Consciousness

• seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
  struggled to understand that light really is electromagnetic waves or that heat
  is kinetic energy, but now it seems obvious. Today’s students already think of
  depression, addiction, and learning as changes in brain state, they say, and as we
  older folk die off, people will come to accept that subjective experience just is a
  pattern of brain activity (in Blackmore, 2005). So, could future meditators who
  shift from distraction into open awareness imagine, or even feel, this to be the
  dropping out of the dorsal attention system and engagement of the ventral allo-
  centric system? If so, subjective and objective would not seem so far apart. But
  perhaps the objective side of the equation will have to involve more than brain
  activity, taking in the rest of the body and the world as well.
  Attention is central to these brain–mind–world connections, and changes in
  attention may be amongst the most profound reasons why people put so much
  time and effort into learning to meditate. This is not in order to gain something
  measurable, nor to achieve a temporary state of consciousness, nor to reduce
  stress. Instead, it may be about coming to perceive and be in the world differently.
  They may be prepared to face new stresses and much hard work in order to see
  through some of the common illusions about consciousness, and wake up.
  In this chapter, we have considered numerous theories of what attention is and
  does. We have seen that attention can be involuntarily grabbed or deliberately
  controlled, and that both are intimately related to eye movements and prepara-
  tion for action; we have looked at the effects of systematically training our powers
  of attention; and we have asked whether paying attention changes the quality of
  conscious experience, and whether we can ever really establish where the divid-
  ing line is between consciousness and attention. But all this still leaves us with
  one of our early questions about the role of consciousness.
  The fact that we may feel we have consciously chosen where to place our atten-
  tion does not necessarily mean consciousness actually does play a causal role: for
  example, the feeling of acting consciously might be a by-product or later effect
  of the brain processes that selectively direct attention. Returning to our example
  of the person coming into the room, you might feel as though you experience
  the sight or sound of the disturbance first and then consciously decide to turn
  round and look, but we pointed out that the sequence is likely to be the other way
  around. In Chapter 9, we will meet the idea that consciousness takes some time
  to build up, and what, if anything, this means for our sense of agency. But first, in
  Chapter  8 we will explore the difference between doing something consciously
  and doing it unconsciously.

‘subjective intuition

[about selective

attention] does not

coincide with and is, in

fact, contradicted by

experimental evidence’

(Rizzolatti et al., 1994, p. 231)

‘no one knows what

attention is, and [. . .]

there may even not

be an “it” there to be

known about’

(Pashler, 1998, p. 1)

Lavie, N. (2007). Attention and consciousness. In

M. Velmans and S. Schneider (Eds), The Blackwell

companion to consciousness (pp. 489–503). Oxford:

Blackwell.

An overview of the early/late selection debate and per-

ceptual load theory, emphasising direct versus indirect

measures, with illustrations from change blindness and

inattentional blindness.

READING