9 3 7 5 8 4 3 2 6 5 7 3 7 4 5 9 6 8 7 0 2 3 4 2 6 5 8 3 4 9 8 5 6 7 2 2 3 0 9 8 6 5 7 4
Notice how readily the other digits pass before your eyes in more or less indistinct rows, but the 5s stand out more clearly. This is caused by your expectancy, your attention is fixed upon this one digit and cares nothing for others. Count the 9s and note the change of expectancy. Use any selected letter in this paragraph for additional practice.
Cure for Diverted Attention
It is not the easiest thing to learn to control and to prolong the attention, but it is one of the most important. Great results are never easily accomplished. Easily diverted attention is a contributing cause of failure in every undertaking and if allowed to continue, will become habitual absent-mindedness. See to it that your child does not acquire this unfortunate handicap.
The cure for diverted attention is to enter whole-heartedly and wholly into everything that you do, no matter how trivial it may be, do not change or lose your enthusiasm over it until fully completed. If you discover something more desirable, put it aside for the time being and attend to the thing started, until you have finished.
Learn to use better judgment about what you start, and when started, never change. It is the tendency to change which you are striving to overcome.
When one thing is finished go directly and enthusiastically to the next, without hesitation or indecision. If uncertain, learn to make a decision and go through with it to the end, and then do the better things which may have suggested themselves after starting.
Parent Is Child's Interpreter
These are immensely valuable lessons for children. Younger children, whose habits are more easily formed can not realize the importance of it so that the responsibility must rest upon you, the parents. See to it that right habits are formed and wrong ones avoided or corrected if they now exist. They will thank you for it many times in later years. Repeat any of the exercises given for sense training and prolong them for development of attention and concentration.
An unusually successful physician tells how his mother developed his conscious attention. Each time she told him to do something or sent him upon an errand she would require him to repeat to her just what she had told him to do. If he could not he had to stand and think it over, and if he had not paid good attention he was punished.