Dogs And Squirrels - Deepstash
What Is Opportunity Cost

Learn more about leadershipandmanagement with this collection

The impact of opportunity cost on personal and professional life

Evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of different choices

Understanding the concept of opportunity cost

What Is Opportunity Cost

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Dogs And Squirrels

Dogs And Squirrels

The attentional filter is one of evolution’s greatest achievements.

In nonhumans, it ensures that they don’t get distracted by irrelevancies.

  • Squirrels are interested in nuts and predators, and not much else.
  • Dogs, whose olfactory sense is one million times more sensitive than ours, use smell to gather information about the world more than they use sound, and their attentional filter has evolved to make that so.

If you’ve ever tried to call your dog while he is smelling something interesting, you know that it is very difficult to grab his attention with sound— smell trumps sound.

95

608 reads

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The Speed Of Our Mind

The Speed Of Our Mind

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time. While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this has an ...

99

789 reads

Our Most Important Mental Resource

Our Most Important Mental Resource

Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness.

102

662 reads

Missing The Beautiful Sunset

Missing The Beautiful Sunset

Most of the perceptual remains of our daily lives don’t register.

When you’ve been driving on the freeway for several hours at a stretch, you don’t remember much of the scenery that has whizzed by: Your attentional system “protects” you from registering it because it is...

99

645 reads

Buying Freedom From Distractions

Buying Freedom From Distractions

Successful people— or people who can afford it— employ layers of people whose job is to narrow the attentional filter. That is, corporate heads, political leaders, spoiled movie stars, and others whose time and attention are especially valuable have a staff of people around them who are effective...

101

577 reads

The Mind Makes Us Intentionally Blind

The Mind Makes Us Intentionally Blind

The human brain has evolved to hide from us those things we are not paying attention to. In other words, we often have a cognitive blind spot: We don’t know what we’re missing because our brain can completely ignore things that are not its priority at the moment— even if they are right in front o...

101

483 reads

Learning How To Think

Learning How To Think

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult ...

102

516 reads

A Limited Mind, An Unlimited World

A Limited Mind, An Unlimited World

Our world has exploded. Information is abundant. We have a limited number of decisions. After all, there are only so many we can make in a day without compromising quality. Once we’ve hit that limit it doesn’t matter how important they are.

The decision-making network in our brain d...

104

922 reads

Satisficing: Not Perfect But Good Enough

Satisficing: Not Perfect But Good Enough

Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behaviour; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

104

1.13K reads

How The Attention Process Works

How The Attention Process Works

Attention is created by networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (just behind your forehead) that are sensitive only to dopamine. When dopamine is released, it unlocks them, like a key in your front door, and they start firing tiny electrical impulses that stimulate other neurons in their net...

101

498 reads

Decisions Decisions

Decisions Decisions

  • Each day we are confronted with hundreds, probably thousands of decisions. Most of which are insignificant or unimportant or both. Do we really need a whole aisle for toothpaste?
  • In response to all of these decisions, most of us adopt...

109

1.32K reads

The Limited Bandwidth Of Our Brain

The Limited Bandwidth Of Our Brain

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. Under most circumstances, you will not be able to understand thr...

104

693 reads

Information Overload

Information Overload

The industrial revolution brought along a rapid rise in discovery and advancement. Scientific information increased at a staggering clip.

Today, someone with a PhD in biology can’t even know all that is known about the nervous system of the squid! Google Scholar reports 30,000 research ...

99

485 reads

Decision Overload

Decision Overload

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%– 85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.

This comes wi...

104

1.02K reads

The Attention Filter Reports Anomalies, Not Routine Signals

The Attention Filter Reports Anomalies, Not Routine Signals

The brain’s change detector is at work all the time, whether you know it or not.

If a close friend or relative calls on the phone, you might detect that her voice sounds different and ask if she’s congested or sick with the flu. When your brain detects the change, this...

101

529 reads

Catching The Mind

Catching The Mind

If you’re driving, a billboard for your favourite music group might catch your eye (really, we should say catch your mind) while other billboards go ignored. If you’re in a crowded room, at a party, for instance, certain words to which you attach high importance might suddenly catch your attentio...

96

506 reads

When The Internet Happened

When The Internet Happened

iPhones and iPads, email, and Twitter are the new revolutions.

Each was decried as an addiction, an unnecessary distraction, a sign of weak character, feeding an inability to engage with real people and the real-time exchange of ideas.

Our brains have collect...

95

480 reads

Why Curation Is Important

Why Curation Is Important

  • As knowledge becomes more available— and decentralized through the Internet— the notions of accuracy and authoritativeness have become clouded.
  • Conflicting viewpoints are more readily available than ever, and in many cases, they are disseminated by people who have no regard for fact...

99

537 reads

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