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#1 Focusing attention is a skill that can be learned and improved upon. It is the key to designing your daily experience, because it allows you to decide what to focus on and what to suppress.

#2 Your attention is constantly being focused on different targets, and you must choose what to attend to in constructing your daily experience. Near Central Park's Strawberry Fields, some bird lovers have scattered lots of seed in a clearing, creating an avian mosh pit that's a natural laboratory for experimenting with biased competition.

#3 When you first enter the feeding area, your attention is stimulus-driven, and you glance randomly at the busy tableau. When you decide to focus on a particular target, such as a little woodpecker called the yellow-bellied sapsucker, your attention is active and goal-oriented.

#4 Your attentional system, like the magician, focuses you on some things at the expense of others. As you continue your stroll, you realize that although you vividly recall that top-hatted trickster, with the exception of a woman in a bright violet jacket who stood right beside him, you only fuzzily recall the rest of the scene.