How to Quickly Improve Focus - Andrew Huberman

[Music] welcome to another episode of after skool I'm Andrew huberman professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine and the host of The huberman Lab podcast today we will be learning about how to improve focus and attention so without further Ado let's watch the animation the best way to get better at focusing is to use the mechanisms of focus that you were born with and the key principle here is that mental focus follows visual Focus we are all familiar with the fact that our visual system can be unfocused blurry or jumping around or

we can be very laser focused on one location in space what's interesting and vitally important to understanding how to access neuroplasticity is that you can use your visual focus and you can increase your visual Focus as a way of increasing your mental focus abilities more broadly so I'm going to explain how to do that plasticity starts with alertness that alertness can come from a sense of love a sense of Joy a sense of fear doesn't matter there are pharmacologic ways to access alertness too the most common one is of course caffeine which if you watch

the Sleep episodes you know reduces this molecule that makes us sleepy called adenosine caffeine can be a relatively safe way to increase epinephrine now many people are now also using Adderall Adderall chemically looks a lot like amphetamine and basically it is amphetamine it will increase epinephrine release from Locus to release it will wake up the brain and that's why a lot of people rely on it it does have a heavy basis for use in certain clinical syndromes prescribed such as attention deficit however it also has a high probability of abuse especially in those who are

not prescribed it Adderall will not increase focus it increases alertness it does not touch the acetylcholine system and if those of you that are taking Adderall say well it really increases my focus overall that's probably because your autonomic nervous system is just veering towards what we call parasympathetic you're really just very sleepy and so it's bringing your levels of alertness up as I mentioned Adderall is very problematic for a number of people as it can be habit forming learning on Adderall does not always translate to high performance off or on Adderall at later times and

the Adderall discussion is a broader one that perhaps we should have with a psychiatrist in the room at some point because it is a very widely abused drug at this point in time the acetylcholine system and the focus that it brings is available as I mentioned through pharmacology but also through these behavioral practices and the behavioral practices that are anchored in visual Focus are going to be the ones that are going to allow you to develop great depth and duration of focus so let's think about visual Focus for a second when we focus on something

visually we have two options we can either look at a very small region of space with a lot of detail and a lot of precision or we can dilate our gaze and we can see big pieces of visual space with very little detail it's a trade-off we can't look at everything at high resolution this is why we have these the the pupil more or less relates to the fovea of the eye which is the area in which we have the most receptors the highest density of receptors that perceive light and so our Acuity is much

better in the center of our visual field than in our periphery it's a simple experiment you can do right now if you're listening to this you can still do it you can hold your your hands out in front of you provided that you're sighted you should be able to see how many fingers you have in front of you you for me it's five still got all five fingers amazingly enough if I move my hand off to the side and I'm I can't see them with Precision but as I move them back into the center of

my visual field I can see them with precision and that's because the density the number of pixels in the center of my visual field is much higher than it is in the periphery when we focus our eyes we do a couple things first of all we tend to do that in the center of our visual field and our two eyes tend to align in what's called a virgin's eye movement towards a common point the other thing that happens is the lens of our eye moves so that our brain now no longer sees the entire visual

world but is seeing a small cone of visual imagery that small cone of visual imagery or soda straw view of the world has much higher Acuity higher resolution than if I were to look at everything now you say of course this makes perfect sense but that's about visual attention not mental attention well it turns out that focus in the brain is anchored to our visual system I'll talk about blind people in a moment but assuming that somebody is sighted the key is to learn how to focus better visually if you want to bring about higher

levels of cognitive or mental focus even if you're engaged in a physical task now there's a remarkable phenomenon in animals where animals that have their eyes on the side of their head are scanning the entire visual environment all the time they're not focused on anything think you're grazing animals your cows your sheep your birds Etc but think about a bird picking up seeds on the beach or on concrete that bird's head is up here it's up about a foot off the ground or if it's a small bird about six inches off the ground and its

eyes are on the side of its head and yet it has this tiny beak that can quickly pick up these little seeds off the ground with immense Precision now if you try to do that by staring off to the sides of the room and picking up items in front of you with high Precision at that tiny scale little tiny objects you will miss almost every time they do it perfectly and they don't smash their beak into the ground and damage it they do it with beautiful movement Acuity also so how do they do it how

do they create this Focus or this awareness of what's in front of them it turns out as they lower their head their eyes very briefly move inward in what's called a virgin's eye movement now their eyes can't actually translocate in their head they're fixed in the skull just like yours and mine are but when we move our eyes slightly inward basically shortening or making the interpupillary distance as it's called smaller two things happen not only do we develop a smaller visual window into the world but we activate a set of neurons in our brain stem

that trigger the release of both norepinephrine epinephrine and acetylcholine norepinephrine is kind of similar to epinephrine so in other words when our eyes are relaxed in our head when we're just kind of looking at our entire visual environment moving our head around moving through space we're an optic flow things moving past us or we're sitting still we're looking broadly at our space we're relaxed when our eyes move slightly inward toward a particular visual Target our visual World shrinks our level of visual focus goes up and we know that this relates to the release of acetylcholine

and epinephrine at the relevant sites in the brain for plasticity now what this means is that if you have a hard time focusing your mind for sake of reading or for listening you need to practice and you can practice focusing your visual system now this works best if you practice focusing your visual system at the precise distance from the work that you intend to do for sacroplasticity so how would this look in the real world let's say I am trying to concentrate on something related to I don't know science I'm reading a science paper now

having a hard time it's not absorbing I might think that I'm only looking at the paper that I'm reading or I'm only looking at my screen but actually my eyes are probably darting around a bit experiments have been done on this or I'm gathering information from too many sources in in the visual environment now presumably because it's me I've already had my coffee I'm hydrated I'm well well rested I slept well and I still experience these challenges in focusing spending just 60 to 120 seconds focusing my visual attention on a small window of my screen

meaning just on my screen with nothing on it but bringing my eyes to that particular location increases not just my visual Acuity for that location but it brings about an increase in activity in a bunch of other brain areas that are associated with gathering information from this location so put simply if you want to improve your ability to focus practice visual Focus now if you wear contacts or you have or you wear corrective lenses that's fine you of course would want to use those you don't want to take those off and use a blurry image

the finer the visual image and the more that you can hold your gaze to that visual image the higher your levels of attention will be many times on Instagram and here I've been teased for not blinking very often that's actually a practiced thing we blink more as we get tired which as you hear it you'll probably just say duh as we get tired the neurons in the brain stem that are responsible for alertness and that hold the eyelids open start to falter and our eyelids start to close this is why it's hard the words I

could barely keep my eyes open which may be how you feel right now but assuming that you're paying attention and you're alert when you're very alert your eyes are wide your eyes are open and as you get tired your eyelids start to close blinks actually reset our perception of time and space this was shown in a beautiful paper in current biology I'll be sure to post the reference in the notes and blinking of course is necessary to lubricate the eyes people blink because their eyes might get dry but if you can keep focus by blinking

less and by focusing your eyes to a particular location is probably pretty creepy for you to experience as I'm doing this but the more that you can do this the more that you can maintain a kind of a cone or a tunnel of mental focus now you may ask well what about the the experiment where people were you know feeling this rotating drama or listening to the auditory queue that doesn't involve Vision at all ah if you look at people who are learning things audit with their auditory system they will often close their eyes and

that's not a coincidence if somebody is listening very hard please don't ask them to look you directly in the eye while also asking that they listen to you that's actually one of the worst ways to get somebody to listen to if you say now listen to me and look me in the eye the visual system will take over and they'll see your mouth move but they're going to hear their thoughts more they're going to hear what what you're saying closing the eyes is one of the best ways to create a cone of auditory attention and

this is what low vision or no vision folks do they have tremendous capacity to focus their attention in particular locations incidentally does anyone know the two animals that have the best hearing in the world the absolute best hearing many orders of magnitude better than humans turns out it's the elephant that might not surprise you they have huge ears and the moth which probably will surprise you I didn't even know that moths could hear but now it explains why they're so hard to catch if you are not cited you learn how to do this with your

hearing if you're somebody who Braille reads you learn how to do this with your fingers if you look at great piano players like Glenn Gould you'll they often times will turn their head to the side you think about some of the great musicians that like Stevie Wonder that were blind right they he would look away because he had no reason to look at the keys but oftentimes they'll Orient an ear or one side of their head to the keys on the piano as I mentioned before people are non-sided to have better pitch so we have

these cones of attention that we can devote and for most people vision is the primary way to train up this focus of building these cones of attention so you absolutely have to focus on the thing that you're trying to learn and you will feel some agitation because of the epinephrine in your system if you're feeling agitation and it's challenging to focus and you're feeling like you're not doing it right chances are you're doing it right and you can practice this ability to stare for long periods of time without blinking if your goal is to learn

how to control that visual window for sake of controlling your focus it can be an immensely powerful portal into these mechanisms of plasticity because we know it engages things like nucleus basalus and these other brain stem mechanisms I get a lot of questions about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD and attention deficit disorder some people actually have clinically diagnosed ADD and ADHD and if you do you should certainly work with a good psychiatrist to try and figure out the right pharmacology and or behavioral practices for you many people however have given themselves a low-grade ADHD or

add because of the way that they move through their world they are looking at their phone a lot of the time it's actually very easy to Anchor your attention to your phone for the following reason first of all it's very restricted in size so it's very easy to limit your visual attention to something about this big it's one of the design features of the phone the other is that just as you you've probably heard a picture is worth a thousand words well a movie is worth ten thousand pictures anytime we're looking at things that have

motion visual motion our attentional system will naturally gravitate towards them it towards those movies it's actually much harder to read words on a page than it used to be for many people because we're used to seeing things spelled out for us in YouTube videos or videos where things move and are very dramatic it is true that the more that we look at those motion stimuli the more that we're seeing movies of things and things that are very dramatic and very intense the worse we're getting at attending to things like text on a page or to

listening to something like a podcast and extracting the information if you think about the areas of life that dictate whether or not we become successful independent healthy individuals most of those involve the kind of boring practices of digesting information on a page boring because it's not as exciting in the moment perhaps as watching a movie or something being spoon fed to us but the more attention that we can put to something even if it's fleeting and we feel like we're only getting little bits and pieces shards of the information as opposed to the entire thing

that has a much more powerful effect in engaging this cholinergic system for plasticity then does for instance watching a movie and that's because when we watch a movie it can the entire thing can be great it can be awesome it can be this overriding experience but I think for all those experiences if you're somebody who's interested in building your brain and expanding your brain and getting better at various things feeling better doing better Etc one has to ask how much of my neurochemical resources am I devoting to the passive experience of letting something just kind

of overwhelm me and excite me versus something that I'm really trying to learn and take away and now there's nothing I enjoy movie content and TV content all the time I scroll Instagram often but we are limited in the extent to which we can grab a hold of these acetylcholine release mechanisms or epinephrine and I think that we need to be careful that we don't devote all our acetylcholine and epinephrine all our dopamine for that matter to these passive experiences of things that are not going to enrich us and better us so that's a little

bit of an of an editorial on my part but the phone is Rich with movies it's rich with information the real question is is the information rich in for us in ways that grow us and cultivate smarter more emotionally uh you know emotionally evolved or people or is it creating how's what's it doing for our physical well-being for that matter so I don't want to tell people what to do or not to do but think carefully about how often you're focusing on something and how good you are or poor you are at focusing on something

that's challenging so once you get this epinephrine this alertness you get the acetylcholine released and you can focus your attention then the question is for how long and in an earlier podcast I talked about these all tradian cycles that last about 90 minutes the typical learning bout should be about 90 minutes that learning bout will no doubt include five to ten minutes of warm-up period I think everyone should give themselves permission to not be fully focused in the early part of that bout but that in the middle of that bout for the middle hour or

so you should be able to maintain Focus for about an hour or so so that for me means eliminating distractions that means turning off the Wi-Fi I put my phone in the other room if I find myself reflexively getting up to get the phone I will take the phone and lock it in the car outside if I find myself going to get it anyway I am guilty of giving away the phone um for a period of time or even things more dramatic I've thrown it up on my roof before so I can't get to it

till the end of the day that thing is pretty compelling and we come up with all sorts of reasons why we need it to be in contact with it but I encourage you to try experiencing what it is to be completely immersed in an activity where you feel the agitation that your attention is drifting but you continually bring it back and that's an important point which is that attention drifts but we have to re-anchor it we have to keep grabbing it back and the way to do that if you're sighted is with your eyes that

as your attention drifts and you look away you want to try and literally maintain visual focus on the thing that you're trying to learn feel free to Blink of course but you can greatly increase your powers of focus and the rates of learning if you want to learn as an adult you have to be alert it might seem so obvious but I think a lot of people don't think about when in their 24-hour cycle they're most alert just ask yourself when during the day do you typically tend to be most alert that will afford you

an advantage in learning specific things during that period of time so don't give up that period of time for things that are meaningless useless or not aligned with your goals it'll be a terrible time to get into passive observance or just letting your time get soaked Away by something that is a valuable asset that epinephrine released from your brain stem is going to occur more readily at particular phases of of your 24-hour cycle than others during the waking phase of course you should know when those are and then you could start to think about the

behavioral practices maybe the pharmacologic practices like caffeine hydration Etc that will support heightened levels of alertness attention is something that can be learned and attention is critical for creating that condition where whatever it is that you are engaging in will modify your brain in a way that you won't have to spend so much attention on it going forward that's the essence of plasticity that things will eventually become reflexive the language that you're learning the motor movement the cognitive skill the ability to suppress an emotional response or to engage an emotional response depending on what your

goals are and what's appropriate for you you should also ask yourself whether or not you're trying to focus too much for too long during the day I know some very high performing individuals very high performing in a variety of contacts and none of them are focused all day long many of them take walks down the hallway sometimes mumbling to themselves or not paying attention to anything else they go for bike rides they take walks they are not trying to engage their mind at maximum Focus all the time very few people do that because we learn

best in these 90-minute bouts inside of one of these ultradian cycles and I should repeat again that within that 90 minute cycle you should not expect yourself to focus for the entire period of one 90-minute cycle the beginning and end are going to be a little bit flickering in and out of focus how do you know when one of these 90 minute Cycles is starting well typically when you wake up is the beginning of the first 90 minute cycle but it does it's not down to the minute you'll be able to tap into your sense

of these 90 minute Cycles as you start to engage in these learning practices should you choose and then of course getting some non-sleep deep rest or just deliberate disengagement such as walking or running or just sitting eyes closed door eyes open kind of mindlessly it might seem in a chair just letting your thoughts move around after learning about will accelerate the rate of plasticity that's been shown in quality peer-reviewed studies thank you for joining for this special episode of after skool if you'd like to learn more tools for mental health physical health and performance check

out the huberman Lab podcast which is available on all platforms YouTube Apple Spotify anywhere podcasts are found also check out huberman lab on both Instagram and Twitter there I cover science and science-based tools some of which overlaps with the content of the huberman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content of the huberman Lab podcast we are also hubermanlab.com that's our website and there you can find links to all of our social media and all of our podcast episodes thank you foreign