What a Sixteen-Year-Old Taught Himself About Attention

A small discovery made during entrance preparation

When I was sixteen, I was preparing for my medical entrance examinations at Prof. P.C. Thomas Coaching Classes.

It was an intense period of preparation. Long hours of classes, practice, revision and, perhaps most importantly, long stretches of sitting silently in the study area. The environment was designed for one thing: studying. There was little excuse for distraction.

But I discovered that removing distractions from the environment did not remove them from the mind.

My mind had its own plans.

Sometimes a random thought would appear. Sometimes I would start thinking about something completely unrelated to what I was studying. Sometimes a song would get stuck in my head and keep playing repeatedly.

And sometimes the distraction really was external — somebody moving, a sound from outside, someone talking, or simply something happening in the room.

At some point, I made an observation that seemed quite natural to me:

There were two different kinds of distraction.

When the distraction came from inside

For thoughts, daydreaming and songs stuck in my head, I found that trying to force them away wasn’t particularly useful.

Instead, I would deliberately listen to something around me.

The sound of the fan was often enough.

Sometimes it would be the sounds of nature or whatever else was happening quietly around me.

I wasn’t trying to analyse the sound. I was simply giving my attention something concrete to rest upon.

Eventually, I could return to my book.

So I developed my first rule:

If the distraction is coming from inside, anchor your attention to something outside.

When the distraction came from outside

External distractions required a different approach.

If something in the environment suddenly caught my attention, I would start counting backwards from 99.

99… 98… 97… 96…

It sounds almost ridiculously simple now.

But it worked for me.

The counting gave my mind a small task that required active attention. After a few numbers, the external distraction had lost some of its grip, and I could return to what I was doing.

So my second rule became:

If the distraction is coming from outside, give your mind a small internal task.

I didn’t know the terms mind-wandering, attentional anchoring, working memory or attention regulation at the time.

I certainly wasn’t practising mindfulness.

I was just a sixteen-year-old trying to study for an entrance examination.

Years later, the idea seems strangely familiar

When I eventually encountered concepts from psychology and neuroscience, I realised that my little system had some resemblance to ideas that had been studied much more formally.

Modern research distinguishes between mind-wandering or task-unrelated thought and attention captured by external stimuli. Mind-wandering is associated with reduced performance in many demanding tasks, particularly when sustained attention is required.

The technique I had developed for internal distraction — deliberately attending to the fan or environmental sounds — resembles focused-attention practices used in mindfulness.

In mindfulness practice, attention can be deliberately anchored to something such as breathing or sound. When the mind wanders, the practitioner notices it and brings attention back to the chosen object. Research has specifically studied both internal and external attentional anchors, including breathing and sound.

The broader evidence for mindfulness and attention is encouraging but not completely uniform. Reviews have found reductions in mind-wandering and improvements in some aspects of attentional control, while other systematic reviews have found that improvements in objective attention and executive function are less consistent than the theory might suggest.

My backwards-counting technique is not a recognised named psychological method, as far as I know. But its underlying principle resembles cognitive redirection: instead of merely trying not to attend to a distraction, deliberately engage attention with another task.

And perhaps that is the most important part of the discovery.

You cannot always command attention to stop wandering.

Sometimes it is easier to give attention somewhere else to go.

What Prof. P.C. Thomas Classes gave me

Looking back, my entrance preparation was much more than preparation for an examination.

Prof. P.C. Thomas Coaching Classes was a turning point in my life.

The intensity of that period taught me to sit with difficulty for long periods, to keep working when motivation fluctuated, and to develop discipline even when nobody was standing over me.

The most valuable lessons were not necessarily the formulas, facts or questions that I studied there.

They were the habits that developed almost accidentally:

Sit down.
Stay with the problem.
Notice when your attention has wandered.
Find a way back.
Continue.

That period eventually led to my admission to AIIMS Bhopal, which changed the direction of my life.

But the lessons from those years did not end with the entrance examination.

Even years later, when the problems became much more complicated than an entrance-examination question, the same principle remained useful:

When your attention leaves the task, don’t waste all your energy being frustrated that it left. Notice it, redirect it, and come back.

Perhaps that was the real thing I learned at sixteen.

Not how to concentrate perfectly.

But how to return.

And maybe that is a more realistic definition of concentration.

A note on the science behind the idea

Contemporary attention research increasingly treats attention not as a static ability that someone either possesses or lacks, but as a dynamic process involving orienting, sustaining attention, detecting distraction and returning to the task.

Mindfulness research similarly emphasises the repeated cycle of noticing that attention has wandered and redirecting it. Recent reviews continue to investigate how this process relates to executive attention, working memory and mind-wandering, while also emphasising that the evidence is not uniformly positive and that different forms of meditation may affect different components of attention.

So my sixteen-year-old experiment was certainly not a scientific discovery in the formal sense.

But it was something perhaps more personal:

an early experiment in understanding my own mind.

And it taught me a lesson that has remained useful long after the examination was over.

References

1. Randall JG, Oswald FL, Beier ME. Mind-wandering, cognition, and performance: a theory-driven meta-analysis of attention regulation. Psychological Bulletin. 2014;140(6):1411–1431.

2. Feruglio S, Matiz A, Pagnoni G, et al. The Impact of Mindfulness Meditation on the Wandering Mind: a Systematic Review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 2021;131:313–330.

3. Prakash RS. Mindfulness Meditation: Impact on Attentional Control and Emotion Dysregulation. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology. 2021;36(7):1283–1290.

4. Internal and external attention and the default mode network. NeuroImage. 2017.

5. Hadash Y, Dar O, Amir I, Braver TS, Bernstein A. The Mindfulness Internal Attention (MIA) Framework: Uncovering the Attentional Mechanisms of Mindfulness Training. Annual Review of Psychology. 2026;77:255–283.

6. Roy A, Subramanya P. The impact of meditation on sustained attention in nonclinical population: An extensive review. Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine. 2025.

Note: I am not a psychiatrist or someone trained specifically in neurosciences. I just wanted to explore whether there was any science behind my techniques.