Sustained attention is really repeated willful returns to the same object

Evidence

For James as for von Helmholtz, this means that there is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention. Instead, what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency. Furthermore, if attention attaches to what is new, we must be finding ever newer angles on the object of our sustained attention—no small task. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 398

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key conceptual clarification: sustained attention is not a steady state but serial re-direction. This directly supports the reader’s defense that ‘doing nothing’ is effortful discipline, not passivity.
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that sustained attention is a repeated act of will — ‘keeping’ attention instead of ‘having’ it — is a genuinely useful corrective to the commonsense picture of focus as a state, and it resonates with meditation and Deep Listening practice.
• XREF: connects to: Receiver attention state determines signal success — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 571; Genuine attention is the repeated return of wandering thoughts to an object. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 503