By Julian De Freitas
Imagine what it would be like to take in everything about this moment. Not only would you be aware of these words on the screen before you, but also of the location of nearby objects with centimeter precision, of the feeling of your toes in your shoes, of every creak, crack and squeak. You would be able to focus on thousands of memories at once, and track every one of your changing emotions no matter what else you were busy with. Needless to say, your mind would overload with all this information. So why are you still functioning? Because you have the ability to selectively process only a subset of the information-rich world at a time---that is, the ability to pay attention. Attention is the gatekeeper that "decides" what the mind processes and what it ignores. Yet we typically pay attention so naturally that we seldom ...
