Millions of people struggle with attention worldwide, and ADHD is one of the most common mental disorders in children. Hopefully the information we've gathered can help!

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The rapid toggling between activities/switching attentional gears, especially when we shift to complex tasks leads to loss of focused attention. For example, when a driver attends to a conversation, activity in brain areas which are vital to driving decreases by an average of 37%.
Attention is powerfully selective, and the conscious mind is in one place at a time. By giving subjects repetitive tasks that require a level of sustained attention—such as keeping a ball within a certain region on a screen—researchers have observed extended periods of poor performance in drowsy patients that correlate with changes in EEG signals. EEGs, or electroencephalographs, use metal discs to record brain waves and transmit them to computers. 

 

Yet, there are ways in which tasks can be made more engaging that can lead to higher performance even in drowsy or sedated states. This includes increasing the promise of reward for performing the task, adding novelty or irregularity, or introducing stress.  The Yerkes-Dodson law is the principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a point. Beyond that point, it states that performance decreases, and moderate arousal leads  to optimal performance. If you're understimulated, you may be bored, not interested and your performance drops because it's similar to your normal routine or behavior. On the other hands, if you're overstimulated, you may be too anxious, too stressed to perform well, and your brain may not be able to adapt to abrupt change.
Optimal arousal depends on the difficulty of the task, and we can apply the law to our life by making our goals not too easy nor too hard. We can increase the difficulty of a task by increasing its speed and/or complexity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lev Vygotsky offers a similar perspective with his idea of a scaffold, a framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking. His zone of proximal development theory explains the zone between what a child can and can’t do without help. He found that children learn best with something in the sweet spot of too easy and too difficult.