"Attention is, in fact a highly directed process. Shift the focus of attention, the area of interest and totally new sensory data flow in. This shift depends on such things as alertness, degree of concentration and areas of interest."
Before you can expand your intellectual horizons in the areas of information processing, comprehension and perspective, it is imperative that you increase your attention span and expand the perceptions of your senses. Think of the brain as a switching center, like that of a giant railroad, sending different trains down different tracks all at the same time. You always want to be awake at the switch.
When one thinks "short attention span," one almost always identifies it with very young children and that is as it ought to be. When building your own intelligence, building your attention span first is a critical factor.
Intelligence tests require you to correctly repeat a sentence you have just heard, the gist of a longer passage and a series of numbers. Sentence memory, passage memory and digit memory are based on the span of your attention and are tests of that span and how well you are able to focus it.
To test your own attention span, try to picture the words as you read, written out on a blackboard. With the longer passage, concentrate on memorizing the key words. The others will fall into place by themselves. The scoring on a test like this tends to be absolute. You receive credit on the sentence memory and the digit sequence only of you repeat every word of the sentence exactly. Muff a word or a number and you receive no score.
In a passage memory exercise, the scoring is again black and white, except you are not expected to remember every exact word. You are however, given credit only if you can recall every salient point in the passage. You are either get these right or you get them wrong. But, on an intelligence test, as the sentences, passages and number series become increasingly more complex and difficult, the test maker will usually begin to stumble more often. At that point, the test is stopped and the testee is given credit for the levels at which there no errors. It works sometime like an eye chart, except that you do not come away with new glasses.
If you have any trouble remembering the seven-digit series. Make up about dozen of them each day for the next week, practicing them until you are comfortable seeing or hearing a seven digit series once, then repeating it once or twice. When you can do that with ease, you should be able to hear a telephone number once and have no problem holding it in your short term memory until you actually dial it.
Although the word "attention" is singular, attention itself is not. There are several kings of attention, each useful in different way and all necessary. There is the long range kind of tenacity required to plow through and digest a boring, but necessary, corporate report and the creative kind of perseverance required to stay with an original project of your own. Too many half knitted sweaters or unfinished letters are languishing in desks or clothes because of insufficient perseverance.
Still other kinds of work require shorter, but more intense bursts of attention to make an extraordinary exertion of mental muscles or break through to new area of thinking, supplying you with final push that can make the difference between your reach and your grasp.