There is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention, only repeated returns

Evidence

The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away. … If, as I’ve said, attention is a state of openness that assumes there is something new to be seen, it is also true that this state must resist our tendency to declare our observations finished—to be done with it. 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. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 397

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that sustained attention is an illusion — a bundle of successive returns — reframes what ‘paying attention’ means and has deep implications for how any practice of attention (meditation, reading, bias-correction) must actually work.
• XREF: connects to: Attention always responds to something else and never rests still.