Student_Voice: The mystery of the wandering mind

Hwang Dahyun

The author is a student at Bulam Middle School, northern Seoul.

Since last year I’ve been working on improving my attention span. Sometimes I find myself staring at my math problems for hours, thinking about anything that tugged at my mind. The numbers would transform into a scene from a video game, where a blue-haired character teleported behind his enemies, then put on a mask and became invisible. Or my mind would drift into a scene from recess that day, when my friend accidentally kicked a first grader while doing a pullup.

As time passed, I started to pay more attention to the study habits of my peers who excelled in school, like my friend Shi-Woo. Sometimes when teachers gave us time to study by ourselves, he would be concentrating so hard on his homework that he wouldn’t even hear the bell ring, and I would have to call his name multiple times to get his attention.

I asked him how he does it. He said, “It just comes naturally to me. I never thought much about it.”

If concentration is just a natural talent, I wondered: Does that mean I can’t get better at it?

So I tried to find out. I started studying with a timer. I’d concentrate for 45 minutes, then the timer would ring and I’d take a 10-minute break. It seemed to be working at first, but gradually my mind drifted off again: At some point I’d be thinking about the drama I watched last Saturday, about a very sad scene where a doctor and a patient started to bond, but then the patient died and the doctor was devastated. I saw her tired eyes filling with tears.

Then a miracle happened. One day I just woke up, brushed my teeth and sat at my desk — and it just clicked. I could focus. I saw only my schoolwork. How did it happen? What changed? It was a mystery, and I wanted to figure it out.

In my search for answers, I came across a study from the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. It said we receive about 11 million bits of information per second, which is like streaming an HD movie into our head. “Paying attention” means the brain is filtering other thoughts — from among the 11 million bits streaming past us — while it tries to hold onto the one thought you actually need to focus on. So how do you get good at this?

Researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands found that working in short bursts of around 25 minutes, with a quick break in between, helps you focus better than just powering through. This suggested that my timer might have been helping after all.

According to researchers at Beijing Normal University and Vanderbilt University, our emotions are directly connected to our ability to focus. This made a lot of sense to me. Sometimes when I got scolded by my parents and they sent me to my room to study, I would just sit there staring at my book. I was filled with anger. Instead of really seeing my book, the anger would pull my mind back to the argument with my parents, and I would think of what I should have said to them, how I could have won the argument, how I could have made them believe me and how I could have avoided feeling like this.

Emotions are the key to this mystery. Looking back, I think that’s what changed on the morning everything clicked: I realized that emotions are not always bad. When you direct them toward a positive outcome, they’re the most helpful and powerful source of energy. When I study now, I try to take my frustration and anger, and my joy and excitement, and turn it all into fuel. It powers the connection to my workbook. It also powers my connection to the future, or the future I want to bring about. While I’m studying, I think of the faces of my friends after telling them my score. I think of how happy my parents will be when I show them another A.