Attention acts as negentropy by substituting certitude for trial and error

Evidence

Both (identifying) automatic attention and (corrective) interpretive attention constitute factors of negentropy: as Paul Valéry emphasized in the notes he amassed between 1901 and 1943 for a book he never wrote, attention ‘is connected to everything in life that struggles against Carnot’s principle’ (which is to say entropy, ‘disorder’). ‘Threading a needle is working against disorder. Writing a sonnet.’ Attention ‘increases the productivity of a certain given initial situation – the sensibility of a sense, the precision of an act – of a response. In general, the response goes by the shortest path.’ It is in this respect that Valéry speaks of economy, since attention allows operations to be performed ‘with minimal trial and error […] and the substitution of a kind of “certitude” for a statistical process’. If I bring the thread to the eye of the needle distractedly, it will probably take dozens of attempts before I get it through; by concentrating my attention briefly, I replace a statistical process with a kind of certitude. The seamstress will probably be able to carry out the same operation without thinking – habit will have developed in her a gestural cliché, allowing her to find the shortest path with her eyes closed. In both cases, attention is an economic factor, ‘increasing the productivity of an initial situation’. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Attention-as-negentropy ties thermodynamic and economic language together, echoing the reader’s noise/entropy material on information overload.