p.24 The range of what we think and do is
limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there
is little we can do to change until
we notice how failing to notice shapes
our thoughts and deeds.
p.31 The threat of pain is the essence of stress
p.33 Schizophrenics are easily distracted - by noise, by movements, by ideas...
they are distracted by their own background thoughts and mental associations. [JLJ - why did I find that interesting? I seem
to have forgotten the reason... :) ]
A focused attention is one that can tune out or ignore distractions,
or at least mute them.
p.41 The brain confronts novelty by calling the stress response into readiness (but not total engagement)
- just in case. The stress response has a dual link to attention: Attention triggers that response in the first place, and
attention centers are in turn activated by the stress alert.
p.41-42 The universal response to novelty in animal species is the
"orienting response," a combination of increased brain activity, sharpened senses, and heightened attention... The
degree of brain arousal depends on how great the mismatch is between what is expected and what is found.
p.44 when the arousal does not fit the task at hand - more particularly, when it is too great - then it
becomes anxiety... When the stress response drives attention, it focuses on the threat at hand.
p.45 Attention primed to focus on a threat dominates even when other matters should be more pressing; thoughts
of threat intrude out of turn. The operational definition of anxiety is, in fact, this very intrusion.
p.46 when anxiety swamps attention, all performance suffers. The antidote at hand, as we shall see, is attention
itself - more precisely, disattention, or denial.
p.47 Events are what one makes of them... Stress in his view [Richard Lazarus, a psychologist at Berkeley],
occurs when the demands of the environment in a person's eyes exceed his resources.
p.47 When events are seen as threats, the stress response is triggered. Stress is the product of
a cognitive act, appraisal.
p.48 Once a person has defined a situation as a potential threat, his stress
response will fluctuate with his appraisal... No matter the specifics of the matter at hand, the substance... boils down to:
How much of a threat is this? The search for that answer engages the orienting response. Depending on the
answer at a given moment, the orienting mechanism will elevate or dampen the stress response accordingly.
p.49 Reappraisal is often relied on to vanquish a threat. If the threat
can be reappraised as a nonthreat (the fire alarm was only a drill; the letter from the IRS was a refund, not an audit notice),
then the stress arousal that accompanied that appraisal ceases.
p.50 Appraisal begins at the initial instant of orienting and initiates
a chain of cognition aimed at finding the most finely tuned response. When reappraisal fails - the threat does not
evaporate - then other strategies are needed.
p.53-54 Palliatives are intrinsically rewarding,
just by virtue of their easing anxiety. What is rewarding is habit-forming. There is ample proof that a person's palliative
choice, whether Valium or Jack Daniels, can be addictive... Mental palliatives skew one's ability to see things just
as they are: that is, to attend clearly.
p.73 In sum, much or most of what we do goes on out of awareness, guided by well-learned sequences.
We reserve consciousness for particularly demanding tasks, or leave it as free space for active attention, for thought and
decision-making, or for the reverie that passes for consciousness
p.75 The packets that organize information and make sense of experience are "schemas," the building blocks
of cognition. Schemas embody the rules and categories that order raw experience into coherent meaning. All knowledge
and experience is packaged in schemas. Schemas are the ghost in the machine, the intelligence that guides information
as it flows through the mind.
p.76 In a sense, a schema is like a theory, an assumption about experience and how it works. A schema,
in the words of the cognitive psychologist David Rumelhart, is "a kind of informal, private, unarticulated theory
about the nature of events, objects, or situations we face. The total set of schemas we have available for interpreting
the world in a sense constitutes our private theory of the nature of reality."
p.76 With schemas, we are able to go beyond the data given... Like a theory, a schema embodies
assumptions, which we take as givens with complete confidence. This lets us make interpretations that outstrip the
immediate evidence from our senses. This cognitive shorthand lets us navigate our way through the ambiguity
that is more often than not what we confront in the world.
p.78 Schemas are the basic units of experience... Only when experience is organized by
schemas is it really useful; embedded in a schema is both an understanding of the experience it organizes, and information
about how that knowledge is to be used.
p.79-80 Schemas and attention interact in an intricate dance. Active
attention arouses relevant schemas; schemas in turn guide the focus of attention. The vast repertoire of schemas
lies dormant in memory, quiescent until activated by attention. Once active, they determine what aspects of the situation
attention will track... Schemas not only determine what we will notice: they also determine what we do not notice.
p.81 Schemas guide the mind's eye in deciding what to perceive and what
to ignore.
p.82 Schemas are intelligence in action... Schemas determine which focus attention seeks, and hence what
will enter awareness.
p.83 Activated schemas guide attention, comprehension, and action... schemas are the lions at the gate of
awareness: they determine not only what enters but what does not.
p.84 The preconscious is a stage midway between the unconscious and awareness, a sort of backstage area
to mental life. Here, says Mandler, there is a pool of schemas at various levels of activation. The most highly activated
schema is the one that reaches consciousness.
An activated schema dominates awareness; it glides from the pool available and guides
attention.
p.90 We can never know what information our schemas have filtered out, because we cannot attend to the operation
of the filter that makes the selection... The model of the mind shows that an intelligence scans, filters, and selects
information; schemas embody that intelligence.
p.106 By directing attention to one pattern of meaning, it ignores others.
p.123 In selective inattention a portion of what is perceived is deleted prior to reaching awareness.
p.124 What can't be seen is hard to change.
p.158 My belief is that people in groups by and large come to share a vast number of schemas... Foremost
among these shared, yet unspoken, schemas are those that designate what is worthy of attention, how it is to be attended to
- and what we choose to ignore or deny.
p.174-175 The process Laing describes is precisely that of schemas at work: they direct attention here
and away from there; they embody how to construe this and that.
p.198 We participate with ease in those social realms for which we have a frame.
p.198 A script codifies the schemas for a particular event; it directs attention selectively, pointing to
what is relevant and ignoring the rest - a crucial factor for programming computers. A computer program has the capacity to
make endless inferences about and responses to a situation, almost all of them absurd. A script allows those inferences to
be channeled along paths that make sense for a given event.
p.200 The reader! You dogged unsuitable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from
inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you
don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall...
p.201 A frame provides an official main focus for attention, in accord with the business
at hand... The frame is highly selective; it directs attention away from all the simultaneous activities
that are out of frame... what is out of frame can easily go unperceived... Any frame at all, in fact, defines a narrow
focus where the relevant schemas direct attention, and a broad, ignored area of irrelevance... All
frames, says Goffman, have such dual tracks: one flow of activity is overt and acknowledged, while a parallel track is ignored,
treated as though out of frame. Anything out of frame, by definition, does not deserve attention... the dominant
track has to be picked out of the entire assemblage of activity.
p.202 These parallel tracks - in frame and out of frame - create a structure in social awareness that duplicates
the division within the mind between conscious and unconscious. What is out of frame is also out of consensual awareness...
Indeed, the social world is filled with frames that guide our awareness toward one aspect of experience and away from
others. But we are so accustomed to their channeling our awareness that we rarely notice that they do so.
p.232 The nature of schemas is to guide attention toward what is
salient and away from what is not. By establishing a notion of what is salient, and how to construe it, the schema
is biased from the start.
