BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello and welcome to Doctor's Notes. I'm Dr. Zandt. I'm Dr. Chris.

We've just finished recording an episode about attention and focus with a very brilliant neuroscientist

at Cambridge University, Professor Duncan Astell, he's a professor of neuroinformatics

in the Department of Psychiatry. I think this is an episode that will involve every single one

of our listeners, Sart. Well, it's an important topic because it affects everyone's life.

Everyone would love to be able to pay attention to the things they're meant to be

paying attention to easily and effectively. But it's also very sort of pathologised. Like we

increasingly think of not being able to pay attention as a kind of disease state or a bad thing.

Disorder. Yeah. And I think digging into that is one of the things that we tried to do on this

episode of Doctor's Notes.

Zahn, for me, in the main episode, the big thing was Duncan getting me to consider,

rather than my struggles with attention, what my brain is trying to do, what the purpose

of the brain is when it comes to attending to

and assimilating all of the inputs and sensory information and why it might be a struggle.

And I think he gave some great tips, didn't he, about how to manage those sensory inputs

in order to increase your ability to do a single thing.

In Doctors and Oates, we go into a bit more detail about diagnoses around attention and focus.

Important to say it's not the deepest dive we could do,

and this I think is a subject, along with other aspects of neurodiversity

that we're going to be returning to again and again.

Zandi, should we open the notes?

...