Why do I zone out watching lectures?

Forty minutes, nothing heard

Leo is in his first year and two weeks behind on recorded statistics lectures. At ten at night he opens the next one and pulls his notebook close.

At minute forty he looks up. There is a graph on the slide he has never seen, and he cannot say how it got there.

He drags the bar back ten minutes and starts again. Halfway through the second go, his mind wanders off again. He decides he just cannot focus on lectures.

Every lecture goes the same way. Play, drift, rewind. The rewinds make each one take twice as long.

Four in ten

In 2013, Karl Szpunar, Novall Khan and Daniel Schacter at Harvard showed students a 21 minute statistics lecture in four parts. After each part, some students answered a few short questions about it. Others did simple sums instead.

Now and then the lecture asked where their mind was. The students doing sums were somewhere else 41% of the time. The ones answering questions, 19%.

The questioned group also took about three times as many notes, without being told to. They scored 90% on the final test against 68%, and said they felt less anxious about it.

So Leo is not broken. Forty minutes with no question coming is when every mind drifts. The researchers think a question every few minutes gives your attention a reason to stay.

Pause every five minutes

In the study, the researchers set the questions. At home nobody does, so ask yourself the simplest one. What did they just say?

Line one is what the last part was about. Line two is one detail a test could ask. Your own words, eyes off the screen.

A blank at a pause is good news. You found the gap at minute five, not the night before the exam.

Put the timer on your phone and lay it face down, or note the stop times on paper. If the lecturer changes slides often, a slide change works as a stop too.

If you have ADHD, five minutes is a stretch you can see the end of. Each pause is a small finish line.

Two lines at five minutes

The next evening Leo set a five minute timer and started lecture six. At the first stop he wrote two lines. At the third, he wrote a question for his tutor.

The lecture took him eight minutes longer. He did not drag the bar back once.

At the end he had a page of short pairs. It was more than his notes from the whole week before.

Tonight, open your next lecture and set a timer for five minutes. When it rings, pause and write two lines. That is the first step.

Plan2Ace

A timer and a pen are enough. Plan2Ace keeps the gaps for you.

Turn each blank from a pause into a flashcard. Flashcards come back when they are due, so the gaps return before the exam does. Prefer paper? The method is the point.

A few more questions