Concentration is an invaluable and indispensable technique of successful study. To study something you must concentrate upon it, give your voluntary attention to it. Without sustained attention, you gain very little from your study-work. As Martin Rhodes has it, “Ability to concentrate is a vital study skill. Without concentration you will never succeed in learning effectively; with it, almost nothing is beyond your grasp and understanding.”
According to William James, “Each of us literally chooses by his way of attending to things, what sort of a universe, he shall appear to himself to inhabit.” The immediate effects of attention are, he says, to make us:
(a) Perceive
(b) Conceive
(c) Distinguish
(d) Remember better than we otherwise would—both successive things and each thing more clearly.
(e) It also shortens “reaction time”. (The interval elapsing between the presentation of a stimulus and the action that follows it is the individual’s reaction time.)
