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Peak Mind

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Peak Mind

Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day

HarperOne,

15 min read
8 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Learn to direct your attention, improve your awareness and create new possibilities for yourself with mindfulness.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Scientific
  • Applicable
  • Inspiring

Recommendation

Because many people haven’t learned to hone their focus and attention, says neuroscience professor Amishi P. Jha, they remain unaware that they remain unaware. Jha studies the human attention system, and her research reveals that as little as 12 minutes of mindfulness training each day can dramatically improve your ability to focus. Your problem isn’t your phone or your inbox, Jha says; rather, it’s your lack of awareness of your mind’s thought processes. Jha recommends mindfulness to increase self-awareness, to stay on task and to better remember the moments you want to savor. 

Summary

When you lack the presence of mind to pay attention, much of your life passes you by.

When you don’t pay attention to life as you live it, you don’t truly experience precious moments, and your memory fails to retain important points in time because you weren’t mentally present. Distractibility benefited early humans, whose survival depended on their ability to scan their environment for predators. Today’s predators are the corporations preying on human attention. Social media companies, for example, that commoditize human attention and sell it to the highest bidder usher in a future whereby corporations trade human “attention futures” as they might oil or livestock.

Happily, you can train your brain to pay attention differently. Safeguard your attention span, because it determines how you learn and remember, how you interact with others and your environment, what choices you make, how you behave, and whether you feel fulfilled and accomplished. 

Most people couldn’t fully focus their attention, even if they wanted to. Neuroscience professor Amishi Jha and her research team at the University of Miami conducted a series of experiments on human attention...

About the Author

Amishi Jha, a psychology professor at the University of Miami, is the director of contemplative neuroscience at the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative.

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