Genuine attention is centripetal distraction, bending thoughts back

Evidence

Having decided that this was an essential feature of normal human sensory cognition (that, to put it bluntly, healthy humans are incapable of “attention” in the flat-footed sense of a dead-eyed and unwavering and complete “focus”), James proposed a truly brilliant account of what we actually mean when we talk about the beautiful thing that attention can be: For him, the genius of real attention is the ability, again and again, to bend the path of those moving thoughts back around to the object. In other words, genuine attention, the phenomenology of human attention, is a kind of centripetal distraction. Imagine the lovely looping rings of a spirograph, as it petals out and away and then again back to whatever is at the center of its attentional whorl. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 503

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines real attention as ‘centripetal distraction’ — a looping return to the object, not static fixation.
• STORYSTEM: The spirograph-flower imagery of attention returning to its object could seed a visual narrative device — a character whose inner life orbits a single center.
• XREF: connects to: Distraction is consciousness fleeing anguish by disowning its own possibilities — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1473; Attention always responds to something else and never rests still.; Genuine attention is the repeated return of wandering thoughts to an object. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 503 (+1 more)