Focusing attention involves both apprehending and comprehending , for the mind pays attention in two major ways. By sensing or apprehending, the human mind recognizes the emergence of the act of paying attention. The second and more conventional way of paying attention is through comprehending or understanding. Comprehending results from having new experience that may be understood in relationship to previous experience. Sometimes the experience refers to previous personal involvement or it may be bonded to cultural norms and collective knowledge.
Comprehension focuses attention and does make sense.
Our human capacities for reason, logic, deduction and the search for meaning are well-recognized and honored. For more than eight thousand years the development of these qualities has marked a series of noble steps in the history of civilization. These ways of knowing are the foundation for comprehension. Less understood are the workings of apprehension. Instead of experiencing bonds to reason and logic which characterize comprehension, the apprehending mind is bathed in emotion and tentativeness.