Attention acts as a gate that admits pre-existing sensory information into consciousness

Evidence

As an artist interested in using art to influence and widen attention, I couldn’t help extrapolating the implications from visual attention to attention at large. It’s a commonplace that we only see what we’re looking for, but this idea of information that makes it into our brains without being admitted into consciousness seemed to explain the eeriness of suddenly seeing something that has been there all along. For instance, the many times I had walked down Grove Street after a symphony performance, noises had presumably been making it into my ears and were being processed; after all, I wasn’t physiologically hard of hearing. It was the performance of the John Cage piece, or rather its attunement of my attention, that provided the “key” for those sounds to pass through the “gate” toward conscious perception. When I moved the focus of my attention, those signals that had been traveling into my head were finally granted admission into conscious perception. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 393

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretizes the ‘attentional key’ concept — attention literally unlocks perception of what was already being processed.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the reader’s use of Deep Listening material in their wider reading corpus; this is the cognitive-mechanism complement to acoustic attentional practices.
• XREF: connects to: Attention is not just a filter of perception but the formative interface of identity — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 355; Attention is a superimposition of entangled mechanisms rather than a single faculty — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 360; Attention splits into immediate capture and slower captivating motor-emotional schemas — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 370 (+6 more)