Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

The point of a secular attentional workout is not spiritual experience but the enhancement of the ability to focus, emotional balance, or both. In the “mindfulness meditation” that’s the most widely used form, you sit silently for forty-five minutes and attend to your breath: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. When thoughts arise, as they inevitably d

This common wisdom notwithstanding, some eclectic research suggests that rather than being helpful, focusing top-down attention on a psychic wound can make you feel worse.

Thus, the first step toward getting on with your work despite a financial setback or repairing a relationship after a nasty quarrel is to direct—perhaps yank—your attention away from fear or anger toward courage or forgiveness.

Meditation is not the only way in which you can use attention to change your neurophysiology and experience, but at present, these practices are the best understood, most accessible, and most clearly beneficial regimens.

deciding to concentrate on your hopes rather than your fears; to attend to the present instead of the past; to appreciate that just because something upsetting happens, you don’t have to fixate on it.

That’s not to say that when something upsetting happens, you immediately try to force yourself to “be happy.” First, says Fredrickson, you examine “the seed of emotion,” or how you honestly feel about what occurred. Then you direct your attention to some element of the situation that frames things in a more helpful light.

The idea that directing your attention away from negative events can be adaptive is supported by a complementary study in China, where the culture’s mourning rituals focus the grief-stricken person outward toward the community, rather than inward on the solitary processing of loss.

Although “attention” implies “conscious experience,” you can sometimes take in subliminal information that flies under the radar of awareness yet influences your behavior—especially when the material carries an emotional charge.

cognitive scientist Don Norman. According to his conceptual model, the brain has three major parts, which focus on very different things and sometimes conflict. The “reactive” component, which handles the brain’s visceral, automatic functions, concentrates on stuff that elicits biologically determined responses, such as dizzying heights and sweet t