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Hi, I'm Thomas Frank, this is Crash Course: Study Skills, and with this video in particular, I want you to promise me you're not going to click over to another tab to look at cats.
In exchange, I'll pretend that's not exactly what you did during the last four videos.
In all seriousness though, I do want you to ask yourself: when's the last time you were able to sit down and intensely pay attention to one task for a long time?
If you're anything like me, this has become harder and harder to do as we've added more distractions to our lives – tweets, snaps, messages, browser tabs, cookies that must be clicked – they're in endless supply, while your brain's ability to resist them is, sadly, not.
So that's why today we're turning our attention to attention itself.
Cue the intro.
Before we get into any specific tips, let's first answer the question of what attention really is.
Put simply, attention is the process of focusing your cognitive resources on one particular stimulus or source of information while ignoring all others in the environment.
Understanding this definition is important because there are two main forms of attention.
