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.

human beings are the only creatures to know that we must die, but we’re also the only ones to know that we must find something engaging to focus on in order to pass the time—increasingly, a lot of time.

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.

The idea that directing your attention away from negative events can be adaptive is supported by a complementary study in China, where the culture’s mourning rituals focus the grief-stricken person outward toward the community, rather than inward on the solitary processing of loss.

Attention is woven into the warp and woof of James’s defense of your freedom, individuality, and ability to create your own unique experience. Because your mind is profoundly shaped by what it imposes on itself, he argued, where you choose to focus it is vitally important. This conviction underlies many of his best maxims, such as “The greatest wea

Thanks to positive emotion’s expansive effect on attention, your immediate reward for that effort is not just a more comfortable, satisfying affective state, but also a bigger, better worldview. Where the long-term benefits are concerned, you’ve come closer to making a habit of the focused life.

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

Thus, the first step toward getting on with your work despite a financial setback or repairing a relationship after a nasty quarrel is to direct—perhaps yank—your attention away from fear or anger toward courage or forgiveness.

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.