ATTENTION PLEASE!

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

- Aditi Singhal and Sudhir Singhal

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. Observe 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?