The Surprising Value of Limited Attention
 by Charlie Harary • New York City

Our brains are limited in one very significant way: in how much information they process at any given time.

The schema is the filter through which we see the world. Our experiences, beliefs, and neuroplasticity all make up the contents of our schemas, and it is through that prism, those sunglasses, that we see our “reality.” But the schema does more than just paint the color of what we experience; it actually determines whether we experience it at all.

There are millions of stimuli around us, all the time, but we simply cannot process them all. In fact, our nervous systems can only process approximately 110 bits of information per second. That’s it. That’s all we get.

If I’m standing in front of a classroom and speaking, in order for you to hear me and understand what I’m saying, you need to process about 60 bits of information per second. You’re also processing other stimuli around you at the same time: checking the clock, feeling hot or cold, catching glimpses of other people in your peripheral vision, tapping your pencil on the table. All of that little stuff takes up processing power, too. And if one other person starts talking at the same time, requiring another 60 bits per second, you’re suddenly overloaded. That’s why you can’t understand two people talking to you at the same time. Science gives us the explanation as to why your mother yelled “One at a time!” when you and your brother started talking over one another at the dinner table.

At any given moment, you’re processing all sorts of things you aren’t even aware of. You may be eating or drinking. You may be hearing the rain outside or people talking in the distance. The way your brain processes stimuli without being overloaded is by choosing which stimuli to focus on. It determines what’s most important to stay focused on and doesn’t process the rest.

In fractions of a second, your brain decides whether certain stimuli are important or not, and it simply blocks out the unimportant ones. Those rejected stimuli never make it past your filter. Do they exist? Sure. But you don’t know it because you haven’t experienced it.

How does the schema know what’s important? It looks for information for which we have context. So if we have no knowledge about something, or no experience from which to draw, it will miss the information entirely. In any given moment, there are all sorts of things going on around us that we aren’t aware of that may be affecting our lives. It means that the way we’ve shaped our personal sunglasses—our schemas—determines not only how we process the information we receive but also whether or not we receive the information in the first place. This is important, because what we turn our attention to is what enters our consciousness, and the number of things we can pay attention to at any given time is extremely limited.

As William James, MD, known as the father of American psychology, said, “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

That’s why the idea of effective multitasking is mostly inaccurate. You only have a limited amount of capacity to interpret information, so if you’re doing two or three things at once, you can only give a small portion of your attention to each task. We’re all aware of this when we talk to someone on the phone: If they’re scrolling through Twitter or answering emails while you’re talking to them, you know it. You know they’re distracted and aren’t giving you their full attention, simply because they aren’t making the normal sorts of responses and cues we’ve come to expect during an engaged conversation.

Productive people don’t multitask. Instead, they give all their attention to whatever task is in front of them, and then put all their attention into the next task and the next, without overlap. We see this in athletes who are on their game, businesswomen who are in a zone during a speech, surgeons who are in the middle of a lifesaving surgery. They’re not texting, tweeting, or scrolling. They are fully focused. Their entire mental allocation is focused on the task at hand, which is what makes them more likely to succeed.

The thing is, for most people, life happens to them. They experience what is put in front of them. Their beliefs and their perspectives are shaped by whatever events happen to them. They don’t choose where to place their attention. It’s chosen for them. They just passively experience it.

But top performers aren’t passive at all. They take the reins. They learn how to control what they experience, what they believe, and what they perceive. That enables them to change their experiences and their circumstances. How do they do what they do? Through focus.

Excerpted from UNLOCKING GREATNESS: The Unexpected Journey from the Life You Have to the Life You Want by Charlie Harary and Mark Dagostino. ©2018. Published by Rodale Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

NY business executive, Charlie Harary was an associate clinical professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University and hosts a weekly radio show and the Unlocking Greatness podcast. Charlie is an internationally acclaimed speaker for subjects ranging from behavioral intelligence to performance management to personal empowerment. charlieharary.com.