Is Attention the Secret to Emotional Intelligence? Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The suns rays do not burn until brought to a focus. - Alexander Graham Bell - Yes; There are many kinds of attention, and each has its value. When we think of focus, we tend to think of one point of concentration—‘I’m going to get this thing done if it kills me,’ just keep your eye on the target. Well, that’s useful in many respects—in school, at work. But not always, if you want to be creative, actually, that is a creativity killer. To be in a creative state of mind, you want to let your mind wander. You do want to focus on the problem at first and gather all the information that might be pertinent as a kind of fertilizer for the creative process. But then the real action in creativity is in those times when you let go and don’t think of anything in particular. You have an enormous amount of “bottom up” circuits, as they’re called, which are beneath the curtain of awareness that processes information, and they will come up with a novel combination that can be useful—which is the definition of a creative insight—and present it to you in an off-moment, when you’re in the shower or going for a walk. So there’s a place for every kind of attention. For example, meditation is, from a cognitive science point of view, the retraining of attention—a bulking up of the neural circuitry that allows you to detach from where your mind has wandered, bring it back to the point of focus, and keep it there. That is the basic repetition of the mind in any kind of meditation. And that’s also what builds up the willpower to resist the pull of electronics and stay with the human world.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 02:57:44 +0000
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