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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.

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.