"Homo sapiens has evolved to focus not only on howling coyotes, flickering flames, sugary tastes, and other salient sensory signals, but also on compelling thoughts (“Get to work on time” or “All men are created equal”) and feelings (“I love you” or “I wish you were dead”)."
"recently, like Western academe in general, the field accepted Greek philosophy’s major distinction between supposedly lofty cognition, which focuses on reason and absolute truth, and funky emotion, which centers on subjective value judgments."
"Just as you’re primed to attend to swarming insects and snarling dogs, you’re strongly wired to focus on the negative ideas and emotions that signal threats of a different kind. Indeed, whenever it’s not otherwise occupied, your mind is apt to start scanning for what could be amiss, allowing unpleasant thoughts along the lines of “I feel fat” or “Maybe it’s malignant” to grab your attention."
"Like physical discomfort, the psychological sort is meant to focus you on a possible problem and motivate you to solve it. If you’re camping in grizzly bear habitat, for example, a frisson of fear keeps you alert and reminds you to be careful about food storage. The desolation or anger you feel at the loss of a relative, friend, or lover testifies to our highly social species’ crucial dependence on such ties for survival."
" “The Three of Us,” co-written with Joe McGinty and Julia Greenberg, stresses Kine’s inability to shift her attention from her tragic target, despite understanding the effects on her life. Judging by the responses posted on the show’s website, many listeners have experienced a similar dark obsession."
"According to psychology’s “negativity bias theory,” we pay more attention to unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because they’re simply more powerful than the agreeable sort. (This would have come as no surprise to Freud, who saw life as a struggle filled with conflict, guilt, grief, anger, and fear.) An all-too-abundant body of evidence attests to psychological pain’s bottom-up grip on your attention. In a survey of which topics we spend the most time thinking about, problematic relationships and troubled projects topped the list."
"Here’s the icing on the cake: on your birthday, you’re up to 20 percent likelier to have a heart attack, perhaps prompted by stress caused by fears of aging or disappointed hopes."
"For the species in general and the individual in particular, the main advantage of paying attention to an unhappy emotion is that it attunes you to potential threat or loss and pressures you to avoid or relieve the pain by solving the associated problem."
"Notwithstanding the flinty advantages, focusing on negative emotions, particularly when they don’t serve their primary purpose of promoting problem-solving, exacts a high cost: you spend a lot of time feeling crummy even if your life is pretty good."
"Just as we evolved to attend to negative thoughts and emotions that could promote survival, we’re also drawn to the positive sort that serve the same purpose in a different way. If fear and sadness warn us of danger and loss, joy, curiosity, and contentment invite us to reach out and explore the world."
"Love’s intense, other-directed focus is essential for a species that must form lasting bonds to nurture the young for prolonged periods and cooperate to prosper."
"Where the individual is concerned, good feelings such as affection, pride at a promotion, and enthusiasm for a new project are the carrots on the stick that keep you moving smartly along life’s up-and-down road."
"Based on objective lab tests that measure vision, Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shows that paying attention to positive emotions literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it—a fact that has important implications for your daily experience."
"When you feel frightened, angry, or sad, reality contracts until whatever is upsetting you takes up the whole world—at least the one between your ears."
"As Norman puts it, “Consciousness also has a qualitative, sensory feel. If I say, ‘I’m afraid,’ it’s not just my mind talking. My stomach also knots up.” "
"The brain’s reactive, behavioral, and reflective elements pursue their own agendas, yet they also constantly communicate with one another. When your alarm triggers an argument over whether to roll over or get up and go to the gym, you experience a mild version of the kind of conflict that occurs when two or more of these networks insist that you focus on different things."
"When you first decide to buy a car, you focus earnestly on the reflective level. You do lots of research and analysis to figure out which auto best meets your needs and offers the most value, and you settle on a medium-priced Toyota. Then, says Norman, “You go to the dealer and drive away in something else.”
Once you leave home, your spouse’s admonitions, and your well-thumbed copies of Consumer Reports and head to the glittering showroom, redolent of new-car smell, your attention shifts from the brain’s sober, cerebral, reflective voice to the reactive, sexy, visceral one."
"TO FUNCTION IN the external world of the senses, you often don’t need to spend much energy on directing your attention. You’ll involuntarily focus on the ringing phone, the stinky garbage, the red-hot pepper. To hear your companion in a noisy restaurant, you’ll automatically home in on her voice and damp down the chatter from nearby tables. Waiting to cross the street, you’ll focus on the traffic signal and let the surroundings blur."
"Where operating in the internal world of thoughts and feelings is concerned, however, staying focused on the optimal target requires more effort, beginning with your mindfulness of attention’s either/or dynamics. Just as you’re geared to attend to loud crashes and lovely smells, you’ll home in on very pleasant or unpleasant ideas and emotions. For evolutionary, self-protective reasons, however, you’re apt to focus more on the latter. Nevertheless, to protect the quality of your experience, you must shift your focus from dull or dispiriting ideas and feelings that serve no useful, problem-solving purpose, as many if not most don’t, and concentrate as much as possible on the productive, life-enhancing sort."
grok:
"Chapter 2 of Rapt delves into the intricate relationship between attention and emotions, framing them as interdependent forces that shape human experience—where emotions act as powerful "salient" signals that capture or direct focus, often involuntarily, while deliberate attentional control can modulate emotional impacts for better living. Honestly, while the chapter builds on the book's foundational mechanics of bottom-up (reactive) and top-down (voluntary) attention from Chapter 1, it shifts to a more psychological lens, emphasizing how Homo sapiens evolved to attend not just to sensory threats but to internal emotional landscapes, with a candid acknowledgment that negative emotions dominate unless actively managed. In depth, this isn't a purely optimistic take; Gallagher highlights the evolutionary utility of emotions but warns of their potential to hijack attention, leading to inefficiency or distress if unchecked—making emotional-attentional balance essential for the "good life." The quotes you provided capture the chapter's essence, illustrating this bidirectional dynamic through examples of negativity bias, positive expansion, and neural conflicts."
"Chapter 2 positions emotions as attention's double-edged sword—essential signals that evolved for survival but requiring top-down management to avoid inefficiency. Honestly, it's a pivotal bridge in Rapt: From mechanics (Chapter 1) to emotional applications, showing how negativity bias dominates unless countered, while positives expand horizons. In depth, this isn't prescriptive yet; it sets up later chapters on mindfulness, but the quotes reveal Gallagher's balance—emotions are "flinty advantages" when functional, costly when not."
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