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Selective Attention Research Paper

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People go through their lives paying attention to only a fraction of the things going on around them that they may easily see, hear, smell, and feel if they could only expand their attention. Although many people probably wish they could pay attention to 2 things at once and remember everything about both of them, it may be impossible. Humans possess something called selective attention which means exactly how it sounds. People pay attention to only things they choose to pay attention to around them when there is a vast amount of things they may never even notice because there attention isn’t on it and it may be because we believe it isn't as interesting as what our attention is on (Selective). There are so many things that we may miss out on daily because we are focused on what are attention is on but that may …show more content…

One of the biggest reasons people do this is to be able to focus on what is important and store it in memory. If we didn’t have this ability, we would be overwhelmed with things coming in and not be able to single one thing out and focus on it to be able to remember any single thing. There is a theory of the human memory capacity is limited and this is why the brain filters so much out and we only have attention on what we want to learn. Attention also becomes hard to keep because the brain only wants to learn what it finds interesting and when something isn’t interesting, attention is lost or hard to keep (Selective). So the brain only wants to memorize things it didn't know before and it sees useful for knowing later on. Without this filter, the brain would probably become overloaded with information it never needed in the first place. This would explain why some students would rather do what they want then do homework because their own thing seems more interesting to them so they chose to focus their attention on

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