Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.

This common wisdom notwithstanding, some eclectic research suggests that rather than being helpful, focusing top-down attention on a psychic wound can make you feel worse.

Consciousness, which is the “reflective” element of Norman’s conceptual brain, handles the “higher” functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your thoughts, you tend to identify it with cognition. However, if you try to figure out exactly how you run your business o

by attending to any of these deliberately selected targets, or even making a conscious decision to “veg out” for a spell, you would have had a far better experience than many of us have much of the time, captured by whatever flotsam and jetsam happens to wash up on our mental shores. In short, to enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than en

We must resist the temptation to drift along, reacting to whatever happens to us next, and deliberately select targets, from activities to relationships, that are worthy of our finite supplies of time and attention.

There’s no tidy “attention center” in the brain. Instead, an ensemble of alerting, orienting, and executive networks collaborate to attune you to what’s going on in your inner or outer world in a coherent way that points you toward an appropriate response.

Although “attention” implies “conscious experience,” you can sometimes take in subliminal information that flies under the radar of awareness yet influences your behavior—especially when the material carries an emotional charge.

New research on its recently unimagined neuroplasticity shows that what you pay attention to, and how, can actually change your brain and thus your behavior. This extraordinarily practical scientific breakthrough shows that like physical fitness, the mental sort that sustains the focused life can be cultivated.

IF BOTTOM-UP ATTENTION asks, “What’s the obvious thing to home in on here?” top-down attention asks, “What do you want to concentrate on?” Because this active, voluntary form of focusing takes effort, the harder you concentrate, the better you’ll attend, but the longer you persist, the likelier you’ll fade.

That’s not to say that when something upsetting happens, you immediately try to force yourself to “be happy.” First, says Fredrickson, you examine “the seed of emotion,” or how you honestly feel about what occurred. Then you direct your attention to some element of the situation that frames things in a more helpful light.