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Week of 1 April 2024
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This week's recommended article & book
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
Behavioural Economics in Business

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

Winifred Gallagher

Why we recommend this book

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher. Gallagher's book makes the case, grounded in the attention research, that what a person habitually attends to is among the most consequential choices they make — not because attention determines outcomes directly, but because it determines the experienced quality of life and the beliefs that form from accumulated experience. Gallagher covers the neuroscience of selective attention, the research on how emotional states shape attentional scope, and the growing body of work on how attentional habits can be deliberately shaped through practice. Read alongside the bias research McRaney covers, Gallagher provides the complementary account: not just what attentional selectivity produces in the way of distortion, but what the deliberate cultivation of attentional direction produces in the way of a different relationship to experience. The book is calm and research-grounded without being clinical, and it takes seriously the practical question of what someone can do with the understanding that attention is selective and that the selection matters.

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