Build Mental Models to Enhance Your Focus | Charles Duhigg

source: Big Think    2016年9月15日
According to Pulitzer winner Charles Duhigg, the art of focus is training your mind to know what it can safely ignore. Duhigg's latest book is "Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business" (http://goo.gl/gNhDR6).
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/charles-du...

Transcript - Nowadays it’s incredibly hard to stay focused. There’s so many distractions around us at any given moment. Your pocket vibrates at any given moment because you’re getting ten new emails and on social media there’s all these new notifications and the phone is ringing and your kids need help and your colleagues are coming up because you are working in an open office plan and they’re asking you to chime in on some memo. Maintaining focus nowadays is harder than ever before. But it’s way more critical too. One of the things that we know about the most productive people and the most productive companies is that they create ways to enhance their focus. They manage their mind in such a way that they’re able to focus on what’s important and ignore distractions much better. And the way that they do this is by what’s known as building mental models.
Essentially telling themselves stories about what they expect to see, engaging in this kind of inner dialogue about what they think should be happening that allows their brain almost subconsciously to figure out what to pay attention to and what to ignore. One of my favorite examples of this is a big study that was done of nurses in NICUs. Some researchers from a group named Client Associates went into some hospitals because they wanted to figure out why some nurses were so good at paying attention to the right things whereas others got distracted by all the noise and bustle around them. And what they found is that the best nurses in NICUs which is the neonatal intensive care unit who were handling these babies, the nurses who were almost had a sixth sense or an ESP about figuring out which babies were sick and were getting sicker were the ones who were constantly telling themselves stories about what they expected to see as they were walking around the hospital. So one of my favorite interviews from this study was with a nurse named Darlene. And Darlene said that what she would do is that she always was keeping a picture in her brain of what she thought the perfect baby should look like. And so she would walk through the unit and she would notice when babies didn’t kind of match that picture in her brain, right. And they would match – they would mismatch that picture in kind of odd ways. Read full transcript here: https://goo.gl/dRTTZW.