Quotes About Focus

This is the essence of the focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f.

Intense focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention.

effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.

So far in this chapter, we have focused on predictive judgment tasks, and most of the judgments we will discuss are of that type.

However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.

To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted.

pupils are sensitive indicators of mental effort—

Even in the absence of time pressure, maintaining a coherent train of thought requires discipline.

Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate at which mental energy is used.

But our focus is on judgments in which variability is undesirable. System noise is a problem of systems, which are organizations, not markets.

Modern tests of working memory require the individual to switch repeatedly between two demanding tasks, retaining the results of one operation while performing the other.

While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

Aici nu exist? mai devreme sau mai târziu... aici exist? doar munc?, asta facem aici.

This moment is the only thing that's real. Worrying about the future and lamenting the past only crowds out the beauty of what is happening now.

I think it is much better not to have a goal, but rather to have a path. I think it is much better not to have a goal, but rather to have a path. Taking the path is very vulnerable and threatened by being pulled to the left or to the right, but if you stay on this thin and narrow, straight path, something of an adventure, something of meaning will happen to you

The only thing more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack is finding a needle in a needlestack.

It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention–difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering–and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.

An epic without a focus - without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make - was just a very long poem.

a single instant of total presence was worth the reading of all the texts, all the poets, all the philosophers.

When a single object takes an exclusive place in our mind, when our being reaches toward this object in a sort of contracted tension, movement ceases within us and suffering finds its home in us.

when our desire occupies all of space the absence of one object goes totally unnoticed, because the flow of our awareness remains free to come into contact with thousands of others.

Au fond, ce journal aura été un perpétuel exercice d'accommodation. Échapper au flou, maintenir le corps et l'esprit dans le même axe… J'ai passé ma vie à « faire le point ».

I like the darkness. It clarifies my thinking. – Gabriel Allon