Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

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.

human beings are the only creatures to know that we must die, but we’re also the only ones to know that we must find something engaging to focus on in order to pass the time—increasingly, a lot of time.

Bottom-up attention automatically keeps you in touch with what’s going on in the world, but this great benefit comes with a drawback, particularly for postindustrial folk who live in metropolitan areas and work at desks rather than on the savannah: lots of fruitless, unwelcome distractions.

Whenever possible, I looked toward whatever seemed meaningful, productive, or energizing and away from the destructive, or dispiriting.

According to psychology’s “negativity bias theory,” we pay more attention to unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because they’re simply more powerful than the agreeable sort.

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.

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.

We must resist the temptation to drift along, reacting to whatever happens to us next, and deliberately select targets, from activities to relationships, that are worthy of our finite supplies of time and attention.

Times have changed, and over the past thirty years of increasing racial justice, the average black IQ has already risen five points. Moreover, blacks now rank first in surveys of the importance various ethnic groups ascribe to education. Nevertheless, compared to other groups, blacks still do a fraction of the homework, which suggests that these st