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.

“Black culture traditionally hasn’t told you to be smart in school and to work hard, because your effort would benefit the slave-owner, not you.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

you cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.