Focus by Daniel Goleman

Author:Daniel Goleman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

ATTENTION CHUNKS

When the Dalai Lama speaks to large audiences on his world tours, often at his side will be Thupten Jinpa, his main English-language interpreter. Jinpa listens with rapt attention while His Holiness speaks in Tibetan; he only occasionally jots a quick note. Then when there’s a pause, Jinpa repeats what was said in English, in his elegant Oxbridge accent.6

Those times that I’ve lectured abroad with the help of an interpreter, I’ve been told to speak only a few sentences before pausing for the interpreter to repeat my words in the local language. Otherwise there’s too much to remember.

But I happened to be present when this Tibetan duo was in front of a crowd of thousands, and the Dalai Lama seemed to be speaking in longer and longer chunks before pausing for the translation to English. At least once he went on in Tibetan for a full fifteen minutes before pausing. It seemed an impossibly long passage for any interpreter to track.

After the Dalai Lama finished, Jinpa was silent for several moments, as the audience stirred with palpable consternation at the memory challenge he faced.

Then Jinpa started his translation, and he, too, went on for fifteen minutes—without hesitation or even a pause. It was a breathtaking performance, one that moved the audience to applaud.

What’s the secret? When I asked Jinpa, he attributed his memory strengths to training he got as a young monk in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the south of India, where he was required to memorize long texts. “It starts when you’re just eight or nine,” he told me. “We tackle texts in classical Tibetan, which we don’t yet understand—it would be like memorizing Latin for a European monk. We memorize by the sound. Some of the texts are liturgical chants—you’ll see monks recite those chants completely from memory.”

Some of the texts young monks memorize are up to thirty pages long, with hundreds of pages of commentary. “We’d start with twenty lines we’d memorize in the morning, then repeat several times during the day with the text as a prompt. Then at night we’d recite the lines in the dark, completely from memory. The next day we’d add another twenty lines, and recite all forty—until we could recite the entire text.”

Smart practice maven Anders Ericsson has taught a similar talent to American college students, who by dint of sheer persistence learned to repeat back correctly up to 102 random digits (that level of digit recall took four hundred hours of focused practice). As Ericsson found, a keen attention lets learners find smarter ways to perform—whether at the keyboard or in the maze of the mind.

“When it comes to this application of attention,” Jinpa confided, “it takes some doggedness. You need persistence even though it may be boring.”

Such remarkable memorization seems to expand the capacity of working memory, where for a few seconds we store whatever we are paying attention to as we pass it on to long-term memory. But that seeming increase is not a true stretching of what we can hold in attention at any one moment.

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