"Pay attention to your attention." Amishi Jha, one of the first scientists to research the links between mindfulness and attention, is known for her pioneering work with soldiers, firefighters, medical trainees, and others for whom attention is a matter of life and death. With her book, Peak Mind, she has started bringing her healthy-attention message to parents, CEOs, accountants, teachers, managers—anyone whose work and decision-making feels like life and death. A cognitive neuroscientist, Jha studies how we pay attention: the process by which our brain decides what's important out of the constant stream of information it receives. Both external distractions (like stress) and internal ones (like mind-wandering) diminish our attention's power, Jha says -- but some simple techniques can boost it and train it for greater focus and less distractibility.