According to psychology’s “negativity bias theory,” we pay more attention to unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because they’re simply more powerful than the agreeable sort.

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

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.

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.

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

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

In short, scientists agree that stimuli can activate parts of your brain and even influence your experience without your conscious awareness, but most won’t dignify a phenomenon of such weak intensity, duration, and effect with the term attention. Taking a stance to be applauded by English majors everywhere, their position is: “Subconscious informa

Meditation is not the only way in which you can use attention to change your neurophysiology and experience, but at present, these practices are the best understood, most accessible, and most clearly beneficial regimens.

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.