How might one improve their ability to concentrate and/or focus?

Factual Questions
1

Perhaps I’m one of a small contingent, but is anyone else out there fighting a lifelong battle with their own mind to achieve concentration? It seems that whenever I try to focus on something, my thoughts are flooded by a bunch of vaguely connected sound bites and irrelevant bits of dialogue.

For example, I’ll be trying to work on homework, and here’s what the inside of my head sounds like:

“Hey, is this really the most advantageous thing you could be doing? How about doing something else?”

“Dude, if you don’t devote some thoughts to the radio show you heard last night, you might miss out on some serious intellectual development.”

(looping 10-second clip from Herb Alpert’s “Rise”)

“Oh, man, I hope that girl over there isn’t looking at me. What if she tricks me into dating her, and then gets pregnant and keeps it? Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…”

“Why did I have the bowl, bart? Why did I have the bowl?”

A pretty grim situation. I’ve been reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and that’s been helping a little, but I was wondering what you fellow Dopers have done to hone your powers of concentration. Any books or strategies you can recommend?

2

OK, I’ll take a stab at this, here’s the answers that you’re likely to hear from this crew:

  1. Lay off the dope

  2. Get some Prozac

Failing those two things, the following may be more practical:

  1. work faster: i.e. you are giving yourself too much time to think and therefore your mind is wandering.

  2. make everything routine. That is, so you don’t have to think about the process.

1 and 2 together make up most of the snazzy NLP learning techniques that get sold in little “courses” these days. Basically the way that the particulars of NLP in these situations (forgive me as I’m ignorant about the main theories of NLP proper) say that 1) the more you throw at your subconscious (as opposed to conscious) to figure out, the better 2) the best way to do that is to go too fast for your conscious mind to mess things up 3) the best way to do that is to create rote situations where you a) don’t have to think and b) engage more aspects of your mind (think the seven intelligences).

Granted, that description leaves a lot to be desired Specifically for reading, I recommend trying the SQ3R method. Also consider the CPL techniques at www.wingwegner.com. I also like to listen to white noise while reading/working or a 30 bpm drum beat.

And, if all that fails, lay off the dope.

3

Safer sex will help; you can control the final destination of your sperm.

I could never study without the radio when I was younger; it’s a counter-irritant, like rubbing clove oil on a tooth-ache.