Chapter
Seven
Attention
Imagine you are sitting in a lecture and the door opens. You turn round to see
who it is. What has happened? If someone asked you, you might say, ‘I heard the
door open and so I turned round to see who it was.’ The causal sequence seems
to be: 1) consciously hear sound; 2) turn round to look. It feels as though our con-
scious perception of the noise, possibly followed by a conscious decision to pay
attention, is what caused us to turn around and pay attention. Is this right? Does
conscious perception or conscious will cause attention to be directed to a specific
place? If it does not always do so, can it ever do so?
First, it seems clear that conscious effort and perception are not always required.
Attention can be involuntarily grabbed or intentionally directed, and these
processes depend largely on different systems in the brain. Attention is drawn
involuntarily when we react quickly to something like a loud noise, or our name
being called, or an email notification on our phone, and only realise afterwards
that we have done so. Such involuntary attention depends on the ventral atten-
tion system, which includes alerting and vigilance systems and is found mainly in
the right hemisphere in frontal, parietal, and temporal areas. By contrast, when
we deliberately pay attention to someone speaking, or try to ignore an annoying
noise to concentrate on reading our book, this uses the dorsal attention system.
DIRECTING ATTENTION
The image of the spotlight of attention is tempting, but perhaps more careful
attention to one’s own experience might provide different metaphors. This is one
way for ‘first-person practice’ to feed into the science of consciousness and one
reason why we ask you to devote time and energy to the ‘Practices’ suggested in
each chapter: we cannot hope to understand consciousness in general unless we
are familiar with our own personal version of it. And as the idea of ‘paying careful
attention to experience’ implies, attention itself is at the heart of all such practice.
We will begin with a basic element of our everyday experience of attention, the
directing of attention, and ask what basic facts we can establish about it.
PRACTICE 7.1
DID I DIRECT MY ATTENTION OR WAS MY
ATTENTION GRABBED?As many times as you can, every day, ask yourself ‘Did I direct my
attention or was my attention grabbed?’
You might begin by asking the question every time whenever you realise
that you are attending to something and don’t know why. With practice you
may find that you can do it for much of the time. This way you can learn to
watch the process and come to appreciate how and when your attention
shifts. Keep a record of the effects this has on your awareness.