One of the most interesting concepts we talked about in class so far was the idea of selective attention. Selective attention is the brain’s ability to focus one certain stimuli and not others. In other words, selective attention is when our brain allows us to focus on and process specific information, while blocking out pretty much everything else at the same time. Every second of the day there are so many things going on around us, and it would be impossible to try to process everything at the same time. This is why our brain only focusses of specific stimuli coming into our brain at any given moment. If we weren’t able to use selective attention, then the whole world around us would be so overwhelming and hard for our brain to process basically anything at a given moment.
Personally I believe that selective attention is such an interesting concept and it affects me everyday without me even noticing. Every morning when I am on my way to my 9am class, I tend to put on earbuds and blast music while I am walking. While this is happening, the only two things I am thinking about is the music that I’m listening to, and getting to class on time. Since this is the case, I barely notice anything going on around me. In particular, early this week my selective attention almost caused me an accident. While I was on my way to class, I was as usual listening to my music loudly and having a good time. However, since I pretty much wasn’t paying attention to anything else going on around me, I started to cross the street thinking nothing of it, and a car had to slam on their breaks so that they didn’t hit me. I was so focused on just listening to music and getting to class on time, that my mind completely blocked out the fact that there were cars driving down the road. Luckily, the car wasn’t driving that fast, so it was able to stop, but it was still a scary moment. Selective attention can be either good or bad depending on the situation, but in this case I wish my brain didn’t block out the fact that there was a car coming straight for me!