There will be warning signals that your attention is waning. For only an additional few minutes, work towards maintaining that focus. Although it sounds simplistic, many individuals are not thinking about what they are doing but, instead, are thinking about other issues. After a brain injury, the brain may not be able to complete one task while thinking about something else. The brain needs to be gently returned to task, sometimes repeatedly.
Selective attention can be a long-standing problem for survivors after brain injury.
At its basic level, it means selecting one stimulus to attend to from a group or a series, like finding certain letters in a word-search or listening for your city during a weather report. At a higher level, it may be like being at a party, trying to follow the conversation you are in and to ignore another conversation taking place nearby. When you cannot select what to attend to, you are distracted, attending to whatever catches you. Clinicians may have special tasks to do this so they can control for the speed and frequency while they measure the accuracy and types of responses. But, many daily tasks require us to listen selectively.