Redirecting attention admits preexisting stimuli that were already being processed

Evidence

It’s a commonplace that we only see what we’re looking for, but this idea of information that makes it into our brains without being admitted into consciousness seemed to explain the eeriness of suddenly seeing something that has been there all along. For instance, the many times I had walked down Grove Street after a symphony performance, noises had presumably been making it into my ears and were being processed; after all, I wasn’t physiologically hard of hearing. It was the performance of the John Cage piece, or rather its attunement of my attention, that provided the “key” for those sounds to pass through the “gate” toward conscious perception. When I moved the focus of my attention, those signals that had been traveling into my head were finally granted admission into conscious perception. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 393

Categorization

• XREF: This is the pivot on which Odell reframes attention from passive selection to active world-construction — central to the reader’s defense of her against the withdrawal misreading. — connects to: Redirecting attention to a biasing cue reduces or reverses the implicit effect it produces. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 241
• SEED: Possible essay angle: attention-training as activism — how retraining one’s perceptual gate is a political act that changes what world one inhabits, contra the view that attention work is private escapism.