During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of John Medina’s Brain Rules, Attention chapter. In addition to your summaries, write about what things vie for your attention, and how you manage your attention.
ENG1101 D340 English Composition I, SPR2015
Official site for ENG1101 D340
John Medina’s Brain Rules Attention chapter made me think a lot about human behavior. The things that catch our attentional usually the things that we are interested in, are familiar with or that are made to catch our attention. Medina pointed out how commercials and print ads are made to thrill us and make an impression on our mind. He also spoke about something that I can relate to. The fact that multitasking is almost impossible and that we only have a 10 minute attention span. After 10 minutes off focusing on one thing my brain tends to get distracted and create a new focal point.
Zahirah Hutton
ENG 1101
3/23/2015
I always knew that we as humans had a selective memory but I didn’t know that after 10 minutes we tend to lose attention. That’s a very interesting statement because wont that mean we all have a trait of A.D.D but some peoples cases are more severe than others? Although it’s sometimes hard to pay attention we all know i’s best. Our attention levels are a result of many things the most common are laughter, interest as well as anything new. You can gauge our attention on the impression you make om our minds which I think is pretty cool.
I thought this chapter was kind of funny. Medina says that people stop paying attention within ten minutes of hearing or seeing something, the reason I found this chapter funny was because I literally will stop paying attention to something within 2 minutes. It’s not done on purpose; I just always figured I had a short attention span. I know when Medina came up with this theory he did not direct it to everyone, but I honestly feel if a person does not care about the subject at hand they will lose interest in less than ten minutes and stop paying attention. So I have always thought if a person could stop paying attention that quickly like me it meant they did not care or maybe had ADD. As usual I found this chapter informative and insightful.
According to John Medina’s “Brain Rules”, better attention equals better learning. In other words, the more concentrate we are the more information we will retained. Equally important, the message that grab our attention are connected to memory, interest, and awareness. Therefore, we use our previous experiences to predict where to pay attention and give extra attention to more important events. For visual attention, our left hemisphere pays attention only to items on the right side while the right hemisphere has global spotlight. Things that vie my attention, are my negative thoughts and attractive things. For example, during the review for the midterm in Psychology, I just bend my head towards my notebook and write everything I heard. However, during my design principle class, I manage my attention by both ways: listening and observing without move or talk. In addition, ” Intrinsic alertness transforms into specific attention called Phasic Alertness”. Moreover, right now social media take away the majority of our attention. As one can see, attention shape our brain in some ways.
Attention is very important, especially during a professional environment. Things catch my attention quickly, bright colours, certain topics like; music, shows, video games, etc. Usually in a classroom when the teacher keeps on talking and doesn’t get to the main point I start space out or start doodling and his or her voice completely disappears. According to Medina, attention equals better learning so basically the more we pay attention the more information we absorb. He also states that we have 10 minutes to keep people’s attention but usually people who not interested in a certain topic will just lose all focus, it’s probably different with everyone else
Medina mentioned that what we may pay attention to is influenced by our memory. We use past experiences determine what we should pay attention to. Another reason why we may pay attention more efficiently to one thing and not the other is because it all depends on our interests. We also remember our most “emotionally arousing events” and usually it will not be forgotten. Medina went on to discuss that our brains cannot multitask. I thought this was interesting because I believe I multitask all the time but when Medina mentioned that “multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth” (pg 84) made all the sense to me. We don’t actually multitask, we may all do more than one thing at a time but only one thing would have our full undivided attention at a time.
An interesting fact John Medina mentions on the “Attention” chapter is “In our brain there are hundreds of neurons fighting for our attention but only some would actually win.” This is a pretty similar situation to what it is like in our everyday life’s. We all have duties to do, some are homeworks, some are work and some are just school but on the side there’s a lot of stuff that is looking to distract us from our duties. One of my biggest distractions is music. I cannot go on a day without music and I think it has become a problem because sometimes instead of me reading a book I choose to listen to music and that’s what john medina was obviously saying that our attention goes to things we like the most. Another interesting fact that took my attention was what occurs in our brains when the amygdala releases a chemical dopamine into our system. This chemical named after dopamine is the reason why we get addicted to stuff and also the reason why we remember some things more than others.
In this chapter, the most interesting was part was when John Medina mentioned that memory has a lot to do with paying attention. “What you pay attention to is often profoundly influenced by memory. In everyday life, you use your previous experiences to predict where you should pay attention.” At first i was highly confused but after giving it a thought i came to the conclusion that memorization does play a factor in paying attention. For example, the way we pay attention in class is by always listening to the teacher but the more and more you attend you start to develop many ways to learn and therefore makes paying attention more profound in a way because you’ll always remember that this is the part when i need to put my full attention on. Chapter was very interesting but then again I am reading John Medina’s Brain Rules.
Better attention is always equal to better learning. The more attention the brain pays to given stimulus the more elaborately the information will be learned and retained. A noted Educator Wilbert McKeachie said in his book ” typically, attention increase from the beginning of the lecture to 10 minutes into the lecture decrease after that point.” I have noticed this a lot and yeah he is true this happens to me on every lecture the first 10 minutes I will be listening to professor very carefully but after a while I will keep track of time more than what professor is talking about. Medina says “If keeping someone’s interest in a lecture were a business, it would have a 80 percent failure rate.” If we pay attention to something we can easily remember that like medina still remember of that tall young boy on a trench coat. Also our brains get very distracted by motion, which is why no one can do their homework while watching TV, one will keep looking up at the TV because the picture is moving. Although many of us know that we try to multitask: watching TV and pretending to do the homework. We already know that the human brain can only focus on one thing, so multitasking is a myth. Brains are not meant to multitask with more than one activity that requires attention. So by paying better attention to one thing we can get better result. Multitasking requires our brains to switch attention from one item to the next, taking time between each switch, often leaving the person to lose track of their work as a side effect of trying to multitask. Emotions get our attention. Honestly I can’t remember yesterday’s lecture but I can still remember every single minute of the day when my grandfather died.
I must say that Medina’s Brain Rules, Attention chapter has really caught my attention. I believe the reason for this is because Medina’s spoke of things that I have found to be true. According to the Attention chapter, better attention always equal better learning and paying attention improves retention of reading material, increases accuracy, and boosts clarity in writing, math, science, etc. This is so true. From my personal experience, I discovered that whenever I pay more attention to something without being distracted, I always learn more than when I am distracted by someone or something. In addition, the Attention chapter states that attention increases from the beginning of the lecture to 10 minutes into the lecture and decreases after that point. Also, that the message that do grab your attention are connected to memory, interest, and awareness. Now, this is also true. As an example, after 10 minutes or so in my Site Planning class I would lose interest in my Professor’s Lecture, unless it is something that intrigues me.
Moreover, the chapter explains that the brain cannot multitask and that the brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. However, the chapter explains that at one level the brain does multitask (You can walk and talk at the same time.)
As an individual, I love attention and I try my best to pay keen attention to my loved ones, to my class lectures, and at my job. In general, anything that might be funning or not boring will definitely have my attention. On the other hand, if there is something very important at home or relates to school that needs my attention; I would give my full attention to that.
In this chapter, John Medina explains how attention is involved in many aspects of the brain such as memory, awareness, and interest. In addition, Medina describes how attention works in our brain which mean the process involve to attention. Also, he delineates the common factor that emotions and attention share in common and how these two aspects are related. First, Medina starts with a question for his students that basically can be restated as when student start to look at the time in a standard class (not boring or interesting class)? Well, for this question many students reply by saying 10 minutes, so this lead us to another question why ten minutes? In this case, Medina continues with his explanation and talking about memory that pretty much can be summarized as the more attention a person pay to a certain object or lecture, also, to a familiar environment. Furthermore, this was illustrated by Medina that the attention can be different from one culture to another such as the case of Asians that focus their attention to object and background scenes compare to Westerners. He mentions about how interest can affect the attention such as people are more interested I unusual things or something that is different that people are unfamiliar with. Medina explains that awareness play an important role in the attention, in other words, if people observe something for a period of time, the brain recognizes it thought the two hemispheres, and this can be detected by great impression such as a big noisy or touch someone’s arms. Moreover, this is related on how the brain process this information that was described by Michael Posner who made an hypothesis about how this works which basically is divided into three parts. The first one is alertness which means people are in a surveillance mode of what happened around them. The second stage is orientation or the place that we are involved and what to do, for example, if it is something dangerous we can leave the place. The third one is executive network which describe what action do we have to take and thinking about priorities.
In Chapter Attention, John Medina tells us that people tend to lose attention after 10 minutes, and I believe it is true. When we’re not interested in something, our brain learns slower. The more attention the brain pays to the better the learning. Our brain only pays attentions to interesting things, the thing you like to do or want to do. The interests will get our brain’s attention and that’s what keep us focused.
I have learned that what we pay attention to is influenced by memory. Our previous experiences predicts where we should pay attention, and where it’s not so important. So whether in school or in business, these differences can affect how an audience perceives a presentation. He also says that people stop paying attention after roughly 10 minutes. I think this is true by my own experiences, after focusing on a thing for some time, I loose attention and find something else to think about. But if this is true for everyone, I think everyone can be diagnosed with a weak form of A.D.D. But if then again, if everyone is diagnosed with something, no one are.
Medina also says that we pay much attention to things like emotions, threats and sex. Medina says that regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? Have I seen it before?
According to Medina, the brain is not capable of multi- tasking. We can talk and breathe, but when it comes to higher level tasks, we’re just not capable of doing it. That’s why talking on a cellphone while driving is so dangerous, cellphone talkers are a half-second slower to hit the brakes and get in more accidents.
In John Medina’s Brain Rules Of Attention, Like in the beginning of the chapter “We don’t pay attention to boring things”, but I believe the opposite I think that boring are one of the most common things that catches are attention when we doze off or are mind goes blank and we stop and stair at something, at that moment you just get distracted by it and in your mind all these random thoughts pop up and we just tend to forget everything in our surrounding. John Medinas starts of by telling us how something so unexpectedly caught his attention and his mind created this false image that he was seen of a young man with a firearm and it wasn’t really that. I actually found his paragraph “Can I have your attention, Please” very interesting, because as am reading that paragraph he’s talk to me/readers and describing how our sensory neurons in are brain are firing simultaneously, and all carrying messages trying to grab my attention and how only some will succeed in making me aware and the rest will just ignore. Usually everybody has something going thru their heads every second and one common thing is everybody’s mind is or that get their attention is their phone especially if you live in New York. I the way I manage my attention depends on my task for the day for example working, cooking or just sitting in my room looking at my phone waiting for at text from nobody.
Justin Echevarria
While reading the chapter “Attention” by John Medina, I assumed the it was mainly going to be about how the mind craves attention from other people. When I think about of attention babies normally come to mind because they always need to be catered. While reading Medina explained how every person has the attention of 9 minutes and 59 seconds as soon as the person hits 10 minutes they lose interest. So with that being said it is important to frequently get someones attention before the 10 minute mark. As people we have a tendency of giving most of our focus to things that are not really relevant and useful for us, so way to catch people attention is with colors and something that really amuses someone.
“Attention” is another amazing chapter from the Brain Rules book by John Medina. According to the author, what we pay attention to is profoundly influenced by “memory”. Our previous experience predicts where we should pay attention. Culture matters too, even when the physical ecologies are similar. Also, he links “interest” and “importance” with attention, the more important events are then given extra attention. Furthermore, he connects attention with “awareness”. We must be aware of something for it to grab our attention. As we talked in class at previous meetings, every ten minutes, the speaker must do something relevant to grab his audience attention back, because we are just able to pay attention for 9 minutes and 59 seconds. Nowadays, people use to think that they are capable of multitasking, but as Medina says, the brain is not able to perform more than one action at a time. We can talk and breathe, but when it comes to higher-level tasks, we just cannot do it. You are just task-switching. When you try to be a “clever” and feel capable of multitasking, you are taking the risk of making 3 times more errors and to spend more time doing a task, approximately, it takes 4 times longer to complete it when is interrupted. That is the reason why, our brain needs a break, we must find the way to manage our time in order to do not do so many things at the same time, because the brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to two things at the same time. Multitasking reduces productivity and increases mistakes. In addition, the brain pays a great deal attention to emotional events. Moreover, it remembers them.
Some experiences that might happen to us long time ago will still be in our memory. It is a strong link between attention and learning. It shows better attention always equals better learning. It improves retention of reading material, accuracy, and etc.
Medina mentioned that we are starting to lose our attention after ten minutes.
Also memory is helping us to pay an attention on certain things. In everyday life, we use our memory along with previous experience to predict what we should pay attention to.
Also in this chapter it states, that more interest occur more attention. And of course, we must be aware of something for it to grab our attention.
Emotions get our attention. Events that are full of emotions tend to be better remembered than neutral ones. Emotionally charged events can be divided into two categories: no two people experience identically, and those everybody experienced the same. I even as a reader looked up ‪Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh Computer‬ that Medina used as an example. I can only imagine who back then that commercial brought lots of attention and become memorable. ‬
It is mentioned in this chapter, tat our brain cannot multitask.