Attention is learned rather than innate, always and for everyone

Evidence

To see the transformative potential of the present moment—to understand what we can change in ourselves and how we can resist what has been done to us; to get our attention off the couch and onto the pavement—we must bear in mind this simple fact: ATTENTION IS LEARNED. Always. You were taught to listen the way that you do. To look, too. And to feel. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 198

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Core theoretical claim underpinning the whole program — attention is learned, hence trainable, hence reclaimable.
• XREF: Connects to prior chapters making the same claim about attention being a learned cultural capacity.

Related

• Attention is learned, not innate, so it can be retrained (similarity 0.93)
• Attention can be defined beyond action and receptivity (similarity 0.84)
• Attention is the substrate of care for self, community, and planet. (similarity 0.84)
• Attention can be deliberately wielded, not just reclaimed (similarity 0.83)
• Most people equate attention with screen-based task focus (similarity 0.83)
• Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era (similarity 0.83)
• Attention is fundamentally a growth of our faculty for noticing (similarity 0.82)
• Laboratory-defined attention was designed for instrumental task selection from the start. (similarity 0.82)
• Attention is the fundamental medium of all human connection (similarity 0.82)
• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention. (similarity 0.82)
• Free, shared attention is named and offered as a transformative good. (similarity 0.82)
• Attention is the mechanism by which we reteach things their loveliness (similarity 0.81)
• Attention as means differs fundamentally from attention as end in itself (similarity 0.81)
• Attention consists in labor that augments our ability to notice the neglected (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is the faculty by which we constitute social and ethical reality (similarity 0.81)