Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

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.

deciding to concentrate on your hopes rather than your fears; to attend to the present instead of the past; to appreciate that just because something upsetting happens, you don’t have to fixate on it.

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

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.

cognitive scientist Don Norman. According to his conceptual model, the brain has three major parts, which focus on very different things and sometimes conflict. The “reactive” component, which handles the brain’s visceral, automatic functions, concentrates on stuff that elicits biologically determined responses, such as dizzying heights and sweet t

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.

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.

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.

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.