The Difference Between Internal and External Focus, and Why It Matters

250 Words:

If our Paleolithic ancestors visited 2014, they’d notice a few changes.

We’re mostly agrarian. We mostly live in buildings. We spend most of our days in small spaces staring at screens. Also, there are seven billion of us—up from a few hundred thousand—and a few of them inhabit a small capsule that flies around the planet. And those tiny rectangles everyone stares at? They’re capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man, but most people use them to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.

And yet, I’m willing to bet that if our ancestors moved to New York City or Hong Kong and landed a desk job, they’d encounter an even bigger difference: The mismatch between how much information the mind can consciously process (not a lot) and how much information it is exposed to (a lot).

Read the whole story: 250 Words