Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

Gallagher (The Power of Place, Working on God) couples personal ruminations and interviews with experts to explore the role of attention in defining consciousness, identity and the human experience: ""who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love-is the sum of what you focus on."" From paying attention to your inner dialogue (helping eliminate negative thought patterns) to bucking the myths of multi-tasking (says cognitive scientist David Meyer, ""Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while multi-tasking at the Swiss patent office""), Gallagher draws practical conclusions from her examination of conscious (""top-down"") and unconscious (""bottom-up"") attention strategies. Though her claims to ""a psychological version of... physicist's 'grand universal theory'"" are a bit outsized, Gallagher takes illuminating forays into the evolution of the species and the global diaspora, looking for instance at how ""Western individualism"" emphasizes top-down focus while the Asian mentality encourages a broader, contextual perspective. A fascinating psycho-social look at human motivation and the power of focus, Gallagher's latest is worth paying attention to.