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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Elle Hunt

Do you like cat photos? Are you constantly distracted? You’re probably actually quite good at focusing: 10 myths about attention

A man with his eyes shut and sitting at a table with his forefingers pressed to his eyelids and other fingers clasped over his nose looking perhaps overwhelmed. Around him swirls an abstract watery vortex

It’s believed that we have about 50,000 thoughts a day: big, small, urgent, banal – “Did I leave the oven on?”. And those are just the ones that register. Subconsciously, we’re constantly sifting through a barrage of stimuli: background noise, clutter on our desks, the mere presence of our phones.

Every second, 11m bits of information enter our brains. Just 0.0004% is perceived by our conscious minds, showing just how hard our brains are working to parse what’s sufficiently relevant to bring to our attention.

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