One study taught attention skills to four- and six-year-olds in just five sessions of playing games that exercise visual tracking (guessing where a duck swimming underwater will surface), spotting a target cartoon character within an array of distractions, and inhibiting impulse (clicking if a sheep comes out from behind a bale of hay, but not if a

Building executive control helps especially for those of us for whom every setback, hurt, or disappointment creates endless cascades of rumination. Mindfulness lets us break the stream of thoughts that might otherwise lead to wallowing in misery, by changing our relationship to thought itself. Instead of being swept away by that stream we can pause

mindfulness meditators show symptom lessening in a remarkable range of physiological disorders, from sheer jitters to hypertension and chronic pain. “Some of the biggest effects found with mindfulness are biological,” says Davidson, adding, “It’s surprising for an exercise that trains attention.”

The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation. Hijacks are the superglue of attention. But the question is, How long does our focus stay captured? That depends, it turns out, on the power of the left prefrontal area to calm the aroused amygdala (there are two amygdalae, one in each brain hemisphere). That amygdala-prefrontal neuronal superhigh

This is bottom-up preselected attention; such capture from below is automatic, an involuntary choice. We’re most prone to emotions driving focus this way when our minds are wandering, when we are distracted, or when we’re overwhelmed by information—or all three.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

An ingenious method for remedying this bottom-up skew is so subtle that people have no idea that their attention patterns are being rewired (just as they had no idea that wiring was going on as they acquired it in the first place). Called “cognitive bias modification,” or CBM, this invisible therapy has those suffering from severe social anxiety lo

Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems

Life today seems ruled to a troubling degree by impulse; a flood of ads drives us, bottom-up, to desire a sea of goods and spend today without regard to how we will pay tomorrow. The reign of impulse for many goes beyond overspending and overborrowing to overeating and other addictive habits, from bingeing on Twizzlers to spending countless hours s