Quotes About Attention

Wait. Look. Notice. If you keep those three words in mind, you just might survive the next few days.

There is always something to see, if you only know how to look.

You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk.

You have become so good that every mistake you make has a spotlight on it.

My attention span is about this big.

On one level, nothing's really changed in my life. I still drive my daughter in the car pool on Monday. But it's impossible not to be aware of this rush of attention it's impossible not to be seduced by it once you've entered into it, seduced by being unhappy when the attention wanes.

Word learning is thus not about putting labels on things but rather is about acquiring conventional means for coming to share attention with others in a variety of complex social contexts.

Conversations may thus be seen as a kind of "joint attention to mental content" (O'Madagain and Tomasello, forthcoming).

One reason you get groggy, long-distance driving, is that you don't move your face.

Maybe ET will use math to get our attention—a string of prime numbers, perhaps, or the apparently omnipresent, omni-important Pythagorean theorem. High school trig teachers should rebrand it the alien communication formula. That would've kept you from daydreaming in class, right?

You can pick out actors by the glazed look that comes into their eyes when the conversation wanders away from themselves.

There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn't task-based so much as response-oriented—whatever captured the boss's attention focused everybody's attention.

The story of Trump was the story of how he tried to make himself a story.

Trump didn't read. He didn't really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate.

He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.

Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval.

this was not a problem to address, this was a person to focus on:

Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight.

Trump didn't read. He didn't really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist.

alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention

The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened.

Donald Trump may have done any number of things that, given good sense and the letter of the law, he should not have done. But with his short attention span, inability to manage multiple variables, exclusive focus on his own immediate needs, and general disregard of all future outcomes, the notion of pinning a grand conspiracy on him seemed like a big stretch.

There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself,

But not only didn't he read, he didn't listen. He preferred to be the person talking.