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. First, the more I stared at the picture, the more it felt alive, with the musicians at the centre almost levitating beyond the canvas.

Second, I found myself more deeply questioning the artwork’s meaning. Why have the singers their backs to the crowd? Did Yeats wish to have the mustachioed men behind them looking not just at the players but beyond them to you, the viewer? It’s as though........

© The Irish Times