Diverse attentional practices form a common arsenal against attention extraction

Evidence

What we have, what we need, are all the very different traditions and practices of human attention: techniques of meditation and prayer, modes of athletic concentration and focus, forms of spiritual leisure and play, the solicitous eye of mothers and grandmothers, the street smarts of the bona fide hustler, the essential absorption of a child in a sandbox. These enterprises are as different as pitchforks and soup ladles! What does Vipassana meditation (durational attention to the breath passing over one’s upper lip) have to do with that youngster in a batting cage, trying to learn how to hit a sinker? And what do either of these have to do with my neighbor, blithely walking her Yorkshire terrier? — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 436

Instead, we will go find other stories, and bring up and share other ways of dreaming. What we have, what we need, are all the very different traditions and practices of human attention: techniques of meditation and prayer, modes of athletic concentration and focus, forms of spiritual leisure and play, the solicitous eye of mothers and grandmothers, the street smarts of the bona fide hustler, the essential absorption of a child in a sandbox. These enterprises are as different as pitchforks and soup ladles! What does Vipassana meditation (durational attention to the breath passing over one’s upper lip) have to do with that youngster in a batting cage, trying to learn how to hit a sinker? And what do either of these have to do with my neighbor, blithely walking her Yorkshire terrier? — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 436

Categorization

• DEFINE: Broadens the working definition of ‘attentional practice’ to include prayer, sports, childcare, street smarts, and child’s play alike.
• XREF: This is the manifesto’s ‘study’ arm — cataloguing heterogeneous attention practices as common resources — central to the reader’s three-part program. — connects to: Aesthetic laboratories protect attention by suspending communicational pressures — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 454; The fix for attention problems is collective attentional freedom, not individual span; Window-staring is an endangered attentional species schools mislabel as distraction
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 436