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gwern comments on Open Thread: August 2009 - Less Wrong
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I agree. And it's too bad - there's a lot psychology has to say about mental focus and attention, about how high working memory leads to greater focus, etc.
what's focus for you? Really curious about how you define it :-)
I define it practically: any mental state in which I'm able to score higher than usual playing Dual N-Back. Any more complex definition falling back on 'being able to suppress unwanted stimulus' or 'remembering in short-term or working memory that which is needed', seems too vague and begging the question for my taste.
That seems to me a definition of effectiveness, not focus.
Mayhap effectiveness is focus. Two words may denote the same concept, after all. As I said, any other definition seems to be essentially 'having in one's mind only that which is wanted', which is not a definition at all. My scores on DNB are positively correlated with my subjective impressions of focus; it's good enough for me.
Do you have a link to some well-written material on the subject? You've piqued my curiosity.
There's nothing really written for the layman online (which I know of). You can start by googling for topics like 'latent inhibition' and research on meditation.
Genuine research papers-wise, you could join http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training to which group's files I have uploaded ~20 papers on various topics related to working memory and focus.
Important ones:
EDIT: in the future, Google will be deleting Groups' Files. You will want to search around for where the collection has moved to; I keep local copies of the most important ones in my wiki, and I copied all files c. October 2010 to my Dropbox account.
In lieu of anything better, you can try my DNB FAQ which discusses the general subject: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ