Harvard art history professor Jennifer Roberts sets a tough challenge for new students on her course. Go into a gallery and pick any artwork. Now stare at it for three hours.
It is, she admits, “a painfully long time” to look at a single object. But the aim is to train people to improve their focus in an age of constant distraction.
Does it work? I visited the National Gallery of Ireland to find out. The recently acquired Jack B Yeats painting Singing ‘The Dark Rosaleen’, Croke Park (1921) was my chosen picture. I started the clock – and lasted all of 30 minutes before the urge to check my phone became too great and I bailed for the coffee shop.
That half-hour didn’t retrain my brain. But it did do something to my concentration that could be described in three phases.
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