Can we train our focus? What's different about the way creative people pay attention?
Winifred Gallagher, an acclaimed behavioral science writer, makes the radical argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it.
Bio
Irene Borger
Irene Borger is a writer, teacher and director of the Alpert Award in the Arts. The former artist-in-residence at AIDS Project Los Angeles, and member of the faculty at University of California, Riverside, she has led writing workshops, devoted to witnessing and not-knowing, for art makers, and people living under conditions of extremity since 1990.
Published in numerous national magazines and newspapers, she is the editor of From a Burning House and The Force of Curiosity. A long time meditation student, she is writing a book on listening.
Winifred Gallagher
Winifred Gallagher's books include House Thinking, Just the Way You Are (a New York Times Notable Book), Working on God, and The Power of Place. She has written for numerous publications, such as Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times.
In psychology, the act or state of applying the mind to an object of sense or thought. Wilhelm Wundt was perhaps the first psychologist to study attention, distinguishing between broad and restricted fields of awareness. He was followed by William James, who emphasized active selection of stimuli, and Ivan Pavlov, who noted the role attention plays in activating conditioned reflexes. John B. Watson sought to define attention not as an inner process but rather as a behavioral response to specific stimuli. Psychologists today consider attention against a background of orienting reflexes or preattentive processes, whose physical correlates include changes in the voltage potential of the cerebral cortex and in the electrical activity of the skin, increased cerebral blood flow, pupil dilation, and muscular tightening. See alsoattention deficit disorder.
Of course they can. Getting on with your life via denial or ignoring it is a valid method. Of course, like everything in life, health care has become an industry. Like all industries, it has to make it itself needed.
The health industrial complex is no different than the military industrial complex.
Doctor, psychiatrists, counselors, educators... all have a valid interest in pushing the necessity of their services, just like military companies need to push the idea of military supremacy or fear to justify money flowing their way... especially the limitless pot of government money.