Too busy to read?

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how humans (and animals and, in some cases, computers) process information. Traditionally, cognitive psychologists have made a distinction among different areas of study: memory, attention, categorization, language acquisition and use, decision-making, and one or two other topics. Many believe that attention and memory are closely related, that you can't remember things that you didn't pay attention to in the first place. There has been relatively less attention paid to the important interrelationship among categorization, attention, and memory.

publishers considered their readers to be their customers, and saw their goal as providing a product good enough to convince people to pay to read it. Day's innovation was to realize that his readers could become his product and the advertisers his customers. His goal became to sell as many minutes of his readers' attention as possible to the advertisers. To do so, he lowered the price of the Sun to a penny and pushed more mass interest stories. "He was the first person to really appreciate the idea--you gather a crowd, and you're not interested in that crowd for its money," Wu explained in a speech, "but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention."

Every time you switch the focus of your Attention from one subject to another, you incur the Cognitive Switching Penalty. In order to take action, your brain has to "load" the context of what you're doing into working memory. If you constantly switch the focus of your Attention, you're forcing your brain to spend time and effort thrashing, loading and reloading contexts over and over again.

The discovery of the mind-wandering mode also explains why paying attention to something takes effort. The phrase paying attention is well-worn figurative language, and there is some useful meaning in this cliche. Attention has a cost. It is a this-or-that, zero-sum game. We pay attention to one thing, either through conscious decision or because our attentional filter deemed it important enough to push it to the forefront of attentional focus. When we pay attention to one thing, we are necessarily taking attention away from something else.

The often-used phrase "pay attention" is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. You could not compute the product of 17 x 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding.

Time and attention are very different things. They're your most precious resources moving forward. Just like you walk through the air and you swim through the water, you work through your attention. It's the medium of work. While people often say there's not enough time, remember that you'll always have less attention than time. Full attention is where you do your best work, and everyone's going to be looking to rip it from you. Protect and preserve it.

To pay attention to one thing means that we don't pay attention to something else. Attention is a limited-capacity resource.

Invest attention. Treat your happy moments like you would your date. Pay attention to them!

It's important to know that the "attention economy" describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers' attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

A critical point that bears repeating is that attention is a limited-capacity resource--there are definite limits to the number of things we can attend to at once.

And unfinished tasks are the more memorable, hoarding attention so they can be performed and dispatched successfully.

2: Find your unique uniform. Steve Jobs always wore the same clothes: a black turtleneck by Issey Miyake, Levi's 501s, and a pair of New Balance sneakers, which even served as his attire for public presentations. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to be fond of a gray T-shirt. Einstein is said to have always worn the same type of jacket. These people took the time that others spend on choosing clothes and chasing trends and turned their attention instead to the things that mattered most to them.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

The limitations of conscious will and discipline are rooted in the fact that every demand on our self-control--from deciding what we eat to managing frustration, from building an exercise regimen to persisting at a difficult task--all draw on the same small easily depleted reservoir of energy.

"In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention."

Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness.