Attentional Bias Quotes

We become what we pay attention to.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.

Mass attention is almost unattainable and it's not clear that you want it.

Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.

The more you think about something, the more important it becomes, the more important it is to you, and the more important it will become to the audience.

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with extraordinary frequency - it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn: in every conversation that we hear in every book we open, in every newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised, and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences.

Human psychology is attuned to the negative. It’s called the negativity bias. We dread bad things more than we savor good things.

So many people are struggling to create happiness while their brain is inundated by noise. If your brain is receiving too much information, it automatically thinks you're under threat and scans the world for the negative first. Because the brain is limited, whatever you attend to first becomes your reality.

People don't really absorb everything they read or hear. They just look at it quickly, and then they choose to remember what they want to remember.

Just remember that those things that get attention flourish.

The problem with me is I read everything, but it's only the bad stuff that stays with me. It's weird, you only need to be told something once and it stays with you.

Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

I try not to read too much because what ends up happening is that you ignore the nice reviews and you just focus on the bad reviews. A negative lesson is learned seven times deeper than a positive reinforcement.