If right now someone pulled a fire alarm in this building, or if we had a fire in this building, my attention would drift. It would not be on recording this podcast. It would be on something else. But would I say that the fire alarm mediates attention? I mean, fire alarms are not really involved in attention.

No, rather they modulate my attention. The noise in the room modulates my attention. That's quite a bit different than a tool that I'll provide later. And I'll just give you a little hint of now. In fact, I'll give it to you now. Which is that 40 Hertz binaural beats have been shown in a number of peer-reviewed studies to increase focus and concentration.

And if you'd like to access 40 Hertz binaural beats in order to improve your focus and concentration, you can do that. You can actually get it at zero cost. You can go into the App Store, for instance, the Apple App Store. This is also available for Android phone. There's an app called Brainwave, and you can go there.

You can dial in 40 Hertz, and it'll play these binaural beats. It's been shown in multiple quality peer-reviewed studies that playing a pattern of sound waves to one ear, do-do-do-do-do, and the other ear, which is slightly offset in frequency, meaning not quite the same frequency, so more like do-do-do-do, that that combination of frequencies played to the different ears actually get integrated within deep brain centers and can increase focus and concentration in part by increasing levels of the neurochemical dopamine and acetylcholine, which we talked about a little bit earlier in this arrow model of focus.

So we'll provide a link to that app. I don't have any relationship to that app, I should mention, but it's an excellent one. It's one that I've used for many years. There are also additional functions within the app, such as for sleep and for other things, but the 40 Hertz, 40HZ, is the way it reads out.

40 Hertz stimulation has been shown to improve focus and concentration. Here is my recommendation in the way that I use it. I would not use 40 Hertz binaural beats every time I'm doing a bout of work. What I tend to do is use it for about five minutes prior to that work, and then turn it off and then do the work.

And I'll talk about other tools to use during that work, whether or not it's reading or math, or even just emailing or something where I require a bunch of focus for a while. However, there are times in which I'm in an area or I'm in a state of mind where I'm feeling very distractible, and then I'll keep the 40 Hertz binaural beats on the entire time I'm doing that bout of cognitive work.

I'll also sometimes use the 40 Hertz binaural beats prior to a workout, in particular weight workouts, where I really want to be able to focus on and contract specific muscles. So it's a very useful tool. Again, supported by quality peer-reviewed science, zero cost available out there, not just in the Brainwave app, but in multiple apps.

I think many of you will benefit from it. Some of you might not experience it immediately as a total dropping into a tunnel of focus in the same way that you might with, say, the sorts of neurochemicals that we'll talk about later, like alpha-GPC and some of these other things that change neurochemicals directly.

But nonetheless, 40 Hertz binaural beats are a very powerful tool. Again, zero cost, non-pharmacologic tool that tap into your own endogenous, meaning within you, or exists within you physiology, in order to increase acetylcholine and some other neurochemicals. And they have been shown to work quite well. Okay, so assuming that you are sleeping well 80% of the nights of your life, or at least working on the various protocols and tools to sleep well and sufficiently long, 80% of the nights of your life, and you are interested in additional tools that are sound-based in order to improve your ability to concentrate and focus, there are quality peer-reviewed studies supporting the idea that white noise or pink noise, and believe it or not, there is something called pink noise.

It has to do with the specific frequencies of sound that are in the noise. Well, white noise and pink noise have been shown to not improve concentration per se, but to improve people's ability to transition into concentrated states. So I don't tend to use white noise and pink noise while I work, but I know a number of people that do.

I know people that also use what's called brown noise. Folks I know from the engineering and computer science side get really into these details of white noise, pink noise, brown noise. You can find white noise, pink noise, or brown noise and listen to it through headphones or in the room.

There is indeed some data to support the fact that white noise, and to some extent, pink noise and brown noise, can support the release of particular neurochemicals, but more data showing that they can amplify the activity of neurons in the so-called prefrontal cortex, this front area, sort of the bumper behind your forehead, that is directly related to your ability to direct your own focus and remain focused on certain things.

So you have the option of either using binaural beats before but not during your work, that is 40 hertz binaural beats, or 40 hertz binaural beats throughout your attempt to focus. You also have the option of not using binaural beats, but using white noise, pink noise, or brown noise.

Again, there are a lot of zero cost apps. You can find also white noise, pink noise, and brown noise on YouTube. Again, these are tools that really have been shown over and over in humans to allow people to focus with more depth and to decrease the transition time into focus.

This is a really key point. A lot of people are challenged with getting into a mode of focus. None of us, however, should be expected to just sit down and drop directly into a state of focus. I think that's completely an unfair request of ourselves. I mean, for instance, you wouldn't expect yourself to go out on the track or go out for a run and not warm up.

You might jog for a few minutes or even walk before you would jog and then jog before you would run, right, I would hope you would do that. And if you're doing resistance training, I doubt that you go over and load up the bar or the machine with the maximum amount of weight that you can move and then just drop right into that.

You always do a warmup. And I think it's very important to understand mental work, focus, and concentration as requiring that warmup. What is that warmup? Well, you know what that warmup is. That warmup is the ramping up or the increase of epinephrine, adrenaline, acetylcholine, and dopamine. The way that neurochemicals work is we don't just get to flip switches in our brain because we decide to.

That's a fantasy. That's sort of the limitless movie or, you know, movies and ideas that suddenly, you know, you're going to flip a switch on your arm and all of a sudden you're going to be in a laser focus. That is just not the way that your nervous system works.

There's a gradual dropping into any state, whether or not that state is sleep, right? You go from shallow sleep to deep sleep and then out eventually. Focus too, you go from shallow focus to increasingly deep focus. That is in our metaphor of the arrow, it's very broad. It's pointed at a lot of things.

And over time, as we drop into focus, that arrow is narrowing and narrowing and narrowing. In fact, probably better to think about it narrowing and then sometimes oscillating and getting wider again. You know, we might hear something down the hallway or more typically our phone will buzz or we'll think, oh, I wonder what so-and-so is doing or I hadn't contacted them about something.

Your focus is dynamic. It is not what we call a step function. It's not like you go from unfocused to focus and then you drop into your maximal focus. By understanding that it's dynamic, by understanding that you are going to be continually going in and out of progressively but varying levels of focus, you will greatly release the pressure on yourself to feel focused all the time when you want to be.

This is very key. People who are very good at focusing understand this and understand that they can't expect themselves to just immediately focus and then snap into or out of focus. Okay, so be patient with yourself and also understand that focus is an ability that you can improve your ability to focus by engaging the neural circuits responsible for focus, repeatedly over time through so-called neuroplasticity, the ability of your nervous system to change in response to experience.

And that has a couple of different components, but put very simply, what we repeat gets etched into our nervous system and becomes easier over time. And the more emotionally important or vital something feels to us, the more likely it is to trigger neuroplasticity. We're going to talk a little bit more about how to increase neural circuits for focus later, but right now what you have in hand is the key importance of sleep.

And I, again, will direct you to hubermanlab.com and the Neural Network Newsletter to really work on optimizing your sleep. We've also got two auditory sound-based tools for improving focus. There's 40 Hertz binaural beats used before or during bouts of focusing concentration. And if you don't like those, or even if you do, you might alternate them with or occasionally use white noise, pink noise, or brown noise, also readily available at zero cost.

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