Quotes About Attention

Stars are almost always people that want to make up for their own weaknesses by being loved by the public and I'm no exception to that.

Radiance belongs to being considered precisely as beautiful: it is, in being, that which catches the eye, or the ear, or the mind, and makes us want to perceive it again

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

If people don't want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?

Actors have bodyguards and entourages not because anybody wants to hurt them - who would want to hurt an actor? - but because they want to get recognized. God forbid someone doesn't recognize them.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

In our society, everyone wants to be a celebrity overnight.

Pay attention to unresolved conflicts in your life.

People attracted to others' trouble or drama like vultures are drawn to roadkill. People who seem to get up when you're down, always just a little too interested in your latest conflict, slight, or failure.

Pain is a gift from God to let us know that something is not right, that something in our life needs attention and fixing.

Most people tire of a lecture in 10 minutes, clever people can do it in 5. Sensible people never go to lectures at all.

Whitman began to see that his mere presence, his tenderness, his attention, had an enormous healing effect. He ministered faithfully to Holmes for weeks and Holmes eventually recovered his health completely and rejoined his unit. But as he left the hospital, John Holmes told

Adolescence is a dreadful period. We tend to notice those youngsters who misbehave and call attention to themselves, but there are others, equally miserable, who receive no help simply because they are silent. (41)

Inner peace does not go well with endless worries and concerns about what was and what might be. What we do with our minds really matters - what we direct our attention to, and what habits of mind we develop.

Gain is a parameter in neural network modeling, which influences the probability that a neuron fires at a given activation level. Single cell recordings in non-human primates have shown that the likelihood of a neuron firing, given a constant sensory input, is enhanced when the stimulus dimension that is preferentially processed by the neuron is attended to.11

Attentional amplification of sensory awareness in any sensory medium is achieved by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex that modulate activity of single neurons in sensory brain areas in the absence of any sensory stimulation and significantly increase baseline activity in the corresponding target region.

The sensory stimuli we encounter do not, in and of themselves, except under unusual circumstances determine whether or not we pay attention to them; we, ourselves, do. In fact novel stimuli of great intensity (which usually are not gated) will be gated if they do not conform to the nature of expected sensory inputs.

A rich sensory experience occurs during such dreaming but what you were not doing to any great extent was paying attention to the complex visual field that surrounded you as you dreamed. You were, at an unconscious level, restricting the amount of visual sensory information that flowed into your conscious mind.

In a similar way, the focus on the form of an object: which leg is larger on that chair, on that table, on that bed—which leaf shape is more oval among those three different plant species—disrupts subsequent meaning processing.

As Kiefer et al. note, again in an insult to clear languaging, "The capture of visuo-spatial attention by unconscious stimuli likewise was shown to depend on the match between the stimulus feathers and a fitting top-down search template."17 In other words, some things have to be believed to be seen or, another way of putting it: if you assume something is not there, then, to you, it won't be.

The emotional response to each tiny incoming sensory bit can tell the conscious mind if you pay attention to how you feel in the same way that musicians pay attention to sound a considerable amount about the meaning inside every particular sensory input that you experience.

In essence, when sensory gating channels are narrow, as they commonly are, we only perceive a very small part of the world around us. Only a tiny bit of the radiance of the world can shine in through the narrow aperture that is left; the rest of it is gated out.

The pre-attentional parts of the self use a complicated analytic process to determine relevance. They weigh a large variety of factors to gauge relevance; this includes such things as the intensity of the sensory inflow, its novelty, the degree of contrast between a sensory stimulus and its sensory background, and its rarity.

William Stafford was describing (though he was talking about writing) when he wrote . . . Just as the swimmer does not have a succession of handholds hidden in the water, but instead simply sweeps that yielding medium and finds it hurrying him along, so the writer passes his attention through what is at hand, and is propelled by a medium too thin and all-pervasive for the perceptions of nonbelievers who try to stay on the bank and fathom his accomplishment.6