Quotes About Abstracting

Acting per se, like all art, is a process of abstracting, of retaining only significant detail. But in impersonation any detail can be significant.

Brain Rule #6 We don't pay attention to boring things. • The brain's attentional "spotlight" can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking. • We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail. • Emotional arousal helps the brain learn. • Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion.

If we subtract from this statement a certain feeling of inferiority that is characteristic of the introvert, and add to it the fact that the "great world of ideas" is not so much ruled by the extravert as he himself is subject to it, then Schiller's plaint gives a striking picture of the poverty that tends to develop as the result of an essentially abstracting attitude.

Also essential to math is the sense in which abstracting something can mean reducing it to its absolute skeletal essence, as in the abstract of an article or book. As such, it can mean thinking hard about things that for the most part people can't think hard about-because it drives them crazy.