Stop for a moment, reflect, and answer this: What do you think is your most precious resource right now?<\/p>\n
I have no way of knowing how you answered. What I can tell you is that there is currently a whole discussion around attention<\/em> as the most precious resource we have. It seems, say philosophers, psychologists and economists together, that we live in an attention economy: the digital world exploits our attention as a resource (the vloggers of recent years understood this very well – they deliver content and make money capitalizing on our attention). Philosopher and essayist Yves Citton argues that we should move from an economy of attention to an ecology of attention<\/em>, that is, to taking care of our attention as a precious and limited resource.<\/p>\n Not sure? Please pick up your phone and see how much time you\u2019ve spent on Tik Tok, YouTube and Facebook yesterday. To their amazement, most people find out that they spend a total of almost 3 hours daily on these platforms. The price paid (remember, “there’s no free lunch”)? That of their time and attention, attention they could have directed elsewhere. Without being aware of it, we let ourselves be taken away, we switch to autopilot.<\/p>\n When our brain goes on autopilot, we miss a number of things that could be important. I will tell you briefly about something that proves this:<\/p>\n A group of researchers from the Harvard Visual Attention Lab asked experienced radiologists to look at a set of X-rays and detect abnormalities. They also fitted them with an eye-tracking device, to better understand how doctors visually would process those images. Among the set of lung x-rays, some with genuine nodules, was an x-ray in which the image of a gorilla had been digitally inserted. Amazingly, more than 80% of the radiologists did not detect this image as abnormal, even though the image was 48 times larger than the image of an average-sized nodule, and the eye-tracking device recorded that most of the experiment subjects had directly looked at the gorilla. It’s not that they didn’t see it or forgot about it: their brains just didn’t register the image \u2013 they weren’t looking for it on purpose, so they didn’t see it. The power of selective attention.<\/p>\n We have greater access to information, we are inundated with competing informational stimuli, and our attention feels increasingly fragmented, dispersed and chaotic. We are in a continuous state of partial attention<\/em>. We thereby unwittingly lose the ability to be present, to truly connect with the world and shape our own experience, but also to think clearly and make good decisions and enjoy ourselves of our life.<\/p>\n It can happen to me in the psychotherapy office, it can happen to you at work. So reflect for a moment: where are you directing your attention? Do you do this on purpose or are you driven most of the time by the stimuli around you? What would your work life look like if you decided, before opening your work email, what you want to focus on for the day, what you want to notice, what you want to remember?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stop for a moment, reflect, and answer this: What do you think is your most precious resource right now? I have no way of knowing how you answered. What I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10126,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletter-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n