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Tell your brain what to find
The brain's filter
There is far too much going on in any moment to process, so the brain is always choosing what to keep. Many people have a negative attention bias, with extra vigilance for what could go wrong, what is not right, self-criticism, criticism of others, or anxiety.
Redirecting the filter
The filter can be redirected. In a grocery store, someone hunting for a particular cereal sees everything blur until that logo jumps out. It was there the whole time, and the brain only had to be told to find it. The same works for aspects of reality that are true but invisible until someone asks for them.
Prompts from joy class
In joy classes, students practice with prompts like these: look around the room, including the body, for something that reminds you of someone or something you love; look for evidence that somebody did something to make life better for you; look for something you enjoy and are having a positive response to.
How much do people miss in plain sight?
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris asked viewers to count basketball passes in a video in which a person in a gorilla suit walked through the scene. They reported in 1999 in the journal Perception that about half of viewers did not notice the gorilla. The effect is called inattentional blindness, and it shows that attention, not eyesight, decides what is seen. The study won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2004.
Why does negative information grab attention?
Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed the evidence in 2001 in Review of General Psychology under the title Bad Is Stronger Than Good. Across studies of emotions, relationships, learning, and memory, negative events had a larger effect than positive events of equal size. One proposed explanation is that missing a threat has historically cost more than missing an opportunity. The pattern is often called the negativity bias.
How do researchers measure attention bias?
A common method is the dot-probe task, introduced by Colin MacLeod and colleagues in 1986. Two words or faces flash on a screen, then a dot replaces one of them, and the person presses a key as fast as possible. A person who responds faster when the dot replaces a threatening word is said to have an attention bias toward threat. Studies have repeatedly found this bias to be stronger in people with anxiety.
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