Attention is required for thinking. Advertisers fight for attention. The Buddhists say that attention is the axis of reality. Attention might even be LOVE. But what exactly is attention?
This is such an awesome question! I never gave it much thought but the things we focus on, or that to which we give attention, has some amount of value in our minds. By giving it value, we increase its importance. While it may be an inanimate or abstract object or concept that has received our focus, by increasing its importance it could have lasting effects on the future relevance of that particular object or concept.
Attention is a feature of minds, wherein a mind can have awareness of lots of inputs (senses, internal thoughts, emotions, etc.) but dedicate most of its “thinking power” to only one or a few things from its awareness at a time.
(“Attention” is narrow; “awareness” is broad. You can be aware of the color of the wall next to you, even if you are not attending to it.)
What does attention do? Attention selects; attention shifts. You can switch from focusing on this sentence, to your breathing, a sound in the distance, the taste of your coffee, your plans for the day, the texture of your socks.
Shifting is not a bug; it is what attention is for. That is why we have it.
There is a rhythm to attention shifts. They can happen quicker or slower; and more or less suddenly. This rhythm differs from person to person, activity to activity, and with emotional and hormonal changes.
Some people are more aware of their attention shifts than others. Some people feel more control over their attention shifts than others. Some people’s attention shifts are more or less in tune with classrooms or offices or other environments that expect certain sorts of tight control.
Meditation allows us to notice and gently alter the parameters of attention.
Spontaneous attention shifts are important! If a loud bang and the smell of sulfur happen from the closet next to you, your attention will probably no longer be on reading this message. If a loved one bursts into the room weeping in despair, your attention will no longer be on reading this message. If the smell of baking pies drifts into the room, your attention will no longer be on reading this message. (At least, if you’re like me. Mmm, pies.)
Focus is also important. When someone “gets in the zone” they may not notice many things that otherwise would grab their attention. They might even fail to attend to the smell of pies; and the weeping loved one would take a little longer to grab them than otherwise.
Attention works along with self-awareness. Attention does the shifting; self-awareness creates the sense of continuity: even though you are sometimes reading and sometimes thinking about pie, you still have the sense that you are the same person. Even though there is not really any such thing as “a self” (q.v. anatta), it is pretty useful to remember that “you” have a body and that it is pretty similar to the body “you” had yesterday.
Some of the parameters for attention seem to include:
Speed and rhythm of attention shifts. Am I focusing solidly on one thing? Or am I switching back and forth between several things, like a student driver who must keep track of their feet and their hands and other cars and pedestrians and signals? When I am distracted, how reliably do I return to an intended object of attention? (I say “rhythm”, but “melody, meter, and rhyme” might be a better analogy.)
The ratios between attention on different sorts of targets: external (senses, objects in the world, people saying words at me), bodily (stuff my body is doing: motions, itches, weird inner ear noises, gait, hunger), and reflective (stuff my mind is doing: inner voice, memory recall, making plans, worrying about that weird inner ear noise).
The strength of episodic memory formation; and the subjective passage of time. Short-term memory is how we perceive time passing; people who are not forming short-term memories (e.g. alcoholic blackout, senile dementia, high psychedelic doses) don’t notice time passing, experience frequent deja vu, repeat the same “discovery” over and over, etc.; they may have extended attentional focus on a single object because they’re just having the same thought repeatedly without forming memories.
I think usually they are referring to “undivided attention” because technically, even though we’re pretty bad at it, you can do multiple things at the same time. I can drive, listen to music, and have a conversation but it starts to overload my brain at that point, as most of my attention is focusing on driving.
If we think of our brains & attention-span as RAM (memory), then some tasks take up more memory, and we have a limit to the RAM, so there are only so many processes that can run at the same time.
Advertisers/products/lovers, they’re all fighting for a bigger slice of your RAM.
I can drive, listen to music, and have a conversation but it starts to overload my brain at that point, as most of my attention is focusing on driving.
The usual computer analogy is multitasking, in which the kernel rapidly switches from one process to another. A single CPU core may switch between running code for my browser, my chat program, the temperature monitoring process, and the wifi driver; this happens so quickly that it appears to me that all of them are running “at the same time”.
Attention also shifts quickly. When you are doing two things “at the same time”, attention is switching back and forth between them! You’re not really constantly attending to the music and the road; ideally you switch back to the road often enough that if something surprising happens there, you can respond to it in time.
We know from experiment that when people have more distractions going on while driving, they actually do respond slower to surprises on the road. Eating a bagel with the radio on and your kids in the back seat is actually hard, and really does slow down noticing the dog that just ran out into the road.
If you’re not sure what attention is, then how can you make all those claims in your title? When you say “attention is required for thinking”, what did you have in mind? Are you sure you’re not just calling several different things by the same name? How would attention be a prerequisite to thinking and not just a component of it?
From a modern psych perspective, attention is kind of filter. We receive countless stimuli and the brain chooses which ones to ignore and which to attend to. That might be called “thinking” but even an earwig can do it. It is indeed the “axis of reality” because it’s what shapes our perception. And attention, or rather attending behaviors, can indeed be a component of love.
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