| Chapter 3: Consciousness Attention is a mental resources that exists in limited amounts. The amount of attention needed to perform a certain task varies with practice. Doing something new requires a lot of conscious effort and resources. With practice, a skill requires less attention and becomes automatic. Automatic processing is good because it's fast and frees resources for other things, but it's bad because it's inflexible. Conscious processing is bad because it's slow and demanding, but it's good because it's flexible. Hypnosis is the intense focusing of attention, for example on directions given by the hypnotist. |
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