Attention is not an organ or substance but a dynamic state of cognitive unison

Evidence

So, ATTENTION AS UNISON asserts in conformity with current instincts that ‘an agent performs a task attentively if and only if its performance of this task displays cognitive unison’. This definition has the virtue of not requiring that attention be conceived as a particular faculty belonging to a specific organ – a problem that has haunted all its psychological and philosophical theorizations. Attention here has no proper substance: it is only defined as a dynamic that puts different functions in unison, whatever they may be. It is even wrong to use the substantive, which makes you think that it refers to something that is isolatable as such. In fact, it would be more correct to designate this particular reality by an adverb: attention is nothing in itself, it is only a collection of tasks performed attentively. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 518

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mole’s ‘attention as unison’ defines attention adverbially — as a property of task performance, not an isolatable faculty.
• DEEPTHINKING: The reframing of attention as adverb (not noun) dismantles a reification that has haunted psychology since its founding — worth sitting with as a paradigm shift in how we discuss the attention economy.
• XREF: connects to: Defamiliarization reveals the concert-attending ritual as pure attention to a nonverbal sign-system — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 48; Attention is a superimposition of entangled mechanisms rather than a single faculty — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 360; Attention is diverse cognitive engagement, not narrow focus — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 496 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Attention is diverse cognitive engagement, not narrow focus #expands (0.85) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 496
• Attention acts as a gate that admits pre-existing sensory information into consciousness #contradicts (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 393
• Healthy human cognition is dynamic and incapable of static focus #expands (0.75) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 501