1. “At any given time, a massive flow of sensory stimulation reaches our senses, but our conscious mind seems to gain access to only a very small amount of it. … …… Conscious access is, at once, extraordinarily open and inordinately selective. Its potential repertoire is vast. At any given moment, with a switch of my attention, I can become conscious of a color, a scent, a sound, a lost memory, a feeling, a strategy, an error – or even the multiple meanings of the word consciousness.” — p: 20.
2. “Out of countless potential thoughts, what reaches our conscious mind is la crème de la crème, the outcome of the very complex sieve that we call attention. — p:21.
3. “[I]nattention can make virtually any object vanish from our consciousness. As such, it provides an essential tool for contrasting conscious and unconscious perception.” — p: 37
From: Consciousness and the Brain – Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts by Stanislas Dehaene, Viking, 2014, pp: 333 ISBN 978-0-670-02543-5
You may watch this 1:54 min YouTube video (thanks to the London Transport Dept.) to know how attentive you are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNF9QNEQLA
