You Say "Ignore." I Say "Focus"

From Business 2.0 Blog:

A study in the journal Nature suggests that smart people are the ones who are good at ignoring things, rather than the ones who can store the most information: From the Editor's Summary:

A study of brain activity in subjects performing a task in which they were asked to 'hold in mind' some of the objects and to ignore other objects has revealed significant variation between individuals in their ability to keep the irrelevant items out of awareness. This shows that our awareness is not determined only by what we can keep 'in mind' but also by how good we are at keeping irrelevant things 'out of mind'. This also implies that an individual's effective memory capacity may not simply reflect storage space, as it does with a hard disk. It may also reflect how efficiently irrelevant information is excluded from using up vital storage capacity.

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