The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention.

Evidence

Over the past century or so, a VAST RANGE OF HUMAN FACULTIES AND EXPERIENCES has been effectively collapsed into a single, narrow, cybernetic (i.e., machine-engaged), quantifiable, and ultimately always-already-instrumentalized THING—a thing we CALL “attention,” and worry about as “attention,” but that has as little to do with the true cosmos of human attention as a sex-ed class has to do with human love. Which is to say, not nothing. But not that much, either. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 122

Categorization

• DEFINE: The chapter’s central diagnostic distinction: laboratory-defined, quantifiable ‘attention’ versus the lived cosmos of human attention.
• XREF: The sex-ed/love gap recalls Adorno’s reading of the drive stripped to its survival function; also parallels the earlier ‘silence reduced to absence’ moves in this reading thread. — connects to: Human attention has been reduced to a monoculture like American farmland — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 486; Attention commodification reduces human beings and relationships to quantifiable, saleable things.
• DEEPTHINKING: A top-tier frame: the reductionist definition is not merely incomplete but generationally erases what it fails to measure.