What We Ignore & What We Pay Attention To

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up. Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount of time to process it, and when we are presented with too much at once we begin to panic, like a waiter who has too many orders shouted at him at once. But our capacity to ignore is limited by another fact: we are always paying attention to something. If we think of attention as a resource, or even a kind of currency, we must allow that it is always, necessarily, being “spent.” There is no…