“Attention is the sort of overarching, colloquially used term, but it can mean many, many things,” says Elizabeth Ricker, neuroscientist and author of Smarter Tomorrow: How 15 Minutes of Neurohacking A Day Can Help You Work Better, Think Faster, and Get More Done. “There are different flavors – like sustained, selective, or divided attention. Attention relies on other mental abilities doing their jobs, too – like working memory (kind of like your brain’s RAM), inhibition (inhibiting off-task stimuli or mental behaviors), and mental flexibility (shifting between and synthesizing concepts).”
