Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

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.

In short, to enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with, you have to take charge of your attention.

Your ability to screen and select your experience, create order from chaos, and delight in fascination are attention’s great benefits, but they exact a price. That little piece of reality that you tune in on is literally and figuratively far sketchier and more subjective than you assume. This underappreciated discovery has particularly important im

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.

Attention has created the experience and, significantly, the self stored in your memory, but looking ahead, what you focus on from this moment will create the life and person yet to be.

Times have changed, and over the past thirty years of increasing racial justice, the average black IQ has already risen five points. Moreover, blacks now rank first in surveys of the importance various ethnic groups ascribe to education. Nevertheless, compared to other groups, blacks still do a fraction of the homework, which suggests that these st

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.

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.

efficiently in such circumstances, you need very clear roles and rules about relationships. “Asians almost never act in an autonomous Western way,” says Nisbett. “In order to get things done, they have to coordinate with others much more than we do.