Attention Please!

What information registers in our brains depends on what our attention allows in. And who regulates this filter? You do!

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What information registers in our brains depends on what our attention allows in. And who regulates this filter? You do!

What you register or experience is determined by what you pay attention to. Only the things we pay attention to seem real to us, whereas whatever we ignore—no matter how important it may be—seems to fade into insignificance. If you go to a shop looking for red shoes to match your red dress, your gaze will stop only at that colour and you will not notice other shoes, no matter how stylish they are.

WHAT IS ATTENTION?

Look around the room you are in. Ob-serve all the white things in the room: It may be the paint on the wall, clothes, curtains, the fan, switchboards, furniture. How many white things did you notice? Now, without checking, can you recall the blue things in the same room? Look again. You will notice that you missed many obvious blue things. Because your first task was to look for the white objects, you ignored the rest of the colours present around you. In spite of the visual stimulus, you did not allow it to register mentally.

That’s what attention does. It is like the beam of light from a torch in a dark room. You will be able to see only certain things in that light. The others remain invisible. Therefore, attention is the capacity to focus on one element or thing while ignoring all others.

WHAT DISTRACTS US?

Consider this scenario: A CEO receives an unexpected email from his marketing manager, asking for an appointment to speak about something important. His mind starts racing about what his manager is going to say. Is he going to ask for a raise? Is he going to resign? Does he have any complaints? All these worries lead to a number of mistakes in the report he is preparing.

There are many factors that take our attention away from a task at hand, resulting in mistakes. These factors can be external or internal stimuli. The factors mentioned in the above example are internal stimuli—mental or emotional distractions that divert our atten...

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