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The Importance Of Selective Attention

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Attention has always been a prized commodity. The brain knows it and cognitive psychologists know it, but the average person has yet to fully grasp the concept. Articles on how to multi-task still flag the covers of popular magazines, and distracting cell phones and tablets accompany students to class on the forefront of their desks next their notes. It has been verified time and time again that the mind simply cannot attend to two things simultaneously; one can pay attention to one thing or another, but not to two things at once. People know that neutralizing distractions will yield invaluable minutes of clarity and focus, but for most, the application of such, is nearly impossible. With the internet access reaching farther into our lives from smart watches to televising pumps at gas stations, distractions are everywhere and increasingly difficult to ignore. …show more content…

Selective attention is focusing conscious awareness on a particular stimulus. (Meyers, 2013, p. 90) An example of selective attention is paying attention to a phone conversation while on a loud busy street. The brain is taking in thousands of stimuli about the surrounding smells, people, sounds, and environment, but allows for singular focus on the telephone conversation. This focus does not preclude a lack of inventory of the other stimuli, the brain has simply ruled them unimportant and tossed them

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Anderson also interviews the author, Winifred Gallagher, the author of Rapt, a book about the power of attention, who wrote the book while fighting a severe form of breast cancer. She mentions that her diagnosis can be viewed as an internal struggle of focus, due to the gravity of her situation. Anderson mentions that she realized attention was ‘ “not just a latent ability, it was something you could marshal and use as a tool” ’ (3). Anderson consults Gallagher on distraction and suggests that attentional self-control, is the focal point of whether one will invest their time productively or become distracted. I concur with this argument, because a majority of instances where I was unable to finish my assignments or work was when I allowed or continued to be distracted by technology.

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I have discovered that I am most distracted when there are multiple tabs irrelevant to my work open on my computer. Normally this occurs when I have shopping and social media windows open, which is a big red flag for me when I am trying to do work. What happens is I get the urge to check in on everyone’s lives on Facebook

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The demons use this often in my life. My main distraction in my life is technology. For example, I will be sitting at the desk and then I will hear my phone start ringing or I will see a new update on my computer and feel the urge to go and check it. The demons place these things out to hamper

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Chronicle of Distraction The world of online is filtered with diversion in every browse; with the share this and view here, no wonder it is easy to lose focus while reading on the web. Nicolas Carr, an author who wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” mentions "Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distractions, remains largely disengaged" (Carr). Carr identifies internet disruptions can interrupt the ability to focus on evaluation. During my reading "25 Spectacular Movies You (Probably) Haven’t Seen"(Schirp) on highexistence.com, I noticed that my attention was fascinating by the topics on the page, ads on the sides, and comment sections.

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Is technology changing our brains for the better or for the worse? The human brain is a biological masterpiece and is the most advanced organ on the face of the planet. In Richard Restak’s essay “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era,” he speaks about how the advancements in technology in this modern era have affected the brain’s habits and functions. Multitasking is requiring the brain to change how it functions, its organizations, and efficiency throughout day-to-day tasks and is also enabling people to do things otherwise not possible. Within the past two decades, the amount of time we spend on using technology has increased by a large amount.

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Shulman defined focus listening as “concentrating on a specific part of the client’s message” (Shulman, 2009). My understanding of focus listening is understanding what the client is saying and not saying. Being able to tune in to subjects the client does not want to discuss and being able to address it with the client. One case that stand out to me was 16 year old Emily who was brought to my office by her mom because of her defiant behavior. Meeting with Emily was challenging at first.

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Abstract The attentional boost effect is novel because its findings were contradictory to previous studies that found divided attention while encoding impairs one’s memory. This effect has been displayed in tests of item memory; however it has not yet been determined whether it affects contextual memory in a similar fashion. This study used four experiments to examine in further depth how the attentional boost affects contextual memory. In this review we will only be discussing experiment one, which examined contextual memory of intra-modal detail using font and color difference in study words.

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First Klosowski delves into the realm of science to examine what is actually happening in your brain when you are focusing on something and what happens when you lose focus. Next, he urges his audience to pinpoint what breaks your concentration and remove the triggers that prevent focus. He argues that through the application of heightened concentration in our lives, we will see ourselves producing better work. Suggestions he includes for attaining such a state of concentration include wearing earphones or earplugs and blocking notifications on your

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Anderson tone especially seems adverse from what his true argument is. Furthermore, Anderson continues his contradicting tone against attention by stating that: When forced to multitask, the overloaded

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When using the internet often we tend to get addicted, and when we are away from the internet all we wonder about is what we are missing out on. “We want to be interrupted because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated," wrote Carr. I am addicted to the internet, and when I am away from it can get tough. When I do my homework I turn off my phone, and put it in another room or else I get distracted and cannot get anything done.

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The article, How Concentration Shields Against Distraction, talks about having external distractions to where we become so focused on the task at hand that we do not realize or focus on our surroundings. What the authors are trying to portray is the idea of concentration and the fact that it will, in a sense, block out any distractions. With concentration, come different levels. For slower levels of concentration, one would be able to catch what is going on in the background. But once the levels increase, one’s focus becomes more prominent on the task to where one does not know what is happening in the background.

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Multitasking makes it difficult to gain any knowledge when a person's attention is in multiple places.  Christine has a strong inductive argument that explains

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For example, at the beginning of the day when I was reading academic texts on Education for my University work, I had to read them really thoroughly so I was able to not only to understand what the text was about but read through the lines so I knew exactly what was being said and so I had to really focus. However, when it was the afternoon when I was making lunch I looked at food packets and was reading the instructions on how to cook the food on one of the packets and that didn’t require as much concentration but I still needed to understand how to cook it. But, while I was on my phone in the evening, I was looking at social media which didn’t need hardly any concentration as I was skim reading tweets which had been posted on Twitter.

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arbitrary inference, negative automatic thoughts activate pathological anxiety (Burns, 1989). As reported by behaviorism, anxiety is learned through classical conditioning (in which a neutral stimulus acquires meaning through association with a crucial stimulus) and maintained through operant conditioning (in which avoidance from the negative experience of anxiety plays eventually a key role in its increase) (Mowrer, 1947). Moreover, the new field of neurobiology contributed to the deeper understanding of anxiety but in a more biological aspect. It has been proved that brain chemistry and brain function or dysfunctions respectively can alter thoughts, emotions and behaviors. So, when an individual perceives an information or stimulus from the environment as threatening, the levels of many neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, GABA and

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Distraction, an issue that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else, happens to everyone, every day whether it is realized or not. Multitasking, the handling of more than one task at the same time by a single person, also an everyday issue that most people do not even think about being an issue to their everyday life, but little do they know without this type distraction they could get forty percent more of their work done. Distraction is everywhere, and with distraction comes multitasking, this combination is something that should be avoided if possible. Focusing on one task has been the biggest issue with the creation of the internet and smartphones. Dewatripont mentions in his paper, “focusing on the two-task case for simplicity, the mainstream multitask problem is based on the observation

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