Winifred Gallagher did not stumble upon the art of concentration easily.  It came while she was struggling with cancer.

She had two choices facing her:

“When I woke up in the morning,” Ms. Gallagher said, “I’d ask myself: Do you want to lie here paying attention to the very good chance you’ll die and leave your children motherless, or do you want to get up and wash your face and pay attention to your work and your family and your friends? Hell or heaven — it’s your choice.”

With everything in life, it’s about choices.  And these choices make up how you experience life.  Do you pay attention to the book in your hand, the flashing billboard above, the conversation going on next to you, or the TV in the store window.  In a world of over stimulation and information overload, how do you stay concentrated?

It can take up to 20 minutes for you to refocus after an interuption.  Let’s face it, you don’t have time for that.

Winifred promotes meditation and even something as simple as carrying a pair of ear plugs with you.  But scientists have found something that sounds like it’s straight out of a science fiction novel.  Lasers.

Instead of laughing or raising your eyebrow, check out this article as it delves into the world of concentration, breakthrough technology to help you focus, and why your brains focus on the things they do.

“Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration

Imagine that you have ditched your laptop and turned off your smartphone. You are beyond the reach of YouTube, Facebook, e-mail, text messages. You are in a Twitter-free zone, sitting in a taxicab with a copy of “Rapt,” a guide by Winifred Gallagher to the science of paying attention.

The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multitask and answer every e-mail message instantly.

Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of what Ms. Gallagher calls the focused life. It can sound wonderfully appealing, except that as you sit in the cab reading about the science of paying attention, you realize that … you’re not paying attention to a word on the page.

The taxi’s television, which can’t be turned off, is showing a commercial of a guy in a taxi working on a laptop — and as long as he’s jabbering about how his new wireless card has made him so productive during his cab ride, you can’t do anything productive during yours.

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