Paying attention

In the English language, we are said to “pay” attention, which plainly implies that the process extracts a cost. Research on cognitive functioning shows us the form of the fee: when attention is paid to something, the price is attention lost to something else. Indeed, because the human mind appears able to hold only one thing in conscious awareness at a time, the toll is a momentary loss of focused attention to everything else.

The best we can do to handle multiple channels of information is to switch back and forth among them, opening and closing the door of mindfulness to each in turn. This skill allows for multitasking, the ability to focus on several activities in the same time frame—perhaps talking on the phone while reading an email message. Although it might seem that we are concentrating on more than one thing simultaneously, that’s an illusion. We are just rapidly alternating our focus. However, just as there is a price for paying attention, there is a charge for switching it: For about a half second during a shift of focus, we experience a mental dead spot, called an attentional blink, when we can’t register the newly highlighted information consciously.

We rightly believe that what they choose to attend to (or away from) reflects what they value at the time.

– Cialdini, Robert B.. Author, Pre-Suasion