Attention

Beyond Mindfulness

Gay Watson

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781789149241, 9781780237459
• eBook ISBN: 9781780237640
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition

Attention is central to everything we do and think, and underlies both the mindfulness revolution and concerns about the influence of social and digital media today.
In this book Gay Watson explores attention in action through many disciplines and ways of life, from neuroscience to surfing. The book contains interviews with, among others, John Luther Adams, Stephen Batchelor, Susan Blackmore, Guy Claxton, Edmund de Waal, Rick Hanson, Jane Hirshfield, Iain McGilchrist, Wayne McGregor, Garry Fabian Miller, Alice and Peter Oswald, Ruth Ozeki and James Turrell.
A valuable and timely account, this book is essential reading for anyone who finds their attention wandering due to the clamour of modern life, and wants to know why.

1

Attending to Attention

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

ORTEGA Y GASSET¹

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

WILLIAM JAMES²

Pay attention

We hear the command to ‘Pay attention!’, and the years drop away as we are returned to our desks at school. From childhood we have been exhorted to pay attention and yet in truth very little attention is ever paid to attention itself. What we do pay attention to is most generally either its absence or the object or content of the attention that is required, ignoring the process itself. Yet attending, that overlooked process, is at the very heart of who we are, and how we become that person we think we know. As a Buddhist scholar wrote: ‘It is as if the accomplishment of mere tasks is of primary value, while the quality of awareness with which these tasks are undertaken is irrelevant.’³ However, if we voluntarily and consciously turn our awareness towards the process and not the product, we may discover a whole new way of seeing and being.

Attention is at the heart of everything we do and think, yet it is usually invisible, transparent, lost behind our fixation with content. We pay attention to every moment or we let our attention wander, but we rarely give attention to the process of attending and distraction. It is typically viewed instrumentally, in terms of what it can achieve, and so its process and practice are overlooked. Yet such sought-after traits as mindfulness and grit are founded upon attention. With the exception of the novelist Aldous Huxley, who began his 1962 novel Island with the word ‘Attention’ spoken by mynah birds trained to call ‘attention’ and ‘here and now’ as constant reminders of our forgetfulness, we pay little attention to attention. Why has this vital part of our experience been so ignored?

Here and now would seem a good time to turn attention to attention itself. Some aspects of attentional practice have become common topics of current discussion and research, both as threat, demonstrated by new media, distraction and attention deficit disorder, and as enhancement in the ever-burgeoning field of mindfulness practices. But to consider attention meaningfully, we need to consider both the how and the what: how our attention actually works in daily life, and to what we can and possibly should allot the finite resource of our attention in order to live better. We find that the processes of attention involve both those that are involuntary and some that are voluntary, under our control and will. Practices of attention are obviously targeted at the latter and will form the major subject-matter of this book. As the cultural attacks on our involuntary attention increase exponentially from the constant overload of advertising, and commercial inroads on our limited attentional capacity, so a wise cultivation of good habits of attention becomes increasingly important.

Neuroscience has revealed that the processes of neuroplasticity – the ability of the brain to alter its very structure, the pathways and patterns of the firing of neurons, in response to repeated experience – continues throughout life. Mechanisms of attention are found to be at the centre of this process. Voluntary attention, it now appears, is a skill, something that we can learn through practice, sculpting our brain patterns, enhancing the mind in ways that will deeply influence the people we become. Just as ‘pay attention’ has become a mere phrase rather than a conscious action, so the belief that we are ‘creatures of habit’ has become an unconsidered adage. Yet if, as research is showing, we are literally formed by our habits, our brains sculpted by our repeated routines, it surely behoves us to choose carefully what habits we espouse. Practice denotes conscious attention; habit is often unconscious practice become so habitual that it is no longer noticed. Good habits require continual questioning.

The value of practices of attention was initially revealed to me as I wrote a book entitled A Philosophy of Emptiness.⁴ This explored ideas of emptiness through time and space, from their origins in the East with Taoist and Buddhist teachings and entrance into the West through Greek philosophers, to a long period of forgetfulness under Christian supremacy, until they resurfaced in the modern world. So, a very brief diversion to illuminate ideas of emptiness is called for. For this emptiness, despite its name, does not denote mere absence or non-existence. In Taoist writings Presence, the empirical world of the ten thousand things in constant transformation, arises from the generative foundation of Absence or emptiness. Tao, or Way, can then be understood as the process of emptiness continuously giving rise to the realm of Presence, of form emerging from formlessness.⁵ Taoist texts tend to be both more poetic and more concerned with foundation and generation than Buddhist texts, which are much more plentiful and more psychological, and present a far greater, more academic and worked-through philosophy of emptiness developed over centuries of study and meditative experience. These philosophical ideas of emptiness are concerned with an emptiness of essence, of form, fixity, permanence, intrinsic identity and definition. The other face of emptiness then becomes interdependence, a celebration of plurality, change and contingency. A full understanding of emptiness, which entails an appreciation of the impermanence and interdependence of everything that is far from being an absence, changes and enriches one’s perspective on life and the self. What I discovered was that such an understanding required a turning away from our Western, and mostly unconscious, fixation on presence and substance. In Eastern traditions, the rigid opposition between presence and absence, existence and non-existence is more blurred and ambiguous. This gives rise to, and indeed arises from, such concepts as sunyata, the Sanskrit term that is usually translated as emptiness, though, as I hope the description above has indicated, it has far more positive connotations than the English word commonly embraces. An interesting example of this is that sunya, or empty, was the word first used in India to translate the concept of mathematical zero, so indispensable for arithmetical operations and today forming half of the binary language of modern computers.⁶

The West has traditionally resisted change and impermanence and followed the ways of presence and substance, embracing a world that obeys abstract laws and an immortal soul that may allow us to escape death, and a god or form that sits beyond or above ever-changing reality, which, since it is unchanging, is somehow more real. For those brought up in the usually unquestioned Western outlook, appreciation of emptiness, impermanence and interdependence asks for a kind of figure/background reversal, away from this historical and now-unconsidered concentration on substance and presence. Such a reversal allows us to appreciate the dynamic dependence of form on space, and of sound on silence. The picture gains depth, context and richness. Seen in this light, one can understand that Western philosophy needed deconstruction in order to loosen the hold of form and fixity, substance and presence. Such a reversal, to be followed by reconstruction of a truer balance, asks for a practice of attention. It is close attention that reveals bias, and which then allows for recalibration and balance. But such attention also requires practice, and what my researches into emptiness have also revealed is that practices of attention, once inextricably linked to philosophy (etymologically the love of wisdom), despite attention’s importance as theoretically revealed by the neurosciences, have long been divorced from both science and philosophy. However, at the same time, in art practice, in psychology and in the contemporary popularity of mindfulness in every aspect of life, such practices are still around, perhaps even more needed in an ever-changing world where compensatory emotional seeking for certainty is so strong. Thus an exploration of the habits and practices of attention seems to follow on seamlessly from that of philosophies of emptiness.

As the Buddha asserted: ‘Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of one’s mind.’⁷ Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, philosopher and psychologist William James described living creatures as ‘bundles of habits’, labelling those that are innate as instincts while suggesting that others, due to education, might be called acts of reason. Long before the era of neuroscience, he even described the plasticity of the brain as ‘the way currents pouring in from the sense-organs makes with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear’.⁸

More recently, composer Philip Glass has written of how he trained himself in ‘the habit of attention’. He describes how he set aside each day the hours from ten in the morning until one for composition, forcing himself to sit at the piano whether or not idea or inspiration came. ‘The first week was painful – brutal, actually. At first I did nothing at all during those three hours. I sat like an idiot without any idea of what to do.’ Then slowly things began to change: ‘I started writing music, just to have something to do.’ After a few weeks: ‘I found the transition from near madness and frustration giving way to something resembling attention . . . From then on, the habit of attention became available to me, and that brought a real order to my life.’⁹

We can train habits and we can lose them. In the 1980s scientist Gerald Edelman coined the term ‘neural Darwinism’, explaining how experience strengthens or prunes away the pathways of our neuronal firings. Each of us is thus deeply individual, the results of our individual experiences. Oliver Sacks has described how in the development of motor skills in babies and rehabilitation after injury the paths of learning differ. Everyone

must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him . . . neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.¹⁰

Practices of attention then become practices of self-creation. They may enhance, enrich or impoverish our own lives and indeed the lives of those around us.

It is vital, then, that we discover what practices may help the development of a healthy mind and what may harm it. At this time of rapid social and technological change, as the use of computers, electronic devices, social media and texting are changing our practice and our experience, attention to attending becomes even more crucial. While much of the concern around these new habits is critical, a recent article by a Buddhist writer goes so far as to suggest that the Internet might be seen as a collective mind and that media sites that allow millions to share what one person has recorded might be regarded as supporting what he calls ‘an emerging form of global meditation’.

Witnessing an atrocity, observing injustice in action, or otherwise directly encountering the things that have historically been invisible is a way of shining the light of awareness into the dark corners of our world – much as meditation shines a light into the unexamined shadows of our mind. But the collective challenge is as daunting as the individual one: how do we bring patience, kindness, and equanimity to what we see instead of having it trigger and release the reservoirs of anger and hatred lurking within that are so ready and eager to erupt?¹¹

It all depends on how we attend; the ethical ingredient of attention.

Day by day, research in the neurosciences is illuminating mental processes more clearly. Many recent findings, such as the discovery of the default mode of the brain, of the distinction between narrative and present-focused modes of attention and of the potential unhappiness of the wandering mind, open up the field in ways that are not only fascinating but central for well-being.¹² Neuroscience, however, will never provide the whole picture of our experience; we are also embodied creatures, embedded in culture, as the excerpt above shows. Psychologist Paul Broks, exploring the work of Nicholas Humphrey, suggests that ‘getting one’s head around the problem of consciousness, experiencing the truth of a scientific or philosophic theory, may be as much the concern of art as science.’ He argues that even if the problem may one day find a solution in scientific terms, these terms may not fit into the frame of human imagination, and that artistic methods and media may prove more valuable for exploring the nature of phenomenal existence.¹³

Aside from science, other fields, ancient practices recently modernized, psychotherapy and, as Broks suggests, the various disciplines of art and craft, have long experience in practices of heightened attention. My intention is to engage with the experience of experts in all of these areas to attempt to present an exploration of attention in action, an investigation that is wide-ranging rather than deep, and experientially rather than theoretically based. I want to converse with those who are experts in attention in various fields, to inquire into the place of attention in their experience and to explore what practices have honed and continue to inform and enrich their attentional skills. A recent scholarly book on consciousness and attention states that attention should be defined fu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• 1 Attending to Attention
• PART ONE Creating Attention
• PART TWO Attending Creatively
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS