Attention

You know that moment when you’re listening to someone explain the instructions to a new board game and you realize that you haven’t heard a single word they’ve said for the last five minutes? And then, when they ask if that makes sense, you have to smile and nod along while you’re internally panicking because your brain had been somewhere else entirely when they told you the difference between the red and green cards? Yet, you can probably still remember exactly what they said a few hours ago at dinner about their neighbor’s cat and what you had to eat at the restaurant. 

That’s attention at work—or rather, not at work in the way you'd hope, when you find yourself tuning out of important details. Attention is a finite resource, constantly being tugged in multiple directions by the environment, your internal state, and whatever YouTube video might autoplay next, demanding your attention for just a bit longer. In an age of endless notifications and predatory algorithms, attention isn’t just your ability to focus; psychologists also define it as something deeper: the set of cognitive processes that allow us to selectively concentrate on certain aspects of our world while ignoring others.

At its core, attention helps us prioritize; it’s what enables you to tune into a friend’s voice at a noisy party, scan a page of text for a keyword, or suddenly brake for a squirrel darting across the road. Classic psychological models break attention down into different types, like sustained attention (maintaining focus over time), selective attention (filtering out distractions), and executive attention (managing competing tasks or resolving conflict).¹,²,³ Neuroscientifically, attention is supported by an interconnected web of brain networks involving the frontal cortex, parietal lobes, and subcortical structures like the thalamus and basal ganglia.¹,² These systems dynamically shift depending on what we’re trying to do, or how sleep-deprived, anxious, or overwhelmed we are.³

But attention isn’t just about the brain; it’s about the whole person in context. Our ability to attend fluctuates based on emotional state, neurodivergence, trauma history, cultural background, and even how well we slept last night.³ It can be hijacked by anxiety, dulled by depression, sharpened by novelty, or completely derailed by a single group text. Understanding attention means understanding not just how the mind works in the abstract, but how our minds interact with the environments, social systems, and stressors around us. In short, attention is the filter through which we experience the world, and sometimes, that filter is imperfect.