نتائج الانتباه .. كتاب علم النَّفس جميل صَليبا

Attention results

Attention has positive results and negative results.

Among its positive results are:

1- It increases the speed of perception.
Attention decreases the time of reflection, and decreasing the time of reflection indicates an increase in the speed of perception. It is true that the reflex time may sometimes disappear, or become negative, meaning that the person reacts before the stimulus occurs.

2- It increases the severity of the psychological state.
The following experiment is the best evidence of this: If we hear a person have two successive sounds: one weak and the other strong, then we ask him to pay full attention to the weak sound, and we shift his attention to something else (to a strong smell, for example) when the strong sound occurs, the person finds the weak sound Strong and the strong sound is weak (Titchener).

Attention also increases the intensity of emotional states. The patient’s attention to his pain increases its intensity, and his not paying attention to it reduces it. It is true that the patient’s preoccupation with something else may relieve his pain. They mentioned about Pascal that he would forget the pain of his headache when he was absorbed in solving his problems. We know that soldiers do not feel the pain of their wounds while they are on the battlefield, and we also know that poor Indians and some Tibetan lamas tear and slash their bodies while they are delirious without feeling any pain. The enthusiasm of the martyrs turns their pain while they were in a state of absence into a fleeting pleasure.

3- It increases the clarity of perceptions.
Observation supported by attention makes the perception of the external thing clear. What a great difference there is between a commoner looking at an artistic image with a general, naive view, and the looking of an art critic who realizes all its characteristics. Contemplating our inner life makes our psychological images and thoughts clearer and clearer. Our attention to them clarifies their aspects. Different types of light appear to our eyes, just as the sun's rays show us the dust particles scattered in the sky of a dark room.

4- It strengthens the consolidation and preservation of memories.
Our attention to images and meanings strengthens their stability, makes it easier for us to memorize them, and enables them to overcome in the future the reasons that prevent them from returning to the field of feeling.

E - Attention helps to arrange and organize perceptions.
The sensation itself does not have a meaning of its own, for example hearing a noise when the mind is occupied with it by something else. Attention makes sensation a meaning that organizes it into other states, and whenever we contemplate one of the meanings, its relationship to other thoughts that we did not pay attention to at first becomes apparent to us. Meditation, then, leads to organizing thoughts, coordinating them, and determining their relationship to one another.

The negative consequences of attention include:
It narrows the field of intellectual effectiveness, and leads to the decline of a large portion of perceptions and ideas and their diminishing intensity. Just as we close our eyelids a little and narrow the field of sight when we notice small things, so we expel from the field of feeling when we pay attention to some intellectual elements everything that has nothing to do with them, thus narrowing the field of feeling, in the same way as we narrow the field of sight.