Attention is the skill under all the other skills
By Sofia Navarro · Finding Your Voice
The five axes this app scores you on (clarity, tonality, structure, energy, intellect) all quietly assume something that nothing measures: that you were present while you were speaking.
You can hear when somebody was not. The sentences are grammatical and the delivery is fine and the whole thing is a recording of a person retrieving a talk rather than giving one. It usually scores acceptably. It rarely lands.
This article is the argument for spending time on attention itself, and an account of how thin the direct evidence is.
What the training literature shows
Mrazek and colleagues ran a two-week mindfulness course against an actively-matched nutrition course and measured working memory capacity, GRE reading-comprehension scores, and self-reported mind-wandering. The mindfulness group improved on all three, and the improvement in performance was mediated by the reduction in mind-wandering.1
That last clause is the interesting one. The paper does not claim that meditation makes you smarter. Its claim is narrower: the performance gain travelled specifically through having fewer moments of being elsewhere.
The diaphragmatic-breathing trial found a comparable thing from the other direction: eight weeks of breathing practice improved sustained attention on a continuous-performance task.2
Two different practices, two different labs, converging on the same mechanism: less time away.
Why that would matter for speaking
This is the place to mark clearly where the evidence stops and our reasoning starts. Neither study looked at speaking at all. What follows is our argument, and their results do not extend to it.
Consider what happens when your attention leaves mid-sentence. You lose the thread, and the specific, audible symptom of losing the thread is the filler word: the "um" that holds the floor while retrieval catches up. Fox Tree's work on that is careful about it: fillers carry signals about the speaker's own production difficulty.3
Which is exactly why the Clarity axis in this app is largely a filler-rate measurement. It is, indirectly and imperfectly, measuring how often you were not quite there.
That is a chain of reasoning and nothing stronger. We are stating it because we believe it and because you should be able to see the joins.
The part that is easy to skip
The Mindfulness screen has three things on it, and the two obvious ones are Breathe and Reflect.
The third is State of Mind, which asks you to name how you feel and takes about twenty seconds. It looks like the least substantial thing on the screen.
It is the one that does the attention work most directly. Naming a state requires you to look at it, and looking at it is the opposite of being carried by it. That is the entire exercise, and the fact that it is over in twenty seconds is part of the design and does not make it trivial.
We have no study for that claim. We have the observation that members who can say what they are feeling before a session tend to speak about it more usefully afterwards, which is an impression. We have no finding behind it, and we would rather say so than dress it up.
How far the evidence goes
The mindfulness-training literature has a well-known problem with active control groups and with self-report, and the Mrazek study is one of the better-designed ones precisely because it addressed both. It is still one study, on students, over two weeks.
Nothing here should be read as: do the breathing exercise and your Structure score will rise. If you have not decided what you are going to say, no amount of attention will supply it.
Attention is the floor, not the building.
References
- Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Phillips, D. T., et al. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science, 24(5), 776–781. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612459659
- Ma, X., Yue, Z.-Q., Gong, Z.-Q., et al. (2017). The effect of diaphragmatic breathing on attention, negative affect and stress in healthy adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 874. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00874
- Fox Tree, J. E. (2001). Listeners’ uses of um and uh in speech comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 29(2), 320–326. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03194926