Paying Attention?

With so many different signals available to us each day, we learn to switch off - we can become oblivious to noises, sights, even smells while we focus on particular tasks and challenges. However, it seems there is a cost. We suffer from attentional blindness, which results in us missing key pieces of information even when we are trying to attend to it.

This video shows how neuroscientists have demonstrated how this phenomenon occurs, and shows one way in which one can increase attention to notice things that we often miss.

The research shows how our brains become overstimulated and therefore less sensitive to shifts in information. Through prayer and meditation, the mind becomes more alert and more sensitive to the information around us - there are physiological changes which take place.

Perhaps Spurgeon was right when he said that he was so busy that he needed to spend the first three hours in prayer!