Posts By: Frank Sopper

Our Associative system allows us to make predictions.  It could be as simple as: what’s around the next corridor; who’s that knocking at my door; or what are my career goals for the next five years? It does this by rapidly lining up our patterns of knowledge and experience and drawing those lines out into…

We’ve learned charting –anticipating what we plan– and logging — documenting our actions — brings together the three cognitive positions necessary to a decision: anticipation, actualization, and review.   And we know, if we want to achieve something, we have to align three states: anticipation, actualization, and review. The less reward there is in anticipation…

My friend, Rob, is a hockey goalie who has a low neuromuscular activation. He doesn’t fidget or flinch. In the chaos of a hockey game, Rob looks like the 15th Incarnation of the Buddha of Serenity. His body stays in a still and focused state until a high-value target, for example a speeding projectile, approaches…

In the case of attending to a conference call, a presentation, or a lecture, you can start by trying to hold your auditory focus for as long as possible, then by trying again for as long as possible after you recognize a drift in focus.  By contrast, consciously tune your attention in and out. Divert…

Even just a few years ago, we thought of our attention span as a single phenomenon. We now realize that each of our brain’s processing systems has its own attention span. Nearly all of us have different attention spans for our Associative processors and our Sequential processors. We also are able to activate and hold…