Quotes About Attention

The observer effect in quantum physics states that where you direct your attention is where you place your energy.

Most days, we move back and forth between beta and alpha states. Alpha is our relaxation state, where we pay less attention to the outer world and start to pay more attention to our inner world. When we're in alpha, we're in a light state of meditation; you could also call that imagination or daydreaming. In this state, our inner world is more real than our outer world, because that's what we're paying attention to.

When you place all your attention and energy on the outer world and you keep reacting to the same conditions in the same way—in a state of chronic stress, which causes the brain to be in a constant state of arousal—your inner world becomes imbalanced and your brain begins to work inefficiently. And then you become less effective in creating anything at all. In other words, you become a victim of your life instead of the creator of your life.

Como la conciencia es atención, y la atención consiste en fijarse en las cosas, y fijarse en las cosas es estar presente

You're going to have to make the transition from being somebody to being no body—which means you have to take your attention off your body, your pain, and your hunger. You're going to have to go from being someone to being no one (taking your attention off your identity as a partner, a parent, and an employee).

It was impossible to have a conversation in a room with a phone. It was like having a conversation in a room with a bat hanging from the ceiling. Even if the bat was asleep, how were you supposed to think about anything else or look at anything else?

Dr. Watson, "You see, but you do not observe.

Son, in this life, you don't ever walk by a red dress.

All it takes now for us to know all the gory details about some murder is for it to be horrible, or it to be a slow news week, and it's everywhere, even if it's some grocery clerk murder in Maine that hasn't a thing to do with us.

When life wants to get our attention it doesn't bother with half measures.

I should have been paying closer attention." "You did the best you could ," she said. "You are not a warrior, Perry, any more than I am a foreign exchange student.

She wasn't invisible anymore. She'd stepped dead-bang into the spotlight, and she'd painted a big bull's-eye on her head.

This book argues that the history of federal student loan policies is best understood as a series of messes in which attention became focused on some particular aspect of a larger problem and well-intentioned policies were devised to address each narrowly defined concern.

Learning to listen for when you are in or out of such a state of optimal tuning is in itself a fine art.

If you break 100, watch your golf. If you break 80, watch your business.

Ich weiß nicht, ob die verdummte Unterhaltung nach und nach dem kollektiven Intellekt unserer Nation geschadet hat oder ob die geistige Faulheit des Publikums zuerst da war und wir sie nur bedient haben.

He was taught to focus on more than one thing at once, so he didn't have to tell her to stop to get her home safely. Not unless her hand dropped to his cock, in which case they might have a real problem. They didn't really cover cock teasing in combination with combat driving.

Tyler commanded attention because he was like a tiger. Mesmerizing and possessing something that suggested it was wise not to turn your back on him, any more than it would be a wise move to run.

Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can't focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions--and less likely to see clearly when they fail. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can't get a handle on any of them.

Tristan [Harris] believes that what we are seeing is 'the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines'. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused.

She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.

goes back to the design of the brain…. It's designed to pay attention to the stuff that matters to you.

The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"--which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.