When you concentrate you also ignore stuff.
(we all concentrate, for work, play, reading, studying, school … we practice it in school … people who are good at it are “good workers”…)
But you call it CONCENTRATION instead of IGNORING because the stuff you concentrate on gets easy-to-see but the stuff you ignore sorta fades away (and then you stop thinking about it, and then it disappears).
The stuff you concentrate on is relatively small. A book. An idea. A game. An attractive girl’s butt. A plan for the future. A tv show.
And that stuff getting ignored is relatively HUGE. Like a whole invisible universe there.
It’s spooky when you think of it. Like a little bit of DIY brain surgery that everybody does but nobody talks about. Like we’re all a bunch of Harry Potters casting obliviate upon ourselves.
And then we forgot that we cast it, because it’s obliviate.
So tell me what you think.
There are many aspects of life that are amazing, but since they are routine they seem commonplace. The amount of processes that occur within the body automatically are staggering, like heart rate, blood pH, body temperature, digestion, immune response, etc. Everyone of those is nearly magic, but we have no control or are not usually conscious of them, so it’s mundane. We are piloting these incredibly complex biological machines.
I’m no expert, but I believe when people are suffering from chronic oversensitivity to external stimuli (individuals on the autism spectrum which have lower functioning commonly suffer from this) they are lacking this ability you speak of op. They are the nonmagical users to continue with your harry potter analogy.
Given that we must direct and (to a degree) concentrate our attention to perform even minimal actions like reading, posting on lemmy, making a bowl of cereal… I think it’s less black-and-white than you portray.
It’s a fuzzy thing. And changable with effort and practice.
Except that it’s sometimes changeable only with medication, not everything can be fixed by trying really hard