Customer Reviews

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchased RAPT after hearing an excerpt on NPR. I am a physician who specializes in ADHD and was curious to find out what a layperson would publish about paying attention. I found the book readable and a good balance of anecdotes and data from psychological research. The information on ADHD was about 5 to 10 years out of date, but not grossly inaccurate. It is a good summary of the spiritual value of a mindful life including hard science support for the author's intuitive points.

I like this book because it makes the neuroscience understandable and applicable. I enjoy books that are based on hard science backed by examples and stories that bring it home at the layman's level.

I found this book fascinating on many fronts. It takes a deep look at how what we focus on tends to be more of what we get and goes in depth on adaptive focus.

The two chapters I found most interesting were the chapters on work and productivity and Nurture: This is your brain on attention.

The author makes a strong argument about the superficial amount of focus children give due to technology overwhelm. Where hours of focused practice made for successful mastery of subjects, today's youth (and increasingly, many adults) are unable to focus long enough to complete tasks requiring intellectual rigor or deep thought. Or in the words of the author: "when you're finally forced to confront intellectually demanding situations in high school or college, you may find that you've traded depth of knowledge for breadth and stunted your capacity for serious thought."

In a time of information overwhelm, this is the one book that everyone should read, thoroughly.

As someone who is interested in improving my personal productivity, I chanced upon this book after looking at Amazon. The book was a disappointment. Key Takeaways from the book who can decide if they still want to invest in the book,

1. There are two types of attention, Top-Down (What do you want to concentrate on?) and Bottom-Up (what's the obvious thing to home in on here?)
2. Attention is a zero sum game.
3. Focus on the positives vs. negatives. Refer to How of Happiness for more practical way to internalize it.
4. Take Mike Posner's Attention Network Test to check your current baseline
5. Meditation or just spending time in solitude is great for concentration. No practical ways to implement this.
6. Learn to listen well and not project your opinions. Also observe how your partner handles good news vs. bad news. Learn to accept that you can be vulnerable, your partner will cherish that.

The author writes in tangential style, citing references in the middle of making a point and never inferring an actionable conclusion. I would advise book lovers who want to improve their concentration to refer to Prof's Csikszentmihalyi book if you want to learn something practical.

Your un-rapted book reader,
Fred

If you haven't read anything on the subject of attention this review may not be for you.

Otherwise, if you have read Kahneman and Csikszentmihalyi, the last being very accessible, then this book would be repetitive and not as good as the material she references.

The above combined with the lack of compelling story telling, see Gladwell, and detailed practical advice, see Brain Rules, are the reasons for my three star review.

Not to sound harsh, if you have read nothing on the subject, then book is a good gentle introduction to the subject.

Rapt presents an interesting and provocative thesis, essentially arguing that modern life is plagued by an inability to focus on what matters amidst unnatural and overwhelming amounts of stimuli. I buy that basic notion: much of our contemporary society, with its mass infusion of media combined with relative social isolation, promotes psychological distraction that is profoundly disorienting. This book, however, has some trouble getting beyond that basic premise. Most of the chapters seem to take conventional topics from academic psychology (motivation, child development, sensation and perception, etc.) and wrap them around that thesis. This wrapping does offer many interesting bits of information, but for me it never really cohered into a useful whole. The chapters follow a basic template that is familiar from other attempts to popularize social science: there are some pop culture anecdotes that offer organizing themes, introductions to researchers doing quirky but relevant social science, and overviews of clever experiments that explain small pieces of our lives. The problem is that the pieces do not always really fit with the centrality this book puts on attention/focus, and the anecdotes often fail to really engage the reader with the issues (in the way that Gladwell has made famous). So, ironically, this book failed to fully maintain my attention. Maybe that is the fault of my own mind's struggles to focus, and there are bits of the book that are interesting to read, but for me the whole book never realized the promise of its grand and intriguing thesis.

Rapt is like a New Yorker article writ large. Gallagher summarizes scientific studies in rapid fire and draws sweeping conclusions from cobbled-together hypotheses. Her basic conclusions, reiterated throughout the book, are that: Paying close attention to good things will make you happier and healthier; Meditation is a great way to both improve attentional capacity (so you can get work done, or whatever) and to actually focus on good things; And Asians are better than Westerners at just about everything; But the Japanese are not--partly because of Manga.

None of her conclusions are particularly startling. And the studies she cites are ones you have probably already seen in the science section of your favorite news weekly. But I still think unless you study this subject professionally or have just finished a book of this same nature, Rapt is worth reading.

Although her premises are sometimes weak, and her conclusions are often over-broad, Gallagher accomplishes what she set out to do--I think--which is to bring complex ideas down to easy-to-grasp-though-sometimes-fuzzy level. For its simplicity and simplistic profundity, I enjoyed reading Rapt. And while I wouldn't propose citing it in your thesis, I found it to be a nice reminder of the power of the mind, the usefulness of mediation, and overall a well-written reflection on what really matters in life.

As someone interested in mindfulness, I read a number of books on this topic. Rapt caught my attention because it is doing so well on amazon. Winifred is a great writer. I haven't read her other stuff but I don't need to. She is a great writer. She sucks you into her stories.

But the best parts of the book are not her ideas. I loved the ideas of the people she interviewed. She interviewed a number of people who study and write about happiness: Richard Davidson, Barry Schwartz, the Nobel prize winning economist, Daniel Kahneman, and Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi (whose work she seems to rely on a great deal). The quotes from these thinkers is worth the price of admission.

Her premise is a good one: what we pay attention to, in the end, becomes our life. Of course, the book opens up with a quote by William James that says exactly the same thing (that he wrote over 100 years ago). And then there is the classic 1990 book: Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness Thus, I am not sure what is new in this book.

For a fresher approach to attention, mindfulness, and how it can improve our lives, I would suggest that people read these other recent books:

Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life

The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living

After all, these books were written by people who do the science and help clients create happy, meaningful lives. Makes more sense to go straight to the experts than the journalist.

I looked forward to reading this. The publisher's blurbs suggested it would be a synthesis of the great thinkers about the psychology of self with modern insights.

In truth, it is simply another one of the faddish pop psychology and business books flooding the market, like those by Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Long and others. Lots of fluff and little substance.

Here, Gallagher takes the profound insights of William James in particular and attempts to mold them to the contemporary age. The reality is that the words and wisdom of William James have withstood the test of time and do not need the support or even interpretation of Gallagher.

A quote from William James begins the book: "My experience is what I agree to attend to". Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist philosophy is also recited as is the contemporary Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ("Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life").

Bottom line: life is what you focus on. Life is what you think it is. If you think you are unhappy, you will be unhappy.

Ultimately, "Rapt" is nothing more than a large selection of classic advice buttressed by a scientific study here, the Dalai Lama there. It is an increasingly worn formula.

Anyone who hasn't read William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson or some of the other greats, will find new information here. But those who have previously studied the psychology of self won't.

Jerry

Winifred Gallagher's RAPT clears a path for those of us hacking through life's jungle. The clarity of Gallagher's map seems particularly useful to readers in middle-age, as we balance aging and ill parents, confounding and challenging children, physical limitations, and the world-wide economic woes with personal goals and dreams. However, the practice of rapt attention is not an agist activity; if you can read the book, you are old or young enough to use the experience.

Leading with a quote from William James, "My experience is what I agree to attend to.", Gallagher takes her reader gently through life's many aspects citing scientific and anecdotal evidence for the attentive life. Rapt attention to the positive can be a healthy and defining choice during our hectic days. Ms. Gallagher has done the work, her readers can reap the benefits.

I've come across books before where, after finishing, I wish I had finished only the first chapter. But this is probably the first book where after finishing I wished I had only read the introduction (14 pp.).

The rest of the book, I feel, didn't add much to that.

Mind you, it's a great introduction: an inspiring argument that the focused life, in virtually any area, is the only life worth living. But the author blew her wad too soon: the book's remaining 14 chapters were pretty much redundant examples and reworded observations.