How to tame your wandering mind | Amishi Jha | TED Talk

Neuroscientist Amishi Jha discusses the brain’s attention system in her TED Talk “How to tame your wandering mind.” We learn that the brain’s attention system was designed to solve this problem by noticing, selecting, and directing computational resources to a subset of information. Attention is like the brain’s boss, and where it goes, the rest of the brain follows. However, attention can fail and leave people feeling foggy and distracted. Jha conducted a study on active-duty military personnel who had undergone mindfulness training to help them deal with attention-related stress. She explains the research, which uses brain-wave recordings to plot the timing of brain activity - specifically the N170 component, which shows how attention affects perception. By using mindfulness and meditation, people can train their brain to pay better attention and increase performance management and time management.