The Gorilla Passes While the Guorilla Walks

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i think it's sort of two sides of the same coin, right? Oreh, your attention is allowing you to see exactly the number passes, so you're inattentive to this whole other domain of the black shirted. They're gong tomiss everything outside of that. It shows us not a failure, not a gacia, but the power of this incredible capacity to blank out something like a gorilla. But it also tells us our vulnerability, which is that we might miss stuff. We can't probably have both just equally active at once.

Research shows we are missing 50 percent of our lives because we aren’t paying attention. Many of us often feel mentally foggy, scattered, and overwhelmed. Why is it that no matter how hard you try, you seem to find yourself somewhere else — if you’re even aware you’ve drifted off to that place.

In this conversation with the acclaimed neuroscientist Amishi Jha, she recounts what her neuroscience research revealed, and shows why whether you’re simply browsing, talking to friends, or trying to stay focused in an important meeting, you can’t seem to manage to hang on to your attention.

Shermer and Jha discuss: the neuroscience of attention; what attention evolved to do; how stress, attention bias, negativity bias, thought flooding, and active listening affect attention; multitasking; the “flashlight” metaphor; mindfulness and well-being, and more…