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metanymous в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

At first I found her ability to ignore external sounds amazing, but she’s always said it was something she learned growing up in a household with six children. (I was an “only” child in a much quieter household.) There was always a lot going on, so if she wanted to accomplish anything, she needed to focus only on that and ignore everything else. Many people who grow up in very noisy or chaotic households unconsciously learn to “tune out” these events, usually without knowing how they do it.
By remembering and reaccessing these kinds of experiences vividly we can realize that we already have the ability to reduce input in certain contexts, and learn to apply this skill in other situations where it would be useful to us—something that adept hypnotists have been doing for many years.
If we examine these experiences carefully, sometimes we can even find out exactly what we unconsciously do in our minds that makes the skill possible. This can make the skill explicit in a form that it can easily be taught to others.
For instance, “tunnel vision” is a problem in many contexts, but it is also a skill that can reduce visual input when that is useful. You can imagine a tunnel with black surroundings, through which you can only see what you are focusing on. Or you can “zoom in” on what is relevant, so that it occupies most of your visual field, overlapping and obscuring other events. Or you could defocus the surroundings so that only what you attend to is in sharp focus.
Prioritization
The previous example included a way to prioritize, so that the blizzard of simultaneous events can be sequenced, and you can focus on one thing at a time. One of the simplest ways to do this is to jot down a word or two on a piece of paper to indicate each of the things that is on your mind. Putting them all down on paper ensures that nothing will be left out, while allowing them to slip out of your mind and onto the paper, putting some distance between you and them. This makes it much easier for you to scan the list quickly and decide which item needs attention first. Some people also like to decide which item should be attended to next, and some even like to use a new sheet of paper to write down all the items in a new order that indicates the sequence in which they need to be attended to. This is fine, as long as the new list is flexible, and allows for resequencing when that makes better sense.