Attention science never actually studied lived experience, only task performance.

Evidence

That activity, whatever it is, that “what it’s like for you to be in the world,” was NOT actually what the twentieth-century experimental scientists studying attention got grants to research. Nope. They got grants to study whether a person could stay focused on a dot if you also asked them to listen for a bell at the same time. And then they got other grants to study how long it took you to press a button after seeing a flash if you had gotten only two hours of sleep in the last two days. Later they got even bigger grants, to see if you could keep track of different instructions being streamed into your ears—some on one side, some on the other. And how long could you monitor a radar screen while this was happening? — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 128

Categorization

• SEED: The radar-screen question is the tell — essay angle: how the pure ‘science of attention’ was born from military machine-monitoring needs before it funded the attention economy.