Attention is the ability of an intelligent system to temporarily work selectively on a particular subset of its inputs, thus making less use of other simultaneous inputs.
When you attend to a piece of music you’re listening to, your mind makes less use of the visual details of what’s in front of your eyes, or of your memories, or of the texture of the seat your butt is on.
If you reach your hand over and start attending to the thigh of the person sitting next to you, your mind makes less use of the music.
If you’re meditating and attending to your breath, you might still notice the crow cawing outside your window, but you don’t dwell on it; the crow sound passes and you go back to your breath.
Let’s say you are in a dark room with a flashlight.
You direct the flashlight at stuff in the room.
The things in the dark room are sights, sounds, thoughts.
We could call the flashlight “attention”.
We could call the act of directing the flashlight “paying attention” or “directing attention”.
And we can focus the light, make it tight and bright. Concentrate it.
We could also spread it out wide.
But the light itself? I dunno. Is it a magic ray?
Then again, reducing reality to an array of sensations like this is a significant step away from the conventional narrative anyway. Terminology gets screwy.
Attention is the ability of an intelligent system to temporarily work selectively on a particular subset of its inputs, thus making less use of other simultaneous inputs.
When you attend to a piece of music you’re listening to, your mind makes less use of the visual details of what’s in front of your eyes, or of your memories, or of the texture of the seat your butt is on.
If you reach your hand over and start attending to the thigh of the person sitting next to you, your mind makes less use of the music.
If you’re meditating and attending to your breath, you might still notice the crow cawing outside your window, but you don’t dwell on it; the crow sound passes and you go back to your breath.
Let’s say you are in a dark room with a flashlight.
You direct the flashlight at stuff in the room.
The things in the dark room are sights, sounds, thoughts.
We could call the flashlight “attention”.
We could call the act of directing the flashlight “paying attention” or “directing attention”.
And we can focus the light, make it tight and bright. Concentrate it.
We could also spread it out wide.
But the light itself? I dunno. Is it a magic ray?
Then again, reducing reality to an array of sensations like this is a significant step away from the conventional narrative anyway. Terminology gets screwy.