Some things in life can grab our attention so much that we become distracted to the point where nothing else seems to matter. My best friend, Aaron, has an addiction to nasal spray. He’s had this addiction for five years and he tells me how without the spray his nose begins to become extremely stuffy after two hours which disallows him from breathing properly from his nose and from focusing on anything but the spray. He tells me that anytime he goes out, whether it’s to school, the gym, or anywhere in general he must bring the nasal spray with him. Aaron said during high school he would try to go to the bathroom in between classes just so he could spray the nasal spray into his nose. Without doing this he wouldn’t perform his best in tests or listening to the teachers’s instructions because all he would be thinking about was when he would be able to use his nasal spray.

A personal example happened during Sunday night, my sister and I were in the car driving to get some frozen yogurt at Forest Hills. On our way, we stopped at a red light and I noticed there was this huge sign saying “DJ’s for all occasions” placed high outside of one of the houses. So, I point it out to my sister and tell her “look, they have DJ’s there now, that’s new” and she responds that the sign has always been there. That caught me by surprise because we always take the same route to the yogurt place and I never seen the sign during all the numerous times passing by the place. However, perhaps, I have seen it before but my memory did not fully process it since it wasn’t my target point at the moment. My target has always been to get to the yogurt place and eat my yogurt whenever  I take this route so anything before hand isn’t significant.

Reference | Personal Experience

Who with: my sister

When: Sunday night

Where: Forest Hills

The attention acts in our brain. It allows us to focus on what part of what is going on around us, while we ignore the environment. The attention is necessary for us to take information from our senses like seeing. we use that process for thinking, solving problem because it helps us to save information. when we pay attention we focus on something and save the information easily. pay attention and focus on something or think about something may have different effects on us, it depends on what we think. it can create the attraction which could be positive or negative we call that “Attraction law” to bring the attraction you have to convince yourself  that you want what you focus on it.

for example in the documentary “Attraction law” the author explains that the attraction law has changed the way he think. when we focus on something strongly, what we wish to get  during our thought will become true. that is a different part of the attention. now we have the case where i watch the television because i pay attention and focus on the scene something is burning in the kitchen and i’m not able to smell that.

When a person is thinking about something or doing something they filter out their surrounding. A person puts all of their attention to one thing that the rest does not matter. The brain cannot perform many things at once and for this, it only focuses on one thing and ignores the rest. The person may be able to catch some parts of the ignored things or may not. Last week, I went to to the Hospital to pick up some results. To kill time I started reading my book and really focused on the book that I started to imagine the scenes of the book, and forget that I was at the hospital.I ignored where I was until I felt a tap on my shoulder, it was the nurse. The nurse said that she had called my name twice but I didn’t remember to hear anything.

As mention in class, children don’t filter out information thus, their span of attention is not big. Since I work a lot with children, this week I’ve been taking a closer look at how they react in different circumstances in reference to their attention. Indeed children of 2 to 3 years old seemed to be easily distracted by small things. This week I was taking care of a 3 years old girl that is really active at all times. She is gotten used to going through my bag every time I get to her house, which is fine with me. But this time I’d forgotten I had a bag of Skittles in it and she went crazy for them. I gave her some but she wanted to keep eating the whole bag; first, I am not allowed to give her any candy, and second it was too late for her to be eating them. Thus, I took the candy away from her, for which she made a scene, and I brought watercolors to her to her attention, as painting is one of the things she loves to do the most. She easily calmed down and changed her attitude as if nothing had happened. Yet, every time she would see my bag she would remember the Skittles and the whole cycle would start again. However, something that I’ve noticed is that with children from 6 and up it gets much harder to trick them into driving their attention to something different than what they want.