Importance of “attention” in our lives.
Hey guys, my name is Sultan, and this is my first blog for Psychology class. I’m currently a rising sophomore at Penn State, double majoring in Psychology and Finance (not the typical mix, I know). I’m currently involved in the Psychology 100 course. So far, it has been a great experience and I love how the topics we learn in class can actually affect our real day-to-day lives. Our professor, Dr. Wede, does an amazing job by giving us real examples and showing videos to help us understand that this course is not only theoretical but practical, as well. Today in class we learned about Psychophysics. This fancy word just describes our relationship with the outside world and how we react to physical events. Furthermore, we talked about the Sensory Adaptation and how we are getting used to different things even if we hate them at the beginning. This led us to one of the most interesting topics in this course, which is Attention. The easiest way to understand this is to realize that the world contains more information that we can fully interpret or process, and, therefore, we need to focus on something specific, something that we are interested in. That’s where attention comes into play. Attention is a powerful force. It can make you experience an “inattentional blindness”, which is when you are failing to detect visible objects when your attention directed somewhere else. All of you probably had this problem when you lost something like your phone, but it was actually right in front of you or even in your hands. “When you are busy doing something else, you can fail to observe even really significant things”. This is how Selective Attention works, and by learning it you can understand how people “look” but don’t “see”. This is why it is really dangerous to drive and text at the same time, and you might even forget that you are driving a car at some point. But sometimes this might be pretty handy for us. Whenever you need to process information that is really important, Selective Attention will help you with that. Most of you have this friend that can do work without hearing any noises around, like loud music or people screaming. These kind of people can’t get easily distracted and it helps them a lot in their professional/school life. While others get distracted by every little thing and can never finish their work, because there is always something else you can do. I’m more like a second type of guy (it can take me the whole day just to finish one task). But after attending today’s class, I realized that our attention and vision are really inefficient, because we can be tricked so easily and there are so many different kind of illusions out there (literally just google “visual illusions” and you will be shocked). So, I thought that if we can trick it then we can improve it. I was right. There are so many different methods to improve your attention span, such as meditating (my favorite one), exercising, staying hydrated, etc. After that, I was shocked how easy it is to concentrate your attention on something for a long period of time. It helps me everyday now in all kind of tasks and it’s all started because of the lecture in my Psychology class. That’s why I believe that PSY100 is the best class in college. Thank you.