Winifred Gallagher is the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Her previous books include House Thinking, Just the Way You Are, Working on God and The Power of Place. She has written for numerous publications including Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. She lives in Manhattan, NY, and Dubois, WY. Here is the introduction of Rapt. Read this and then take Gallagher’s quiz — exclusively for wowOwow — to gauge your focus level. Plus: Click here to enjoy more engaging brain games.

Introduction: Choosing the Focused Life

We’re all amateur psychologists who run private experiments on how best to live. Some of us specialize in relationships and mostly explore bonding. Others concentrate on work and test ways to be more productive and creative. Still others look to philosophy or religion and investigate the big picture: the ultimate way things are. Five years ago, a common-enough crisis plunged me into a study of the nature of experience. More important, this experiment led me to cutting-edge scientific research and a psychological version of what physicists trying to explain the universe call a "grand unified theory" or "theory of everything": your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

That your experience largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects that you choose to pay attention to or ignore is not an imaginative notion, but a physiological fact. When you focus on a STOP sign or a sonnet, a waft of perfume or a stock-market tip, your brain registers that "target," which enables it to affect your behavior. In contrast, the things that you don’t attend to in a sense don’t exist, at least for you. All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.

Attention is commonly understood as "the concentration of the mental powers" or "the direction or application of the mind to any object of sense or thought." Recently, however, a rare convergence of insights from both neuroscience and psychology suggests a paradigm shift in how to think about this cranial laser and its role in behavior: thoughts, feelings, and actions. Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.

If you could look backward at your years thus far, you’d see that your life has been fashioned from what you’ve paid attention to and what you haven’t. You’d observe that of the myriad sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that you could have focused on, you selected a relative few, which became what you’ve confidently called "reality." You’d also be struck by the fact that if you had paid attention to other things, your reality and your life would be very different.

Attention has created the experience and, significantly, the self stored in your memory, but looking ahead, what you focus on from this moment will create the life and person yet to be. Since Sigmund Freud, psychology has mostly examined our pasts to explain and improve our lives. If you think in terms of the present and future instead, you might encounter an intuition lurking in the back of your mind, as it was in mine: if you could just stay focused on the right things, your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create: not a series of accidents, but a work of art.