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Attention and the Focused Life
Penguin Press
April 2009
On Sale: April 16, 2009
296 pages
ISBN: 1594202109
EAN: 9781594202100
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Winifred Gallagher revolutionizes our understanding of
attention and the creation of the interested life In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred
Gallagher makes the radical argument that the quality of
your life largely depends on what you choose to pay
attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher
grapples with provocative questions—Can we train our focus?
What’s different about the way creative people pay
attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors
when making big decisions, like where to move?—driving us
to reconsider what we think we know about attention. Gallagher looks beyond sound bites on our proliferating
BlackBerries and the increased incidence of ADD in children
to the discoveries of neuroscience and psychology and the
wisdom of home truths, profoundly altering and expanding
the contemporary conversation on attention and its power.
Science’s major contribution to the study of attention has
been the discovery that its basic mechanism is an either/or
process of selection. That we focus may be a biological
necessity— research now proves we can process only a little
information at a time, or about 173 billion bits over an
average life—but the good news is that we have much more
control over our focus than we think, which gives us a
remarkable yet underappreciated capacity to influence our
experience. As suggested by the expression “pay attention,”
this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must
learn to spend wisely. In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to
a diverse cast of characters—artists and ranchers, birders
and scientists—who have learned to do just that and whose
stories are profound lessons in the art of living the
interested life. No matter what your quotient of wealth,
looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means
focusing more on what really interests you and less on what
doesn’t. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis—the wise
investment of your attention is the single most important
thing you can do to improve your well-being—Rapt yields
fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means
to be fully alive.
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