"Ways we can be"

Brian Dettmer, Old masters (2006)
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«(…) Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agreed to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.» - William James (1890).

«(…) At a given moment we are incapable of focusing on more than a few bits of information at a time. It requires effort to concentrate, that is, to keep the same information in focus for any length of time. Consequently, there are a limited number of things we can do, a limited number of ways we can be. (…)»
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Mihaly Csikszentnihalyi, Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things, Domestic Symbols and the Self, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 5-6