Attention operates as an ecosystem of echoes and variations rather than transmissions

Evidence

Most importantly, the analogy with improvised music gives us a good feeling of the potential of the echological model for an understanding of our attentional dynamics. When guitarist Otomo Yoshihide takes up a standard theme, like Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman, he echoes it as he reprogrammes it. The evolution of this theme ‘from recording to recording to recording’ is nothing but a sequence of echoes incessantly affected by variation. From unisons to counterpoints, the incessant collective ‘reprises’ which make up the musicians’ interactions weave a fabric of communal resonances where – in the best scenario – it becomes impossible to distinguish the soloist from the accompanist. ‘To play for himself, each player plays for all the others’: Narcissus and Echo finally combined… — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 531

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretizes the ‘echological model’: every act of attention re-programmes a prior echo, so nothing is original transmission.
• XREF: connects to: Radical attention is rooted in proximate 1-to-1 scale practices — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 314; Experiments reify attention while it is actually a plastic flux — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 390; Attention ecology requires modulating between deep and distributed focus. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 425 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• The economic paradigm distorts our understanding of how attention actually functions #expands (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 75