Sustained attention differentiates a perceptual blur into discrete meaningful units

Evidence

What amazed and humbled me about bird-watching was the way it changed the granularity of my perception, which had been pretty “low-res.” At first, I just noticed birdsong more. Of course it had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time. And then, one by one, I started learning each song and associating it with a bird, so that now when I walk into the Rose Garden, I inadvertently acknowledge them in my head as though they were people: “Hi, raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch, towhee, hawk, nuthatch…” and so on. The sounds have become so familiar to me that I no longer strain to identify them; they register instead like speech. This might sound familiar to anyone who has ever learned another (human) language as an adult. Indeed, the diversification of what was previously “bird sounds”—into discrete sounds that mean something to me—is something I can only compare to the moment that I realized that my mom spoke three languages, not two. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 63

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Deep Listening’s work on differentiating a soundscape from figure/ground and to the broader claim that attention is the faculty by which one constitutes a world. — connects to: Attention duration and quality expand perceptual granularity; Sustained attention is really repeated willful returns to the same object — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 398; Attention duration and quality determine how much differentiation one perceives — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 65 (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Attention duration and quality expand perceptual granularity; Sustained attention is really repeated willful returns to the same object — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 398; Attention duration and quality determine how much differentiation one perceives — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 65 (+1 more)