The Focused Life, All Rapt Up

Wednesday science writer Winifred Gallagher is in town to discuss Rapt at 7:30 p.m. at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St. in Seattle (free). She also pops up Thursday at the "Good Life" event at 6:30 p.m. at the Palace Ballroom, 2100 Fifth Avenue (tickets: $25).

With chemical "neuroenhancing" worthy of a feature in the New Yorker, science writer Winifred Gallagher's book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life feels a little like a schoolmarm testing you on your Latin declensions. Study hard! she says. Pay attention! Meanwhile all the cool kids have downed a few Ritalin and are powering through another 16-hour day.

Gallagher's theme is that paying attention is an ability that we can cultivate with practice, and that much of our success or failure in life is directly related to how we use this finite resource. She begins with an examination of just what attention is, and how as much as we like to tell people to pay attention, a good deal of what we pay attention to is hard-wired by evolution--"basic operating principles," says Gallagher.

It's easy to pay attention to negative emotions (fear, anger), for instance, because they used to have a direct impact on survival. Yet we also know that paying too much attention to them leads to an inability to see anything but the downside. Or consider the adrenalin-fueled "weapons effect"--that crime victims see the actual weapon most clearly, say, the tip of the barrel of the gun, while not being nearly as sure what the assailant looked like.

There's a lot in these 220 pages: everything from Mozart's genius and how to build meditation muscle to ADHD and how technology keeps interrupting us and keeping us from achieving states of "flow." Gallagher writes matter-of-factly about it all, never getting too wonky about the neuroscience, and pilfering from a seemingly inexhaustible fund of apropos celebrity quotes to spice up the narrative and keep you focused on the page. If her writing style is supposed to illustrate her findings, we have to agree she knows what she's talking about.