Quotes About Attention

Today, you still need to pay attention to what lies ahead because that's how you protect yourself and survive, although my experience is that most people overdo forward-looking thoughts and make themselves miserable

There is a group of core symptoms common to those who have ADD. These include short attention span for routine, everyday tasks, distractibility, organizational problems (for spaces and time), difficulty with follow-through, and poor internal supervision or judgment. These symptoms exist over a prolonged period of time and are present from an early age, although they may not be evident until a child is pushed to concentrate or to organize his or her life.

diet high in simple carbohydrates makes attentional problems worse, especially for people vulnerable to ADD. Most ADD children and adults simply do better on a high-protein, low–simple-carbohydrate diet (much more on this later). A lack of protein causes a tremendous problem with focus throughout the day. If a person is vulnerable to ADD, a high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet typically makes their symptoms worse.

Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.

The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called 'The Human Moment,' about how to make real contact with a person at work: … The fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry, close your laptop, end your daydream and pay full attention to the person.

It's not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.

What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.

if we stick with a task too long, we lose sight of the goal

99 percent of us cannot multitask.

McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.

the Zeigarnik effect, our tendency to remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones.2

listen without listening for anything.

The differences in the two thinking styles, as Baron-Cohen describes them, are intriguing. "Systematizing involves exactness, excellent attention to local detail," and an attraction to fixed rules independent of context, he says. "To systematize, you need detachment." 21 (Baron describes autism as an "extreme" male brain.)

Nowadays, everyone—whether we're the head of an organization or its freshest hire—faces a torrent of information. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.

The buttons I usually push don't need my force, only my intention. Buttons are supposed to be servants, waiting to deliver your commands to the machine. Instead, this loud, dumb piece of steel I'm driving demands that I pay strict attention to every turn of the road, keep my hands and feet ready at all times. The car takes no responsibility for the job of driving. It leaves me in total control. I hate it. I don't want control. I just want to get there

Tran Van Hay soigne

It's the central executive in your brain that notices that the floor is dirty. It forms an executive attentional set for "mop the floor" and then constructs a worker attentional set for doing the actual mopping.

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.

That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they'll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it. Daydreaming

Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.

the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens.

We're assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumor, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting, and at the same time, we are all doing more.

Daniel J. Levitin

When we do one thing—uni-task—there are beneficial changes in the brain's daydreaming network and increased connectivity. Among other things, this is believed to be protective against Alzheimer's disease. Older adults who engaged in five one-hour training sessions on attentional control began to show brain activity patterns that more closely resembled those of younger adults.