Recently, the search for what he calls “the splinters that make up different attention problems” has taken Castellanos in a new direction. First, he explains that your brain is far less concerned with your brilliant...

Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals.

In a variation on James’s recipe for interesting experience–the familiar leavened by the novel–Hobbs’s “art of choosing difficulties” requires selecting projects that are “just manageable.” If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and...

Because you actually might not know what activities truly engage your attention and satisfy you, he says, it can be helpful to keep a diary of what you do all day and how you feel...

However, by Sunday noon–not coincidentally, the unhappiest hour in America–you may have run through your options and wind up slumped on a couch, suffering from the Sabbath existential crisis. It’s at just such unfocused, unproductive...

If you really want to focus on something, says Castellanos, the optimum amount of time to spend on it is ninety minutes. “Then change tasks. And watch out for interruptions once you’re really concentrating, because...

Where visual artists are concerned, the Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini and the painter and sculptor Picasso were clearly adept at both experiential and instrumental attending, says Tellegen, as is the modern architect Frank Gehry....

Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are “reactant” personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others’ attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of...

…In Jack Nasar’s research on American’s taste in homes, only one group preferred the modernist house: architects.

Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often aggravates a victim’s stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved people do better without grief therapy.

Your motivations–get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office–aren’t impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual’s goals figure prominently in the theories of personality...

Arguably the mos intriguing characteristic assessed by the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), a widely used test developed by the University of Minnesota’s eminent psychologist Auke Tellegen, is “absorption,” which describes a particular style of focusing....

Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Hobbs put it, the...

Research shows that when they confront a potentially unpleasant situation, such as some unfriendly faces at a gathering, these extraverts are apt to shift their attention rapidly around the room and zero in on amiable...

People who are diagnosed as having “generalized anxiety disorder” are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural...

this observation leads Rozin to a stunning conclusion: “Disgust is the basic emotion of civilization.

After he wrote The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz got fervent amens from European governments as well as individual readers for insisting that the management of your focus has become one of decision-laden modernity’s major challenges....

Yet he argued that even a tedious topic can take on a certain fascination if you make an effort to look at it afresh: “The subject must be made to show new aspects of itself;...

Consciousness, which is the “reflective” element of Norman’s conceptual brain, handles the “higher” functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Because consciousness pays a lot of attention to your...

Horse Frightened by a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different situation. Stubbs painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate the nature of the sublime, which was one of his era’s most popular philosophical...

Once out of your cradle, you don’t focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as...