Conciousness and attention dissociation

Many of our students read one thing while thinking about something else. This discrepancy is known as consciousness and attention dissociation and is counter-effective. For example, if you try to generate markers and worry about the quality of your markers at the same time, your attention is focused on the text, but your consciousness is dealing with your insecurity. As a result, your reading speed and retention will drop.

A different take on the same idea is this diagram.

While some consciousness can exist without attention and vise verse.  As your consciousness wanders away, your attention becomes increasingly selective. As your attention wanders away, your visual markers will get lost in storage.

To make things worse, consciousness and attention dissociation may be feeding itself.  As your consciousness registers less visual inputs, it focuses on its own activities, as the attention focusses on the text unable to split for visual markers registration. This sort of “paralysis by analysis” is one of the hardest problems we face while teaching our best students.

There are some solutions we can try:

Read something interesting. Relax and have fun. Does not matter what results you get. As we drop the requirement of perfect reading at high speed, the brain has easier time focusing on the text instead of the reading process. The reading improves, and new reading habits are generated. Unfortunately, when facing an exam or other stressful activity, the bad habits may surface again reducing the efficiency of this method.

Focus on one thing at a time.  Reading is basically work of attention and analysis is work of consciousness.  By alternating reading and analysis, consciousness and attention sync with each other. Do not worry if you need to read the same paragraph several times.  Only when fully in focus, add the prereading stage to the mix and speed up.  With time, the attention and consciousness will sync faster until there will be no need in this practice.

Speed up! Paradoxically, as you speed up, there is no time for consciousness and attention dissociation. While you expect that your retention will drop at higher reading speed, it may actually increase. Also, when reading fast, boring texts become more interesting simply due to the amount of conscious effort involved in understanding.

To summarize: as your attention wanders away from the text, relax, focus on one thing at a time, and try to speed up.