"'We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children,' writes Gopnik. 'But really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus.'"

That's a useful distinction. I remember reading somewhere (and I suppose that robg, the submitter here, is familiar with the professional research literature on this subject) that the human brain has HUGE processing and storage capacity, and the human sensory systems have enormous sensory capacity, and the role of attention is to decide which subset of the enormous amount of sensory information taken in minute-by-minute goes along the (comparatively) narrow-bandwidth pathway from sensory organs to the brain. A big part of learning while growing up is learning what to attend to, and practicing making the most expedient direction of attention habitual.

Thanks for posting the interesting article.