifts to perfection.

Winner’s Brains are flexible; they have a tremendous ability to calibrate the level of Focus across a broad range of circumstances. By using a variety of strategies, they can fine-tune the neural machinery of Focus to provide a distinct advantage. And amazingly, nurturing these powers of attention and concentration can actually change the physical makeup of the brain itself, often directly translating into improved Focus.

Blips, Bleeps, and Blinks

Strug’s vault, which at the time was viewed by millions of people all over the world, is now a classic YouTube moment. Watching the video, even through the lens of time, you still feel the chills of anticipation as Strug charges down the runway. Will she nail the landing? Will the United States get the gold?

“I get questions all the time about what I was thinking in those seconds before I did my second vault,” Strug says. “People want to know how I dealt with the pain and how I was still able to perform.”

Her explanation is simple: “There’s not much time between vaults so I thought to myself, ‘You fell and jarred your ankle but it doesn’t matter what’s wrong because you’re going to do it anyway.’ Then, I was so well trained I just focused on the task at hand. I didn’t hear the crowd or think about my ankle or what was riding on my success or failure, I just concentrated on my performance. I said to myself, ‘OK, here we go!’ And that was it. For that moment, I was on autopilot.”

Top athletes aren’t the only ones who experience situations where it all comes down to one instance. Every one of us has taken a test, delivered a presentation, or given a performance that we perceived to be make-or-break. Different Winner’s Brain traits come into play here, but it’s the ability to really concentrate and maintain a narrow focus that enables us to triumph.

If you’ve ever watched thoroughbred racing, you may have noticed some of the horses wearing a piece of head gear called blinkers, which look like two leather drink coasters placed on the outermost edges of their eyes for the humane purpose of restricting peripheral vision. Well, a state of narrow focus is the mind’s version of blinkers. It’s the type of focus you need when you’re doing a task that requires your absolute attention. In recounting the shining moment of her gymnastics career, Strug doesn’t remember external factors like the sound of the spectators or her throbbing ankle. She tuned into what she needed to do.

For most of us, narrow focus is a skill reserved for practical, routine situations like preparing taxes or sewing on a button, tasks that require the ability to block out all unnecessary, unwanted information to concentrate on one thing. Clearly, mind-wandering and attentional missteps in these sorts of situations cause us to make mistakes: Let your mind drift off while threading a needle and you get a sharp reminder of why it’s important to pay attention.

Buttons and taxes are the least of it. The average person contends with an astonishing number of distractions. One survey found the average office worker switches tasks every three minutes and once interrupted takes nearly half an hour to go back to the original task. Between email, instant messaging, cell phones, Twitter, BlackBerries, iPhones, TV, and digital signage, attention is a casualty of the high-tech age we live in. So rampant are distractions, they’ve spawned a new field called interruption science. They’ve also helped coin the word “single-tasking” to describe the luxury of being able to give your undivided attention to one thing at a time.

One recent investigation into a type of distraction called a brain blip, or in more technical terms, an attentional lapse, was carried out by a team of researchers led by Daniel Weissman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. Weissman and his colleagues wanted to know what happens at the neural level during a brain blip, so they asked a group of volunteers to look out for two symbols among a series of symbols that flashed randomly across a screen and then push a button each time one of the symbols popped up. As the participants went about searching for symbols and pressing buttons, the Weissman team was busy scanning their brains and measuring the localized changes in blood oxygen levels that follow changes in brain activity. Subjects were given all the time they needed to give the correct response to each visual display.

The researchers noted that reaction time varied substantially both between subjects and among the same subjects from one test to the next. Faster reaction times meant the person was locked and loaded on the task at hand—paying attention—whereas slower reaction times meant that the person was briefly distracted.

As the researchers monitored the different brain images and the different areas of the brain that lit up, they found some interesting differences in brain activity depending on reaction time. Slower reaction times were associated with reduced activity in the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices, structures of the brain thought to help in controlling attentional focus. Importantly, this reduction of activity in these regions occurred before the visual pattern popped up, which is consistent with the possibility that the person experienced an attentional lapse moments before the trial took place. There was also reduced activation in the visual-processing areas at the rear of the brain, as if those areas had not been properly notified by the distracted regions of the frontal lobe that it was time to spring into action.

Another type of Focus-related processing error people often make was reported in 1992 by Jane Raymond, now at Bangor University in Wales, and her colleagues while then at the University of Calgary. Researching a completely different topic, she and her team devised a study involving a rapid-fire stream of individual letters flickering onto a screen and asking volunteers to spot each of two pre-specified targets. When she and her team examined the results, they noticed that if a second target appeared within a half a second or so after the first target, people failed to see it. Raymond instantly realized she had hit upon something important. She dubbed this temporary “mind blindness,” caused by the fact that we aren’t good at taking in two things at once, an attentional blink.

Says Raymond, “The name ‘attentional blink’ came to me because we were also doing some eye movement studies during visual perception and I noticed that people habitually blink just when a trial ends. It seemed to me that when an attentional episode is over, the attentional system does just what the eyes do—blink!” In subsequent investigations, researchers have discovered that the attentional blink also happens for images of faces, objects, and TV ads laced with grabby images (bad news for advertisers using quick-cut imagery to get their products noticed).

There’s more. University of Delaware researcher Steven Most has identified a phenomenon he calls attentional rubbernecking, which is similar to what you experience when you’re driving along on a highway and can’t take your eyes off an accident; your focus is on the wreck instead of the road and then—wham! You’ve crashed too. Then there’s inattentional blindness, a phrase coined by psychologists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, which refers to the inability to see something if you’re not paying attention, even if it’s right in front of you. This time you crash the car because, while busy watching for oncoming traffic, you fail to notice the deer standing smack in the middle of the road.

All these blips, bleeps, and blinks of Focus are manifestations of the same problem: Despite having more than 100 billion neurons at our disposal acting as super high-speed neural processors, our attentional resources can only be stretched so thin. When we dedicate those resources to processing one thing in the environment, we often don’t have the resources to allocate to another. Our mind must stop and catch its breath for a moment, so to speak, before it’s able to move on and process the next piece of information.

Beating Distractions

The Weissman study reveals a few clues about how we might be able to reduce attentional load in everyday, practical situations. His subjects’ error rates were about the same regardless of whether they performed quickly or slowly. When they were slow to respond, the researchers realized subjects compensated for the delay in brain activity before the task began, with greater brain activity once the person engaged and was actively trying to solve the problem. In other words, the pre-test brain blip was offset by an extra dose of attention when the person was actually engaged in searching for the symbol on the screen. Yes, a momentary distraction cost more time—but this extra time helped the subjects avoid making mistakes.

Get your brain back on task after it’s been distracted with this simple, yet effective Winner’s Brain strategy we call focus reinvestment. If you find yourself in the middle of something that requires a lot of Focus, stop and consciously reorient yourself to critical details. Pay attention to minutiae like sounds, textures, and colors you might not ordinarily notice. For example, right before you are about to give a speech, you might deliberately notice the fabric of the chair you’re sitting in or the tone of the previous speaker’s voice. You’ll find that this helps you gather your Focus and turn down the volume on fear, nervousness, or any other competing brain buzz.

Five Easy Steps to Reinvest Your Focus

1. Admit to yourself you’re off task.

2. Remind yourself of the original task and why it’s important.

3. If possible, eliminate the factors that derailed your attention; turn off cell phone, close email, grab a sandwich, finish a conversation.

4. Choose a starting point, cue yourself with a word like “go” and get back on task, noticing the rich details of what you are doing. If you’re reading something you’re trying to stay focused on, put a checkmark at the bottom of every page or every so often, jot a word in the margin.

5. Pay attention to the small details you may not ordinarily notice to give you a new perspective on the task at hand.

Some winners, like African-born Tommy Frank, come by this focus reinvestment technique naturally. As a New York City window washer for more than twenty years working often dozens of stories up from the ground, Frank certainly has much to lose from poor focus. “I can never allow myself to think about other things in the middle of a job,” he says. “I’m focused on my own safety, checking the belt and ropes and so forth each time I clip in or out; I make sure I keep track of all my tools so I don’t accidentally drop any on a pedestrian below; I concentrate on the type of window I’m cleaning, all of the hinges and the screws so I don’t open it the wrong way or allow the glass to fall out.”

The concept of focus reinvestment to reduce mind wandering illustrates another important finding of the Weissman study. Not only were the research subjects able to boost brain activity after a pre-test distraction, they were also usually able to add an extra burst of brain activity after a slower reaction time so they were able to maintain Focus and respond more quickly in subsequent trials. It was as if the subjects literally “learned their lesson” following an attentional lapse and actually changed the way their brains worked. They weren’t able to make this happen every time, but when they did, their response times were even faster without compromising accuracy. This suggests that you can truly reorient after a brain lapse and get back on track.

Another Winner’s Brain strategy for dealing with distractions is minimizing or avoiding them in the first place. In one fascinating study, Heleen Slagter and her University of Wisconsin-Madison colleagues gave a group of 17 volunteers a classic attentional blink test and then had them study a yoga/meditation technique that emphasized reducing distraction and enhancing awareness. After three months of study, the subjects then took the test again. Lo and behold, the volunteers’ abilities to avoid an attentional blink and see the second symbol improved significantly—and further, their ability to see the first symbol didn’t suffer.

This suggested to the researchers that meditation training makes the brain more efficient at distributing its neural resources. Thus, the volunteers seemed able to devote fewer of those resources to the first task, leaving enough left over to attend to another target that followed shortly after. Indeed, a reduced amount of brain activity associated with seeing the first symbol strongly predicted the ability to accurately detect the second one. The subjects weren’t meditating at the time they were being tested, which implies that their mindfulness training had paid off with lasting and significant benefits to their powers of attentional control.

Play to Win

Video games may seem the complete antithesis of meditation, but in fact they have a positive impact on attentional focus. Research conducted at the University of Rochester by Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier revealed vast improvements in attention control after just ten hours of video game play. (Parents of a Grand Theft Auto-obsessed teenager probably didn’t need a study to convince them of this!) But as we offer up a few hours on the Wii as a novel way to enrich your Focus abilities, a cautionary note: There’s a fine line here between Winner’s Brain strategy and too much of a good thing.

The subjects’ meditation practice in the Slagter study was quite rigorous—up to 12 hours a day—but numerous other studies show that even a little can go a long way, including a 2007 investigation at the University of Pennsylvania by Amishi Jha and colleagues, which found that practicing even small doses of daily meditation can improve Focus. Another study published later that same year by Chinese researcher Yi-Yuan Tang and her colleagues showed positive effects on attentional control in just five days of meditation practices lasting a mere 20 minutes per day. In both of these studies, the subjects were casual students of meditation. Of course, it stands to reason that the more time and effort you put in, the more benefits you’ll reap. (Note: We cover meditation in depth in both the Brain Care and Adaptability chapters.)

Practice, Practice, Practice

As you may already suspect, on the opposite end of the spectrum from using a narrow focus is using a wide focus, the type of Focus we use to survey, manage, and integrate multiple factors from our external surroundings or internal thoughts. Rather than lavish all your attentional resources on one small detail, wider focus calls for spreading them across a larger canvas. This is the type of Focus the brain of a symphony conductor flips to when he’s conducting a piece of music and he must read the music score, cue each section, and listen to the tone of the overall orchestra while integrating the sound of each individual instrument.

It’s also the type of Focus Geoff Billingsley needed as an air force major. When asked to recount his most memorable experience as a pilot, Billingsley, who trained fighter jet and B-2 bomber pilots for more than eight years, calmly relates a story that perfectly illustrates how a Winner’s Brain uses wide focus:

I was up with a student in a T-37 trainer jet. We had climbed to 20,000 feet and purposely put the aircraft into a tailspin so we could practice getting out of it. This was one of those standard things I drilled with student pilots so they were not encountering it for the first time in the heat of battle.

The plane had stalled and we were completely out of air speed. As the plane spiraled, I was conscious of the ground rushing towards us, making a mental note that it was getting closer at the rate of 3,000 feet per minute. I waited a few turns to see if my student would begin to initiate recovery procedures and when he didn’t I calmly turned to him and said, “Idle. Neutral. Aft. Spinning right-needle right. Full left rudder. One full turn Stick, abruptly full forward and hold, then Stick neutral and recover from dive.”

That’s the sequence for spin recovery procedure, and it’s one of those things a pilot needs to know verbatim. In the air force, it’s what we call a bold-faced command and any experienced pilot can recite it in his sleep. My student didn’t have the huge bank of flight experience a seasoned pilot has to draw on, but he’d done enough training to be able to recite and perform the spin recovery procedure checklist by heart.

He got through the first three steps OK: Push the stick abruptly forward and hold until the nose drops down and the plane is perpendicular to the ground. The jet is set up on its nose and in a position where you can grab enough air to recover from the spin.

That’s when he froze.

As we started to pitch past vertical, his hands gripped the stick and his elbows locked full force. It’s essential to complete the recovery sequence quickly so the plane doesn’t stay perpendicular to the ground for too long; otherwise it goes into an inverted spin where it’s still rotating around and around, but now it’s upside down. All things considered, not an ideal situation.

“Release the stick,” I said firmly.

Nothing.

“Okay. I have the aircraft,” I told him, reaching over to take the controls.

Nothing. Still no reaction.

At this point, time started to slow down and I remember thinking “Does he hear me? Am I saying something that just doesn’t translate? Or is he thinking he can do this and he simply doesn’t want to give me control of the aircraft?” In the same instant, I considered all my options. Maybe I could say the sequence in a different way? Try different words? Or, I could try the strong-arm approach and wrestle the controls from him. But would that make him think there was something wrong with the plane and if so, how would he react? In the end, I karate chopped him across the elbows. That was enough to break his spell—and his grip. I took control of the jet and we recovered from the dive.

Don’t you immediately suspect a Winner’s Brain at work here? Billingsley’s ability to stay level-headed and keep a wide focus in a life-or-death pressure situation is extraordinary. He was able to pull out the correct resolution by sifting through all of the potential distracters including the plane and its swiftly changing position and altitude, the student pilot’s demeanor, his actions, and several potential options. And he did this all in a slice of time no more than a few seconds long.

Clearly this shows distraction isn’t just a prospective problem during narrow focus; it has the potential to muck up your ability to skillfully use a wide focus too. It would have been easy for Billingsley to get caught up in the irrelevant details. He might have been distracted by the sensation of the plane spinning around or a rush of air through the cockpit cabin or the buzzing of the instruments on the control panel. None of these factors would have helped him troubleshoot his way to safety, especially in the few precious seconds he had to decide upon the best course of action.

Like Kerri Strug’s use of narrow focus to complete her vault, Billingsley could not have pulled off his feat of cool-headed wide focus without all the technical aspects of spin recovery procedure tattooed into his memory. The cockpit of a military jet is crammed with expansive control panels featuring over 150 dials, switches, levers, and buttons. Pilots spend two to three years in training, on average, during which they log hundreds of hours committing every feature and control of the aircraft to memory. They endlessly drill every likely—and unlikely—scenario they might encounter so by the time training is complete, they’ve learned to fly with their brains literally switched to autopilot.

Control over widening and narrowing focus is much greater when a task is practiced to the point of being automatic because it’s easier to free up neural resources when you don’t waste attentional energy thinking through each of the meticulous steps involved. Well-automated tasks and thought processes reduce the load on attention and Focus by habitually ensuring that the brain relies on implicit memory—implicit in the sense that we don’t have to consciously retrace the steps of our previous experience with a task to complete it.

Cruise Control to New Heights

The more tasks you can automate and the more information you can shift to implicit memory, the lighter the load on the attention systems and the more control you gain over your powers of Focus and concentration. And in fact, this leads us to an essential Winner’s Brain strategy for sharpening your Focus skills: Practice, practice, practice—until you can perform on autopilot.

Every time you tie your shoes you don’t say to yourself, “Now take one lace in each hand, make an X, draw the top lace through the bottom of the X, pull the two laces tight, make a loop out of each lace so you create bunny ears . . .” and so on (though you probably did something like this when you were first learning how to do it). Now, you simply tie your shoes without any conscious thought, often while doing something else like talking on the phone or watching television. Repetition to the point of autopilot is like clearing off an extra shelf in your brain: You pack up recurring pieces of information and store them in implicit memory, which frees up room for focusing on those important aspects that still require conscious thought and control.

Pilots use many techniques for consigning very complex chunks of information into implicit memory. Besides all the flight time they log, both in a simulator and in an actual plane, they memorize hundreds of checklists, standard sequences, and mnemonic devices. And Kerri Strug says if she did ten vaults in practice and fell on the tenth one she would never just walk away and let herself end on a bad routine—so the Olympic drama was no different, except this time the whole world was watching. In other words, she rehearsed her gymnastic skills and her emotional responses in all different types of situations.

Of course it’s obvious that practice leads to skill improvement, but a large part of that improvement boils down to the fact that attention is a finite resource; if your brain is busy fumbling around trying to remember how to do something, too many resources get dedicated to the rote aspects of the job. You experience this phenomenon in the early stages of studying a new language when it takes a long time to form a sentence because you’re caught up trying to keep the rules of grammar straight, or when first learning how to play chess and you’re so overwhelmed with trying to remember the names of the pieces and how they’re allowed to move, you can’t stay focused on the game.

Break It Down

By the way, it’s probably not the best idea to jump in and try your equivalent of a Yurchenko 1½ twist vault or attempt a tailspin recovery on your first day in the cockpit. When you’re learning something that involves a lot of complexity or that requires you to focus, try scaffolding it, a technique where you practice the individual parts of a skill in a stepwise fashion before putting them all together as a whole.

Pilots-in-training, for example, spend a lot of their time “chair flying” before they actually attempt a flight skill in an actual aircraft. In chair flying, they set up a swivel chair, place a toilet plunger on the floor between their knees, don their helmet and oxygen mask, and then try to mimic every aspect of a flight in their mind. Billingsley says that no detail was too small to be left out during chair flight, and he would even take it down to where he would place his bag when he first arrived at the aircraft. “I might start out in the morning and spend the whole day in chair flight, just thinking and practicing. I’d chair fly a sequence repeatedly, and then sure enough when I sat in the simulator or the jet, that training kicked in as soon as I hit step one,” he says.

Visualization Made Simple

Make it vivid: Use all of your senses to make the experience real.

 

Choose a perspective: When you visualize, are you looking through your own eyes or are you watching yourself on a stage? Some research suggests using the audience perspective is most beneficial.

 

Visualize in real time: That’s the speed you’ll use in reality.

 

Maximize control: You control everything that happens in visualization—successes, comebacks, other people’s reactions, etc. Use that control to take yourself where reality may or may not go.

Many sports and vocations have their own version of chair flying to help visualize their skills. Golfers close their eyes to picture a swing and top salespeople spend a lot of time refining their pitch to the customer. As you’d expect, this practice and visualization cause the areas of the brain responsible for simulating a task to light up—but the parts of the brain responsible for actually performing a task light up as well, suggesting that they help you perform better in real time. So it appears that thinking can be almost as good as doing.

Use Your Zoom

A Winner’s Brain is also especially adept at toggling effortlessly back and forth between narrow and wide focus at the appropriate times. In 1986, two researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Charles Eriksen and James St. James, first likened this ability to a camera’s zoom lens where you turn the dials and adjust a few settings to zoom in on a narrow part of the picture or zoom out to capture the whole scene. Their studies were among the first to describe this as a dynamic process.

The ABCs of Prioritizing

There are many systems for helping to cultivate the Winner’s Brain strategy of setting priorities. This method, used by people who swear by the Franklin Planner organizational system, is as easy as ABC.

* Start by writing a list of everything you need to accomplish; list every task you can think of as it comes to mind without worrying about the particular order.

* Next assign each task an A, B, or C ranking where A is assigned to high-priority tasks that need to be completed within a day, B to tasks that need to be completed within a week, and C to tasks that need to be completed within a month.

* Now subdivide each category by ranking them in numerical order with your number one task designated A1, your next priority A2, and so on.

* Revisit the list daily and reassess priorities as needed. Make a fresh list at the start of each week.

Recent f MRI studies, such as that led by Joseph Orr at the University of Michigan, show how specialized areas of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an oblong structure located in the central region of the frontal lobe, light up when you need to adjust your Focus. The ACC is sensitive to incoming information that might conflict with an ongoing task or sequence of thoughts. It plays a critical role in detecting potential distractions and in signaling other parts of the brain, mainly in the outer, lateral regions of the frontal and parietal lobes, to boost attention to what is most relevant for what we want to do.

Winners seem to be able to train their brain to have ACCs that work with this frontal-parietal attention network to ensure the right type of Focus at the right time and avoid a potential “can’t see the forest for the trees” or “can’t see the trees for the forest” type of conundrum. If Billingsley had begun trying to resolve the tailspin by directing his attention to a single “tree,” like say, the position of the plane, he would have missed the rest of the “forest,” the altitude, speed, the student, all of the potential solutions. If his Focus had continued to evaluate the multiple factors of the situation, the solution of karate chopping the student’s elbows would have remained a tree hidden in the forest. Meditation may be a helpful way to practice adjusting your zoom lens since it specifically trains the brain to alter its level of Focus; research indicates that meditation can thicken the regions associated with attentional control and thus improves the ability to concentrate.

Getting Your Priorities Straight

Practice, scaffolding, and the zoom lens all lead to the point of why you pay attention in the first place, and that’s for the purpose of setting priorities. When you prioritize, you use what limited attentional resources you have at your disposal to juggle information in the most effective, efficient manner possible. Winners continuously bring a situational factor to the top of the list, examine it, eliminate it if necessary, and then move the next item to the top of the list. Even in a high-stress situation, a winner can do this spontaneously and instantaneously. When Billingsley, for example, steadily reevaluated his predicament, he demonstrated a high level of prioritization expertise.

Here again, meditation can help. The 2007 study by Jha and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania found 30 minutes of meditation helped subjects raise their ability to prioritize and manage tasks and goals after just one month. After eight weeks those both experienced and novice in the art and practice of mindfulness performed faster and more accurately on a series of computer skills similar to those any computer user would encounter. The results suggest that even a small dose of meditation may improve attention and Focus when you’re stressed out and time crunched. While practicing meditation may itself not feel relaxing or restful, the attention-performance improvements that come with it may still help you be more relaxed in general. Anyone who works in a high-pressure office environment should take heed of these findings.

Whac-a-Mole and Go with the Flow

As we’ve said, it makes perfect sense that mind wandering and day-dreaming can lead to mistakes. But deep in the bowels of an Orlando, Florida warehouse, there lives a dusty, beady-eyed creature who personifies the upside of mind wandering for augmenting attentional control.

The creature, a hand-forged resin mole, is the last remaining remnant of the first Whac-a-Mole game. Its inventor, Aaron Fechter, says his inspiration for the game was an ill-conceived Japanese prototype he saw at a gaming convention in 1973. Fechter’s original machine consisted of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top with each hole containing one mole and the air-powered device necessary to move it up and down. The object of the game was to wait for one of the moles to randomly pop up out of its hiding place and then smack it decisively on the head with a large, soft mallet. Whac-a-Mole is now a fixture at carnivals and gaming arcades all over the world, and though the mechanism has changed a bit and the moles are somewhat fancier, the gist of the game is pretty much the same.

You might think that the best strategy for playing Whac-a-Mole would be to stay vigilant and keenly focused so that as a mole peeks its head up, you’re ready to strike. Not so. After thirty years of watching people play the game, Fechter swears he can tell how well someone is going to do the moment they step up to the mallet. “If they look alert and there’s a lot of head and body movement, I know they’re doomed,” he says. “When they’re loose and relaxed they usually get a high score.”

Research backs Fechter up on this. In 2006, a team of Canadian researchers led by Dan Smilek studied the speed at which people were able to find a specific object among a bunch of similar objects—sort of like a video variation on Whac-a-Mole. Volunteers who were told to simply relax and allow the target to “pop up” in their mind scored higher than those who were told to actively scan for it. This suggests that a laid-back approach is sometimes faster and more efficient than active searching for a target. Smilek’s team found that using a passive approach worked best when the search was hard, but not so well when the search was simple.

BE A WHAC-A-MOLE ZEN MASTER

Want to impress friends and family the next time the Whac-a-Mole game at the amusement park beckons? Take a few tips from Aaron Fechter, who claims he can rack up a perfect score every time he steps up to the mallet.

“The best way to get a high score is to gaze in a relaxed way at the center of the playing field with the side moles in your peripheral vision. At the start, hold your hammer over the center mole with it grazing the top of the mole’s head. When the first mole pops up and you see where it is out of the corner of your eye, just swat at it—follow it with your eyes but don’t move your head at all. After each swing, bring your mallet back to the center of the playing field and continue gazing and swatting, gazing and swatting. Do that and you’ll hit practically every single one of those critters.”

Fechter still plays Whac-a-Mole at conventions and arcades, stunning people with the ease with which he beats the game. They often say things like, “Wow, it’s almost like you invented the game!” Fechter just puts the mallet down, smiles, and walks away. A Winner’s Brain at work.

Of course, the act of relaxing your attention is used for higher purposes than searching for lost keys. As we mentioned in the last chapter on Motivation, letting go of your Focus while becoming fully immersed in what you are doing was described by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi as the state of flow, and it seems to be one of the keys to creativity. The octogenarian blues icon B. B. King describes what flow feels like: “When I’m doing improv, I seem to live what I’m doing in the moment. It’s like playing a puzzle and every piece must fit. When you find those missing pieces it feels good, like a river flowing.”

That “river flowing” is exactly what Charles Limb and Allen Braun were trying to capture in their f MRI scans of experienced jazz musicians at the National Institutes of Health MRI Facility in Bethesda, Maryland. They observed that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, showed a slowdown in activity while the medial prefrontal cortex, which some scientists view as being critical for self-expression and individuality, showed increased activity. This may indeed be what happens in the brains of artists and non-artists alike when they let go and let their creative juices flow. And it’s an ideal state for coming up with novel ideas and those lightbulb moments when you suddenly figure things out.

So, sometimes not focusing during idle moments gives us the solution to problems, allows us to make plans for the future, or gives us the chance to reflect on our selves. Indeed the same regions of the brain that are engaged when our minds wander are also key regions for helping us to plan ahead, relate to others, anticipate future events, and predict what we might need to do to help us prepare for the future.

Tranquil-Wiser

The take-home message here is to relax and be patient when Focus is key to the performance of a task, job, or skill. Push aside that hunt-it-down-and-kill-it intensity and simply relax and respond. The next time you’re looking for your keys—something you may have had some practice doing—lighten up and let the brain do its thing without interference from the slower, more restricted, consciously controlled routines. Those slower, executive brain regions will switch off, allowing the relatively automatic, freely associative processes to take over.

Anxiety results from situations where the challenge outpaces your ability and training—you become overfocused and unable to become immersed in the experience. Flow happens when there is a balance between level of ability (from talent, expertise, practice, training) and challenge (how difficult the activity is for you). And boredom results from situations where your ability and training exceed the challenge—there is no reward from excelling. So a tip for the Winner’s Brain: Seek out situations that are challenging, and in which you can become immersed in what you are doing. Most people, through past experience and gut instinct, have a grasp of what types of interests keep them engaged.

You don’t need to be an Olympic gymnast or fighter pilot to appreciate how finely tuned Focus skills can help you deal with life’s constant distractions. Winner’s Brains can shift to the right type of Focus for each situation, but they always try to prioritize information and stay locked on to what’s important both in the moment and in the long term. Perhaps this chapter inspired you to take up yoga or meditation to help you hone your Focus skills (and as you shall see, they help augment many other Win Factors) or has shown you how you can reduce the demands on your Focus by practicing some parts of a skill until they are second nature. In the next chapter, you’ll discover the key parts of the brain that are critically involved in balancing emotions and why they are so important for maintaining your Goal Laser, Opportunity Radar, and Optimal Risk Gauge.