I decided to write my blog post about the topics discussed in lecture six involving Sensation and Adaptation. One of the concepts that really jumped out at me was the in depth explanation of attention. Attention in psychological terms, is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a certain stimulus while trying to ignore the other perceivable stimuli. Attention is an extremely powerful force and it must understood that our environment contains too much information for someone’s brain to fully interpret all at once. We as humans try to take advantage of that and have developed our own ways of multitasking. Instead of focusing our attention on one thing, we choose to try and focus on multiple things at once. When people are busy doing something else, they often ignore the other significant things around them, and I have experienced something like this in my life.
A time that I can recall experiencing the effects of Attention occurred at my sleep away camp a few years ago. I was in deep conversation with my counselor, at the time while the activity instructor told me to come into the other room. There were two rooms connected to each other however they were separated by wooden barrier and to get to the other side you had to go through the door. I decided to multitask by walking backwards to find the door while still being able to talk to my counselor. I though I would find the door easily and successfully multitask however that was not the case. The door happened to be closed, so it was up to me to open it however since I was too busy talking I ended up walking straight into the door. I genuinely thought I would be able to perform these two actions at once, however my attempt was unsuccessful. All I ended up doing was hurting myself.
Attention is necessary to detect all of the stimulus changes around us. We need to be more aware of what goes on around us and understand that Multitasking harms our attention span. When people are multitasking, it is more likely for them to make mistakes or perform their actions more slowly. I can prove this through my experience because while I was attempting to do two things at once I made a mistake and ended up hurting myself.