“Children with suspected attention deficits are now underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed” “One of the most important factors that make a person’s behavior intelligent involves a highly efficient attention control circuitry in the brain” “In adults, the ability to maintain attention spans between 45 minutes and one hour”Charo Rueda (Almería, 1972) argues that one of the keys to being successful in life is having a good attention span, because thanks to she is easier to make good decisions. An expert in attention, how to control it and also how to improve it, she is a professor of Basic Psychology at the University of Granada, where she teaches Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology and directs the Cognitive Neuroscience of Development laboratory. In her latest book, Educar in attention with a brain (Publishing Alliance), delves into how attention allows us to interact with the environment in a deeper way, richer in nuances and sharper, but also to make decisions more in line with our objectives. She asks. Why is paying attention so important?She Answered. Basically, when the brain is in an attentive state, the information is not processed in the same way, but with a greater degree of depth. And enter into what we call consciousness. That is, we are aware of what we are doing and the information that is reaching our brain. And so we make decisions that are in tune with our goals: voluntary, conscious and considered. Q. Is having a good attention span key to being successful in life? A. All the data that come to us from the investigations point in that direction. One of the most important predictors for professional success, academic success, monetary health and physical health is the ability to regulate attention and behavior in an attentive state, even above intelligence. Why? Because when one makes voluntary and weighed decisions based on objectives that are sometimes strategic, one eats, for example, better and does not get carried away by immediate desires such as eating sweets or smoking. Q. Are the smartest people the ones with the longest attention span? A. Probably not everyone will agree with me on this, but there is a lot of data of various kinds that suggests that it is so. When you look at the phylogenetic evolution of the brain of our species, what you see is that one of the parts of the brain of Homo sapiens, which is the most different from other species, is precisely the one that has to do with the entire circuit of attention control. Another thing that is clearly seen in neuroimaging studies is that when one performs tasks that involve reasoning to measure intelligence, there is also a very strong activation in the anatomical circuit related to attention. That makes me think that an intelligent brain is a brain that has a high capacity for regulating information processing. In my opinion, one of the most important factors that makes a person’s behavior intelligent involves a highly efficient attention control circuitry in the brain. P. Can one train to get more and better care? A. Yes, clearly. The organ of cognition is the brain and, like any other organ, its structure and function is partially determined by genetics. In other words, a person’s attentional efficiency is subject in part to what is inherited from their parents. But the thing about the human brain is that it’s highly plastic. It is an organ that has evolved so that its functioning is increasingly determined by the experiences it receives. It is functionally specialized to maximize a person’s ability to process the information that is required. A very clear example is language. The brain of all Homo sapiens has a specific brain circuit to learn language. Now, some learn one language or another based on experience. A child who was not subjected to any exposure to any kind of language would not learn any. And one who is born in Japan will learn Japanese. And another that was born in Spain, Spanish. If we take this to the field of attention, the same thing happens. If we have an environment that demands us and puts us in a situation where we need to find that brain state of attentive processing, our brain will grow to maximize that capacity. P. This, you have verified in your laboratory. A. Yes. We have done studies to see to what extent we can alter the functioning of our brain by having children between four and six years old do exercises that we have designed to activate the brain structures that are activated when one is paying attention and exercising control over their responses. A. Yes, we have verified that when we give training with that exercise. If we take a measurement of the brain before training and afterwards, we see that the trained group, compared to a group that does the exercises but does not increase the difficulty of these in the training program, there is an improvement in the efficiency in the functioning of the brain. brain in the trained group. Q. Does that efficiency last over time? A. In the short term it remains, but for it to do so in the long term you should continue training. Q. Do you recommend then that schoolchildren train their attention span? It would be good if the cognitive skills needed for the academy were exercised more in school curricula. For example, attention, memory, reasoning… I get the feeling that school curricula focus a lot on content but little on skills. At least in the infant stage, an effort should be made to train the cognitive skills that will later be required for all content. Q. Should you also train at home? There are parenting styles that encourage decision-making, emotional regulation, attention regulation… It would be enough for parents to be aware of this and to put these types of skills more into practice. Having a good lifestyle also influences: a good sleep pattern, nutrition, parents who stimulate cognitively and give their children opportunities to be autonomous and make decisions, and who guide them to develop long-term strategies. Q. What exercises are there to train attention? Any exercise that makes the child have to inhibit an automatic behavior that is incorrect and has to stop it to make an alternative decision. We have exercises adapted to the difficulty. A very nice one is that robots of different shapes appear on the screen (square, rectangular and round) that eat nuts of their shape, but not of another. Therefore, the button must be tightened when the nut coincides with the robot. To make it more challenging, we included nuts of the same shape but rusted, which would not work. That is why you have to be very careful to get it right. Test of attention at the University of Granada. NIUSP. Sometimes it’s exhausting to pay attention. R. Being in an attentive state supposes a very rich and deep processing of information. And it is an exercise all the time of weighing the response you give to that information based on your objectives. This supposes a number of circuits, of regions, very important. They are regions that consume a lot of energy. And it’s very tiring, of course. Q. Why are there people who can maintain attention by doing several things at the same time and not others? A. The efficiency with which one can attend is an interactive mixture of genes and experiences or learning. There are some genetic variations that suppose a greater or lesser dopamine in the brain and that makes you have a greater tendency to be more hyperactive or to be more distractible. But sometimes experiences are capable of modifying genetics. If you train an ability, you can improve it, even if you have genetics that, in principle, were not the most favorable towards that ability. Q. Are women better at being able to attend to several things at the same time? A. I’m not clearer that women are better. Women and men have had different occupations historically and culturally. That makes the female brain more trained towards multitasking. But that is a question that should be tested. I don’t like these simple statements because they are often wrong. P. And the children, how long can they maintain their attention? A. Attention span means in psychology how long one can maintain attention. In children, this is not well geared in the brain and it is very difficult to reach a high attentive state and maintain it, especially if that sustained attention has to come from an internal interest. To the little ones, if what they are told is a story that arouses their interest, such as stories with dragons, to the extent that what you tell is motivating and touches their emotions, their spam will be greater. Their span depends a lot on what they are serving. A three-year-old child, faced with a demotivating activity, cannot last a minute, but if he is, he can do it for 15 minutes. A. In adults, the ability to sustain attention is between 45 minutes and one hour. That’s why the classes last that long. Q. There is a lot of talk about children with attention deficit disorder. Is there more now than before or is more detected? A. My impression is not that there are more, but that it is diagnosed worse or is overdiagnosed. Many times the problem is that it is directly the teacher or the family doctor who says that a child is hyperactive and there is no serious diagnosis. The action of different professionals would be required. A psychologist would have to be able to rule out that these hyperactive and inattentive behaviors are not due to other circumstances. Sometimes children have a very difficult home environment. One of the first attentional systems to deteriorate at the brain level is due to stress, anxiety, and lack of affection. Many times only the child’s behavior is assessed and a psychotropic drug is prescribed to control it pharmacologically. And that’s a major mistake in my opinion.