Attention necessarily requires ignoring competing stimuli to select one focus

Evidence

The great William James understood how important is the ability to ignore, when in 1890, he wrote that attention “is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” and that it “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1154

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the whole book’s core argument that selective attention has a cost and that distraction/withdrawal is intrinsic to focus — the foundational definition the attention economy builds on. — connects to: Distraction enables perception that focused attention forecloses — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 338; Focused attention necessarily amputates awareness of other stimuli; Attention ecology requires modulating between deep and distributed focus. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 425 (+9 more)
• DEFINE: Provides the canonical definition of attention from psychology’s founding figure.

Broader Connections

• High-coherence stimuli bind pre-attentively while low-coherence ones need attention. #corroborates (0.82)
• Attention modulates audiovisual binding only for low-coherence stimuli, not salient ones #qualifies (0.80)
• Attention is diverse cognitive engagement, not narrow focus #contradicts (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 496
• Attention acts as a gate that admits pre-existing sensory information into consciousness #expands (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 393
• Poor attentional inhibition increases susceptibility to background noise #exemplifies (0.80) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1229
• Directed attention does not weaken world-consciousness but relegates the world to ground #qualifies (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 881
• Reflexive neural triggers explain why certain images consistently capture attention #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 66