Lishen Nair

Attention Span, Concentration and Age

2014-10-25T07:36:00.001-07:00

Traditionally older people were the ones we fingered as the forgetful or "slow" among us. I have found this to be a generalization though, because I have worked with people in their fifties and sixties who had impeccable memory. Yes, natural aging and reduced brain cell count are inevitable as time passes, but their adverse effects are overrated and I firmly believe our modern lifestyle featuring information overload and multitasking is far more detrimental than any natural process like aging.

We now have data spanning decades which dispels the many generalizations and myths about mental ability and aging. For instance, results from the University of Washington in Seattle showed that middle-aged adults performed better on four out of six cognitive tests than those same individuals did as young adults, says study leader Sherry Willis, PhD.

In fact, it is the millenial generation (those aged between 18 and 34) who are forgetful, more so than people over 55. A Trending Machine national poll revealed that millenials are more likely than those over 55 to forget what day it is (15 percent vs. 7 percent) and where they placed their keys (14 percent vs. 8 percent). It goes without saying that much of this difference is attributable to differences in lifestyle: millenials have more information, less sleep and greater stress levels from a more demanding world.

Fortunately there are simple changes you can put in place to reverse the effects a modern lifestyle has on your mental functioning:

#1: Control your Information Diet

Your brain naturally omits low priority items. Now the more you load it, the more it omits, and invariably important bits of information are also lost in this process. Knowledge is power, but too much of it weighs you down.

Author Tony Schwartz expressed the problem information overload presents with this metaphor: "It’s like having water poured into a glass continuously all day long, so whatever was there at the top has to spill out as the new water comes down. We’re constantly losing the information that’s just come in -- we’re constantly replacing it, and there’s no place to hold what you’ve already gotten. It makes for a very superficial experience; you’ve only got whatever’s in your mind at the moment."

Quite simply, we’re exposing ourselves to too much TV, Internet, busy environments and music. Sometimes these things are unavoidable, but it’s far from unreasonable to unplug from electronic media on a quiet day like Sunday, where you switch off all alerts on your mobile phone, drive without music, and go for a walk instead of watching TV. You will feel alleviated by reducing the load you provide your brain to process.

#2: Sleep

During sleep your brain correlates and stores events and information for the day. If your sleep is disrupted or shortened, the storage process is compromised.

How often do you find yourself fighting to keep your eyes open because you feel compelled to watch a movie or sports game late at night? Is it really imperative to you to know what happens in the end? The answer to that is no, because your life isn’t affected whatever the result is. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t watch and enjoy a good movie or sports game, but just don’t do it at the expense of sleep.

The guidelines are simple: Keep your room dark, maintain the same sleeping hours, and get no less than seven hours of sleep.

#3: Multitask less

We live under the misguided belief that you need to multitask in the 21st century if you are to be productive. All that happens when you multitask however is you do bits of many tasks without completing any of them. There is absolutely no proof that shows you to be more productive when doing many things simultaneously.

It feels like you’re getting a lot of work done when you skip across many tasks only because your cognitive load is increased. You just feel busy, but effectively your rate of output does not increase. What multitasking does do though is increase your stress by forcing the brain to re-orientate itself each time you switch tasks. In the meantime you lose present moment awareness, as you anticipating the next thing you need to do and sporadically jump between jobs. In this process, your concentration span reduces and you unconsciously develop a habit of not completing things you start.

Often you will have many things to do, but plan forward and allocate solid blocks of time to one task at a time. It’s usually a reactive, unplanned response that causes you to stop one thing and start something else. Your productivity is at its best however when you work slowly and deliberately as far as possible, instead of trying to do too much.

How to make your PC startup faster

2012-05-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

So you've run disk defragmenter, deleted programs and run disk cleanup too, yet still you only see a minor improvement in your machine's boot-up time.

As time goes you accumulate updates and install new software. Many of these programs/updates take the liberty to plonk themselves on your list of startup programs, meaning that your PC runs these programs every time you switch it on, whether you use them or not. I found the HTC Sync software for my phone doing this for instance. Even worse was that it never opened up in a window, so I had no idea it was taking up system resources - it was just quietly running in the background after I installed it.

That wasn't the only thing. I found that Adobe Acrobat, CS5 and Google updates (see below) were all running on start up. Unfortunately many programs you install run on startup by default until you deactivate them. Periodically then you need to manually toggle which programs you want to run at startup.

[Disclaimer: Tech buffs or programmers may find this obvious, but this is for the remaining 99.9% of PC users who don't have degrees in computer science.]

Step #1:
Click the Start button. In the input box where it says Search programs and files, type in msconfig.exe
A shortcut for msconfig.exe should appear at the top of the start menu as you type (highlighted in blue). Click this shortcut.

Note: For Windows XP and older simply click Start, then click Run. In the dialog box type in msconfig.exe and click Run.

Step #2:
A window called System Configuration will open. Click the Startup tab. Here you will see all the programs that run when your computer starts up. Every box that is checked means that the corresponding program is running at startup:

The ones checked above look important, so best to leave them checked. As a rule of thumb, if you don't understand what the Startup Item does, don't deactivate it. However, when I scroll down the list here is what I see:

Step #3:
From the pic above you can see Startup Items relating to Adobe, Microsoft Office and Google. These were not Startup Items when I first bought my machine, so I will uncheck all of them:

In 99% of cases, you would do well to eliminate all third party applications that aren't critical to startup. Ask yourself: did this program come with my machine when I first bought it? If not, uncheck it. With all the unessential programs unchecked, click OK.

All the programs that were needlessly clogging your machine will now only open on command and not during startup. Start your machine again and you should immediately see a difference.

A 9 year old shows what perseverance and passion are about

2012-04-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

Here is a kid who makes arcade games from the cardboard boxes left over in his dad's auto spares shop. He receives little to no customers in spite of devoting days worth of his sweat and time, but he doesn't care. All he cares about is making his arcade the best it can be. He continues to make games even though nobody is playing the ones he has already built.

A detail in this video that can easily be missed is the method nine year old Caine Monroy uses to verify his fun passes. Personally I don't think I could have devised such a method even when I was 12. This lad is both industrious and brilliant.

Everything is manual: he physically goes behind each arcade game to push tickets/coupons to any patron that's playing, for instance. In this video you will also see how he modified one of his games after he received feedback that it was too easy. Caine displays the raw old fashioned resilience and passion that is the driving force behind any successful endeavour. Adults for the most part lose this single point focus and start getting anxious at the first sign of difficulty.

Keep building, keep shipping, and soon enough the people will come. Of course, Caine doesn't give that sentiment too much thought - he's too busy mastering his art.