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. Science's new understanding of attention can help shape your answers to this question, which pops up all day long in various forms.
#Winifred gallagher rapt how to#
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Īmazon Exclusive: Winifred Gallagher on RaptĪ 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? 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. 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. On the deepest level, what you focus on can literally change your brain, and thus your behavior. 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. Your brain’s selective gatekeeper, it’s involved in virtually every aspect of life-learning and memory, thought and emotion, work and relationships. 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. 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. Your world, and even your self, is largely constructed from the thoughts and feelings, people and things you’ve focused on throughout your life.