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Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, by Winifred Gallagher
Ebook Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, by Winifred Gallagher
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Your world, and even your self, is largely constructed from the thoughts and feelings, people and things you’ve focused on throughout your life. Much more than you probably suspect, you can, as you move forward, actively direct your attention to create the kind of experience you want and become the person you want to be. Drawing from the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Rapt illuminates attention’s essential function: transforming the vast, chaotic world into your own orderly, user-friendly personal version. Your brain’s selective gatekeeper, it’s involved in virtually every aspect of life—learning and memory, thought and emotion, work and relationships. As the expression ‘paying attention’ suggests, you have a limited store of this cognitive currency, which you should invest wisely, because the stakes are high. On the deepest level, what you focus on can literally change your brain, and thus your behavior. On the experiential level, taking charge of your attention is the key to personal power and freedom—and the hallmark of the successful and satisfied. Along with organizing your internal and external worlds, attention opens the doors to the sublime experience best described as ‘rapt.’ By cultivating this ability to be completely engrossed—whether by rolling waves or a soaring aria, by rearranging your furniture or writing a poem—you improve your capacity for concentration, broaden your inner horizons, lift your spirits, and most important, feel what it means to be fully alive.
- Sales Rank: #4161896 in Books
- Published on: 2015-08-11
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .50" w x 5.25" l,
- Running time: 8 Hours
- Binding: MP3 CD
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Winifred Gallagher on Rapt
A wise research psychiatrist once told me that he had identified life's greatest problem: How to balance self and others, or your need for independence with your need for relationship? Since writing Rapt, I've come to believe that we now face a fundamental psychological challenge of a different sort: How to balance your need to know—for the first time in history, fed by a bottomless spring of electronic information, from e-mail to Wikipedia--with your need to be? To think your thoughts, enjoy your companions, and do your work (to say nothing of staring into a fire or gazing dreamily at the sky) without interruption from beeps, vibrations, and flashing lights? Or perhaps worse, from the nagging sense that when you're off the grid, you're somehow missing out?
Science's new understanding of attention can help shape your answers to this question, which pops up all day long in various forms. When you sit at your computer, will you focus on writing that report or aimless web browsing? At the meeting, will you attend to the speaker or to your BlackBerry? Research suggests that your choices are more consequential than you may suspect. When you zero in on a sight or sound, thought or feeling, your brain spotlights and depicts that "target," which then becomes part of the subjective mental construct that you nonetheless confidently call "reality" or "the world." In contrast, things that you ignore don't, at least with anything like the same clarity. As William James succinctly puts it, "My experience is what I agree to attend to."
The realization that your life—indeed, yourself--largely consists of the physical objects and mental subjects that you've focused on, from e-bay bargains to world peace, becomes even more sobering when you consider that, as the expression "pay attention" suggests, like your money, your concentration is a finite resource. How can you get the highest experiential return for this cognitive capital? By focusing on some screen or on playing your guitar? On IM-ing your old friend or joining her for a walk?
Considering the Internet's countless temptations and distractions, deciding how best to invest your time and attention when you're online is particularly challenging. Left to its own devices, your involuntary, "bottom-up" attention system asks, "What's the most obvious, compelling thing to zero in on here? That e-mail prompt? This colorful ad?" Fortunately, evolution has also equipped you with a voluntary, "top-down" attention system that poses a different question: "What do you want to focus on right now? Ordering that new novel, then checking the weather report, then getting back to work, right?" Sometimes, it's fun to just wander around online, allowing your mind to be captured by random, bottom-up distractions. In general, however, it's far more productive to focus on top-down targets you've selected to create the kind of experience you want to invite.
Along with making clear choices about what things merit your precious attention online, there are some other simple ways to protect the quality of your daily life from technological interference. Remember that your electronics are your servants, not your masters, and don't let them choose your focus for you. Abandon vain attempts to "multitask," because when you try to attend to two things at once—phoning while checking e-mail—you're simply switching rapidly between them, which takes longer and generates more errors. When you need to concentrate on an important activity, try to work for 90 minutes without interruptions, because rebooting your brain can take up to 20 minutes.
Most important, as you go about the day, bear in mind that by taking charge of your attention, you improve your experience, increase your concentration, and lift your spirits. Best of all, enjoying the rapt state of being completely absorbed, whether by a website or a sunset, a project or a person, simply makes life worth living. We cannot always be happy, but we can almost always be focused, which is as close as we can get.
From Publishers Weekly
Gallagher (The Power of Place, Working on God) couples personal ruminations and interviews with experts to explore the role of attention in defining consciousness, identity and the human experience: "who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love-is the sum of what you focus on." From paying attention to your inner dialogue (helping eliminate negative thought patterns) to bucking the myths of multi-tasking (says cognitive scientist David Meyer, "Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while multi-tasking at the Swiss patent office"), Gallagher draws practical conclusions from her examination of conscious ("top-down") and unconscious ("bottom-up") attention strategies. Though her claims to "a psychological version of... physicist's 'grand universal theory'" are a bit outsized, Gallagher takes illuminating forays into the evolution of the species and the global diaspora, looking for instance at how "Western individualism" emphasizes top-down focus while the Asian mentality encourages a broader, contextual perspective. A fascinating psycho-social look at human motivation and the power of focus, Gallagher's latest is worth paying attention to.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Gallagher’s fascinating book, which analyzes the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, easily translates difficult concepts into layman’s terms. She includes contemporary and historical examples of men and women, including Mozart and Tiger Woods, whose ability to concentrate led to their successes. Gallagher’s writing is engaging and accessible, and her suggestions for a more focused life range from the mystical (meditation) to the ordinary (separating oneself from distractions.) Critics did, however, have a couple of complaints: her focus on the conscious mind overlooks the subconscious and the veiled effect it can have on thoughts and feelings, and she sometimes tries too hard to relate all of life’s experiences back to her topic. However, readers who choose to concentrate on Rapt will not be disappointed.Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great summary of focus research
By Sunyata
If you want a summary written by someone who went through the job of collecting information from a lot of other sources, this book is great. That is what I wanted. I found a lot of other sources of information to look into, and appreciated learning little bits of a lot of different aspects of focus.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
densely packed with great info and advice
By Amazon Customer
Some of the best moments are here and gone and in the past sooner than I'd like. Rapt helps me believe that even if I can't keep the best parts forever I can get the most out of them as they happen by striving for the focused life. This is one of those book that I hope to come back to and read again as it seems to have already enhanced my time with my two young children.
I actually bought this hoping that it would help my teaching practice, by helping me understand my students with attention issues, but I got so much more out of this read. I feel like this book will improve my experience of my recreation and family time more than my professional life. I found myself highlighting quote after quote from Rapt, as this book is densely packed with great info and advice.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Monkey Mind Account of Mindfulness
By Jennifer
Who we are and how are is largely shaped by where we focus, where we invest our attention. Although our minds are naturally (and often strongly) drawn to the dangerous and the novel, we have the ability to influence our focus. With or without intentional choice, attending to one aspect of our physical and mental environment causes us to ignore others.
Rather than making a coherent case for where we should place our attention under what circumstances and providing techniques for controlling that attention, the author provides a journalist’s survey of the scientific work being done in the area. A sprinkling of nineteenth century philosophy provides some context, but we are left with little more than the general idea that attending to the right things will make us happier.
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