Striving to Be in “The Zone”

Blocking childhood distractions that muddy our minds.

By Greg O’Brien

Source; Shutterstock/Gorodenkoff

Distinguished Belfast-born scientist, physicist, and mathematician William Thomson, the 1st Barron Kelvin, was ahead of his time. He espoused in the 1800s: “What is not defined cannot be measured. What is not measured, cannot be improved.”

The quote implies that without an adequate measure for success, it’s virtually impossible to quantify progress.

Our world today is gripped by a toxic attention deficit—from children to adults—that makes success more and more difficult to define. That’s the view of former Harvard Professor Steve Gullans, a prominent scientist, author, and entrepreneur. Gullans was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital for nearly 20 years; he has published more than 130 scientific papers on biology and medicine, and has lectured internationally. He fully embraces the sage words of Thompson in his revolutionary effort to heal this toxic attention deficit.

Says Gullans in an interview, “People in the 21st century have lost 70 percent of their attention span,” the measuring stick to mentally succeed at complex tasks. Without such focus, he warns, we all drift.

And that doesn’t take into account the rising toll of those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia—a progressive disease for which there is no cure now. Those of us living with this vile disease know well the importance of trying to keep focused.

As a society, we now drift, by and large, says Gullans, who has designed and produced— along with a gifted team of doctors and PhDs— an ingenious program for improving children with attention deficiencies, THYNK.

Consider today’s social media and other menacing distractions for both young and old, says Gullans, co-author of Evolving Ourselves, which details the role of life science technologies in our future. “What’s needed to regain focus? First, we have to get everyone’s attention!”

That’s a challenge in a world today where children are obsessed with their iPads, cellphones, social media, other fast-paced stimulations, and television, often used as a babysitter.

“Kids now are not learning sustained attention,” says Gullans. “When they watch a cartoon, the images change every few seconds on average, in comparison to the Baby Boom generation, which grew up with just three black-and-white television channels and ‘rabbit ears’ to improve bad reception that often resembled snow squalls on a dreadful day.”

Now, on average, he adds, “children are often on video screens five to six hours a day. These young brains are being barraged with just milliseconds to absorb and, thus, not learning sustained focus.”

The same is true of adults, Gullans says.

“Adult distractions impede our daily workflow, adds Gullans, a father of two and grandfather of five, who lives outside Boston with his wife, Stenie. “The average person at work sitting at a computer may have between 50 to 100 interruptions a day that didn’t exist 30 years ago—including numerous emails from the boss to do something immediately, or online shopping because an ad just popped up, or other disruptions. It’s overwhelming. We also see it today in action movies. Hollywood plays to this—often with dozens or more chase scenes in an hour and a half film where scores are killed and scenes change in nanoseconds.”

So how do we fix this?

“Stone by stone,” says Gullans, noting we should work with young minds first.

Stone Soup is a timeless French folktale. There are different versions by different authors. In 1947, Marcia Brown published and illustrated a children’s book version. In Brown’s version, soldiers are marching toward a French village. The villagers, upon seeing the soldiers, hide their food. Realizing food has been hidden, the soldiers then tell the villagers that they can make tasty soup out of stones in a boiling pot of water, and thus begin the process, stone by stone. The soldiers, in a clash of wits, suggest the stone soup might be tastier with some cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. So the villagers start plunking food they had hidden into the pot. Soon an incredible soup is cooked and consumed by delighted villagers and the hungry soldiers, who leave the village fully fed and wholly satisfied.

“Stone Soup is a story about how to accomplish seemingly impossible missions by motivating a community of like-minded individuals to work together for everyone’s benefit,” says Gullans. “Dreams are possible when a community embraces a vision of how the future can be better.”

Gullans’ dream is to teach a generation of young minds how to focus in far more disciplined ways so they are more successful in school, with family, and ultimately in life.

“Parents of children with attention deficiencies understand the constant struggles,” says Gullans, noting that by using the power of biofeedback, THYNK, a winner of the Oracle Health Innovation Award, is clinically shown to greatly improve focus. All this through a disciplined video game. The technology includes the use of a patented EEG headset (a brain-computer interface), which, using real-time biofeedback, controls a groundbreaking video game, Skylar’s Run, to teach cognitive skills.

Biofeedback is an "alternative medicine approach that teaches one to change the way your body and mind function." It’s a mind-body therapy.

Using feedback from a child’s brainwaves, Skylar’s Run adjusts to each child’s skill level—matching skill with challenge. By finding a perfect balance between skill and challenge, Gullans says, “a child’s brain begins to understand what sustained focus feels like.” Such video games, he adds, are a powerful medium for learning because children most naturally learn through play.

In essence, Gullans approach helps to get a child into “The Zone,” free of distractions. “'The Zone,' also called 'Flow,' is a mental state of boundless focus where one gets intensely absorbed in the moment and the world disappears,” says Gullans. “We see this in meditation, in sports among remarkable athletes, in the arts, writing, music and in other aspects.

“And that’s what we’re all about—getting the best out of young minds, exceeding all expectations with the focus of a heat-seeking missile.” In the future, Gullans and his team will work to expand its brain health focus to give more hope to those with Alzheimer’s and other dementias in conquering these forms of attention deficit. In addition, Gullans and his team have worked with high-functioning children with autism, and has directed parents of autistic children to other technologies specifically designed for (ASD).

Thompson, the 1st Barron Kelvin, would be pleased…

(Greg O’Brien is a career journalist, writer, and author. He lost his maternal grandfather, mother, and paternal uncle to Alzheimer’s, and before his father’s death, his dad was diagnosed with dementia.)