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    Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
    Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
    Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
    Audiobook7 hours

    Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

    Written by Winifred Gallagher

    Narrated by Laural Merlington

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A revolutionary look at how what we pay attention to determines how we experience life

    Acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher's Rapt makes the radical argument that much of the quality of your life depends not on fame or fortune, beauty or brains, fate or coincidence, but on what you choose to pay attention to. Rapt introduces a diverse cast of characters, from researchers to artists to ranchers, to illustrate the art of living the interested life. As their stories show, by focusing on the most positive and productive elements of any situation, you can shape your inner experience and expand your world. By learning to focus, you can improve your concentration, broaden your inner horizons, and most important, feel what it means to be fully alive.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 16, 2009
    ISBN9781423393245
    Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
    Author

    Winifred Gallagher

    Winifred Gallagher’s books include House Thinking, Just the Way You Are (a New York Times Notable Book), Working on God, and The Power of Place. She has written for numerous publications, such as Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. She lives in Manhattan and Dubois, Wyoming.

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    Reviews for Rapt

    3.5/5

    117 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Must read a prelude to Deep Work By Cal Newport

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      "Rapt" is about living a better life through directing our attention, in various forms and on various levels. It's aptly labeled as "psychology/self-help." Gallagher strings together different studies to lead the reader through various ways they could improve their lives, but never explicitly labeling various behaviors as rules or tips.The studies are interesting and relevant to the overall narrative, and I appreciate how much Gallagher uses them to flesh out the subject through a progression of chapters. There are 14 chapters in total, and while each chapter built on the previous one to advance the point, I found the relationships between each a bit loose. That aside, if you have a passing interest in the topic as I do, I highly recommend it.Read if: You have an interest in re-directing your attention.Avoid if: You're looking for hard scientific principles or a pure self-help on meditation.
    • 5/5
      What an awesome collection of literature of attention and focus. The author has compiled a densely packed, but slim, volume of ideas that are best savored over and over in small bites (focused attention!). Better than the reams of self-help books on the shelf or in web blogs that try to boil it down to a quick list of 7 things, Gallagher's comprehensive literature review and idea organization draw the connections between ideas.

      Thanks for a book that deserves a place on the shelf to be picked up and thumbed through over and over.
    • 4/5
      This is a mellow survey of the literature. No lists but lots of wise thought provoking comments from specialists. Reread.
    • 4/5
      Great book if you've got a wondering mind. Shows you convincingly that happiness is directly connected to your ability to pay focused attention to something
    • 4/5
      Excellent book. It sometimes gets a little dense with studies and research, but the author does an terrific job of making an abstract concept tangible and actionable.
    • 2/5
      Non-fiction. Partly self-help for meditation and attention. Partly discussion of neuropsychology and theory on consciousness. The author identifies herself as an amateur psychologist, and develops her own theory of attention. It's not too much New Age, but has echoes of Alan Watts's popular hippy Buddhism of the 1960's.
    • 2/5
      This book did not prove to be as interesting it sounded in the flap copy. It has some interesting information and useful advice.
    • 5/5
      One of the most valuable self-help books ever written. Paying attention, though it sounds banal, is crucial to living a full life. Your life is the sum of your consciousness -- of what you CHOOSE to focus on. This book examines the nuts and bolts of the neurology, psychology, & social aspects of the attention factor.
    • 2/5
      I was excited to read Rapt, having struggled with keeping focused and having read Gallagher's excellent House Thinking. The subject matter is interesting, but Gallagher spends way to much time relaying statistics and studies and reiterating her thesis. Even though Malcolm Gladwell irks me, he is the master of anecdotal evidence and using stats/studies as narrative. Gallagher provides lots of research (a strong point for data nerds like myself), but somehow doesn't pull it all together in an engaging manner. If you have ADHD, skip to the chapter on attention issues. For those conducting research, the book stands as an interesting collection of sources. For anyone reading for recreation, look elsewhere.
    • 2/5
      This book is mostly written the second person and I found that incredibly annoying. I was not able to get past it and did not finish the book.
    • 3/5
      Some interesting ideas from a variety of people, but the author follows a very limited formula. Each chapter is a different take on the idea of focus and attention, and for each of these she takes one or two proclaimed experts and quotes them relentlessly. There is little to no critical discussion or debate about these people or their work. Apparently, they're just simply right.
    • 4/5
      I LIKE this book! Though many of the items covered are covered in other books in more depth (mindfulness, flow, health-from-mindfulness, how-we-make-decisions, and so forth), and there are no specific instructions on how to become "rapt", this book serves as an excellent compendium of the latest thinking, research, and neuroscience on attention and mindfulness/rapt[ure].Therefore, not only can it serve as an excellent launching platform into further study, it is a wonderful summary that ties a variety of thinking together. It brings together observations about attention from William James to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to Lobsang Rapgay, the Dali Lama, Kabat-Zinn and many other students of attention and mindfulness.