Quotes About Attention

Carol Dweck, the psychologist who studies motivation, likes to say that all the world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.

Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue.

The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correcting your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.12

Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.

Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: "What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.

El recurso más precioso de un ordenador no está en su procesador, en su memoria, en su disco duro ni en la red, sino en la atención humana», concluye un grupo de investigación de la Universidad de Carnegie Mellon.

We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.

But amid the din and distraction of work life, poor listening has become epidemic.

Whenever you notice your mind wandering," a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, "bring your mind back to its point of focus." The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own.

In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation—all signifying a lack of attention.

Tightly focused attention gets fatigued—much like an overworked muscle—when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy.

Rapport demands joint attention—mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.

The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erving Goffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an "away," a gesture that tells another person "I'm not interested" in what's going on here and now.

our society suffers from an attention deficit. Today's children grow up with a digital device at hand continuously, and those devices offer constant distractions (and a larger stream of information than for any generation in the past), so we consider boosting attention skills to be nothing short of an urgent public health need.

At first the flow of thoughts rushes like a waterfall, which sometimes discourages beginners, who feel their mind is out of control. Actually, the sense of a torrent of thoughts seems to be due to paying close attention to our natural state, which Asian cultures dub "monkey mind," for its wildly frenetic randomness.

Such self-awareness would seem to require an activated neocortex, particularly the language areas, attuned to identify and name the emotions being aroused. Self-awareness is not an attention that gets carried away by emotions, overreacting and amplifying what is perceived. Rather, it is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions.

The ability of the powerful to dismiss inconvenient people (and inconvenient truths) by paying no attention has become the focus of social psychologists, who are finding relationships between power and the people we pay most and least attention to.4

Practice mindfulness of breathing, which has proven benefits for both for sustaining attention and for the circuitry that calms us down. This combination of calm and concentration creates an optimal inner state for focus and learning.

Posner's group proposes that attention training should be part of the education of every child, giving a boost in learning across the board.

It takes a panoramic attention to appreciate system-level interactions

What makes data more useful is the person curating it.5 Ideally, the person who curates information will zero in on what matters, prune away the rest, establish a context for what the data means, and do all that in a way that shows why it is vital—and so captures people's attention.

Como el músculo sometido a un sobreesfuerzo, la atención intensamente focalizada también se fatiga, llegando incluso al punto del agotamiento cognitivo. Los signos de fatiga mental afectan a la eficacia y aumentan la distracción y la irritabilidad, lo que significa que el esfuerzo mental necesario para mantener el foco ha agotado la glucosa que precisa la energía neuronal.

el reconocimiento de que nos hemos distraído es el primer paso para recuperar la concentración

La mente del lector suele divagar entre el 20 y 40% del tiempo que dedica a la lectura.