Sustained attention is a series of willed returns, not a steady state

Evidence

IT’S HERE THAT I want to come back to the relationship between discipline and attention from the previous chapter. An element of effort and straining exists in the word attention itself, which comes from Latin ad + tendere, “to stretch toward.” This relationship finds one of its most compelling expressions in William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology. Defining attention as the ability to hold something before the mind, James observes that the inclination of attention is toward fleetingness. … Though the spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept strained on that one object until at last it grows, so as to maintain itself before the kind with ease. This strain of attention is the fundamental act of will. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 396

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines attention etymologically (‘to stretch toward’) and via William James as effortful strain — central to the book’s key concept.
• XREF: connects to: Attentional tasks fail when capacity cannot meet their demands; Attention always responds to something else and never rests still.; Attention operates as an addictive wealth of increasing returns — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe:…, 347 (+2 more)