Yesterday someone called up to ask for help someone else by spreading vibrations of love and peace.
I sat for a while and shared from the heart… not just for that soul, but also for the world. And the realisation was that I need to work on the basics. A soul who is serving on multiple projects often gets thoughts of them even while sitting in meditation.
So here is some research (to understand where we are globally)…
- Hal Wechsler says that on average…
“adults can concentrate with undivided attention for up to five minutes… teenagers… are distracted…after approximately 30 seconds. In fact we spend less than one minute on each website we visit.”
He gives some medical reasons and then suggests meditation and autosuggestion as ways to improve the attention span.
- I heard in a class that MTV now has the policy that no visual should last more than 1 second(!) because the attention span is very short. There is a tweet that states that average attention span used to be 3 minutes (length of an MTV video) in the 1980s and is 2.7 seconds in 2009.
- I happened to see CNN-IBN going on at the airport and noticed that there was a main audio-visual news going on, plus a scroll bar text giving some other news highlight, plus some stock market info on another corner. At first I couldn’t understand why they would confuse everyone by giving such an overdose of unconnected messages – and then i guessed its probably to keep everyone engaged with something or the other of their interest.
- At a client’s place I witness that the MD has the attention span of about 30 seconds and tries to take in one page of information in 2-5 seconds. Conversations have to move very quickly otherwise he either tunes out, works on his blackberry or skype or nods his head impatiently while signalling other people to do something. And if people don’t still get it, he vocally urges them to either move on or interrupts them with something else.
- One minute presenter has a series of posts tagged ‘attention’ where it cites a variety of sources including a Times of India article quotes a report that says the attention span of a university student is about 10 minutes and that a youtube video that says hollywood action movies have a cut (scene change) every 3 seconds. They also present the concept of spaced learning (intense learning sessions of 20 minutes interspersed with 10 minutes of physical activity…)
- There is a quiz by blogthings to check your attention span.
- TED talks are 18 minutes long because: “It’s long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention.”
The irony is… i’ve already had enough distraction (doing this research) so that I can value concentration more!
I believe Dadi Janki had a suggested a 40 40 40 exercise. From what I remember, it was: “Aim to stay concentrated on one thought for 40 seconds, on one theme for 40 minutes and one stage (of equanimity of being) for 40 days.”
Good homework.
