Focus makes us smarter. In a recent study using mice, when their attention improved, so did their cognitive performance. The same is true for humans. 

The twelfth world chess champion says that, even when things were bleak, he “never lost the will to fight.”

How is it that we're able to focus on a distant conversation while ignoring the person who is speaking right in front of us? Tony Zador, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, breaks down the brain mechanisms that allow us to have selective auditory attention.

How can we train our brains to think like Sherlock Holmes? We need to develop the core skill of mindfulness.