Attention duration and quality expand perceptual granularity

Evidence

This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems like a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention. With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 65

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: This is the core definition of what Odell means by attention-as-world-constitution: the faculty by which the world becomes more differentiated, more populated, more yours. Essential for defending her against the withdrawal misreading.

Related

• Attention constitutes reality and remaking it remakes the self (similarity 0.82)
• Patterns of attention determine what reality feels possible to us. (similarity 0.82)
• Attention can be defined beyond action and receptivity (similarity 0.82)
• Directing attention is trainable like breath control (similarity 0.80)
• Attention is the faculty by which we constitute social and ethical reality (similarity 0.80)
• Attention can be deliberately wielded, not just reclaimed (similarity 0.80)
• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention. (similarity 0.80)
• Shifting one’s attention can change the kind of world one moves and acts in (similarity 0.80)
• Attention also varies in quality and mode, not just quantity (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is judged by its blooms, not its duration (similarity 0.79)
• Modern ‘attention’ is a narrowed, instrumentalized construct far removed from lived human attention. (similarity 0.79)
• Once attention expands to co-inhabit a place, it resists narrowing again. (similarity 0.79)
• Laboratory-defined attention was designed for instrumental task selection from the start. (similarity 0.79)
• Attention science defined attention as visual, durational, and cybernetic to fit its funders’ tools (similarity 0.79)
• Prolonged attention transforms what initially seems boring (similarity 0.78)