Neurofeedback: How new technologies can train your brain to concentrate better

Using technology to assess and monitor our health is nothing new. Smartphones and smartwatches deliver data on our daily habits: our sleep patterns; how far we’ve traveled; our heart rate when we wake up and when we exercise; how long we’ve been sitting around. But for as much personal health data our smart devices deliver, it’s a passive, one-way feed. They can tell you how long you’ve been sitting at a desk but can’t, for example, tell you how much you’ve focused on a particular project.

As we enter the 2020s, the challenge to concentrate is all the more pertinent. A few years ago, a study from Microsoft revealed that people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds(the average attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds), underscoring the effects of an increasingly digitized lifestyle on the brain. The smart technology age has ushered along with it an array of distractions unimaginable barely 20 years ago. Social media alerts, push messages from newspapers nudging you midday to read a week-old think piece, and the latest GIF on your team’s Slack channel all compete for your attention. Kids are similarly drawn into their devices, lured by funny memes, YouTube channels, and TikTok videos that are designed to capture their attention in short, easily digestible bursts of content.

Wrist-borne fitness info is useful, to be sure. But as much as our tech devices give, they also take from our focus and concentration. It’s time for our tech to start rectifying that. Science and technology are at a perfect moment in time to work together to help people overcome distractions and learn to concentrate.

Enter neurofeedback as a tech-driven, non-pharmaceutical method for the mind to reroute itself back from daydreaming and concentrate on the task at hand.

Get more on neurofeedback and concentration on Narbis’ official blog.