Lack of attention and mental laziness are two serious problems

Daniel Goleman, PhD in psychology from Harvard, launched in 1996 the book Emotional Intelligence, bestseller worldwide, recently launched a new project - entitled Focus - which advocates the importance of attention and alert to the challenge today to keep our focus on routine tasks and our projects. The book is available in Portuguese language since January this year.

No scholarship and readable, the book is based on a triad of outbreaks: the internal focus, external focus and focus on the other, and aims to teach how to join the three to make the most of our attention.

"Our focus is continually struggling against distractions, both internal and external. The question is: What our distractions are costing us?" Goleman has asked. "Attention operates like a muscle: little used, it languishes; well used, it improves and expands."

With the revolution of media, the consolidation of the internet as a tool, laptops, smartphones, tablets and the immense amount of information that is offered to us daily, it is difficult indeed to almost all people maintain focus. "The flood of data that leads us to hits sloppy shortcuts, how to select emails by subject, skipping many of voice messages, read messages and memos overlooked," says Goleman. "It's not just that we have developed habits of mind that make us less efficient, but that the weight of the message leaves us very little time to simply reflect on what they really mean."

In the book he says something that many have already noticed: the generation that was born in front of the computer has little ability to concentrate and therefore have difficulty maintaining focus on what is essential. With so many opportunities for information, education and entertainment, it is hard to think and reflect on everything that gets in the eyes, which restricts our vision and make our increasingly narrow minds incapable of jumps that occur only after moments of reflection and deep analysis.

As an example of this difficulty, the book quotes the report made by an eighth-grade teacher who for years has adopted the book "Mythology" by Edith Hamilton. According to her, about five years ago students began to lose interest in the work. "They say that reading is too hard, that sentences are too complicated, it takes a long time to read a page," said the teacher.

The problem, however, affects not only younger. There is also a loss of attention among adults. A film professor heard by the author said he found himself unable to read more than two pages at once the biography of the French director François Truffaut, one of his favorite filmmakers.

Goleman combines his knowledge of psychologist with his research in neuroscience to explain how our brains work, which are the moments in which we allow that our focus to disperse itself and how to avoid it.

It is likely that the excess of information also contributes to the expansion of so-called mental laziness, what J. Herculano Pires noted in the book Spiritist Pedagogy.

The mental laziness, which according Herculano Pires has hampered the progress of Spiritism on Earth, is mentioned in the book Sowers are Back (Seareiros de Volta), psychic work that Ignacio Bittencourt (Spirit) reports that a survey conducted by exalted leaders of Spiritism on the higher planes, intrigued by the difficulties of Doctrine’s progress in our plan, revealed that among all the causes that hinder the progress of the New Revelation in the world, stands out in a spotlight position, the mental laziness.

The conclusion of the research clearly correlate with what you see in the spiritist midst, dominated by ease, by the pursuit of personal gain, the cultural indifference and disinterest of people in applying themselves into a serious and persevering study of the Doctrine, something that is, as known, deeply regrettable.