The illusion of “paying attention”
Attention is merely motivation and awareness, which you then interpret retrospectively as an “action”
Say that you think of an elephant. It’s easy to explain how you know it is an elephant — you can compare its colours and shapes to something you can see. But how do you know that it was a thought? What objective or concrete reference can you compare the features of a thought to? How do you know you compared it to the right thing? Despite being intimately familiar with your own inner life, it is surprisingly difficult to identify and describe the various aspects of your subjective mental functions — thinking, reasoning, feeling, consciousness, etc. They are abstract in the purest sense — formless, colourless, shapeless — they have no sensory side.
The only way you can describe them is by making analogies using words, diagrams, equations, syllogisms, or some other concrete form. For example, you can make an analogy between thoughts and physical “objects” (i.e. thoughts are “things”), or perhaps “computations”. Or you could say thoughts are like “containers” for their content. Of course, your subjective experience of thoughts does not display them to you as containers; these are only analogies that help you understand some aspect of your experience.
Unfortunately, introspective analogies can also lead you astray. In this post we will focus on one such case where we have fooled ourselves, and defined a mental function that does not actually exist; specifically, the function called “paying attention”. I’ll first discuss how it is based on a misguided analogy to visual attention. Then, I’ll show how the meaning of the concept “attention” actually arises out of a gap between what others want you to care about and what you actually care about.
The visual analogy
Visual-spatial attention is familiar to almost everyone. It is the act of turning your eyes towards a place in the world, and allowing them to take in what is present there. This action, however, is not attention in the true sense, you are merely changing your direction of gaze. Paying attention in contrast implies you are taking in, becoming aware of, and learning about something. You can rotate your eyes without paying attention to what they show you, all the while attending to something in your peripheral vision.
The fact that attention and visual gaze frequently coincide in practice means we tend to set up a misleading analogy between them. When you try to explain what it means to pay attention to an aspect of your experiences — like a door, or your thought of an elephant — your intuition is to say that you are focusing on some “entity” in your experiences, and bringing it into the forefront. This implies there is a “space” in which mental entities roam; a neutral substrate, like a Kantian form, in which mental entities can be highlighted. All objects that you can pay attention to must be of a type that lets them be located in that space.
Or perhaps you’d prefer — which amounts to the same thing — to say that attention is like a memory bank in a computer whose rows you access by index, like slots in a Turing machine. Each slot is a channel of information that acts as a container for its specifics, and attention focuses on that channel. “What is there?” your mind asks, and implicitly assumes a “there” (channel) which is independent of what is being searched for, a space which has a position relative to other entities. This in turn assumes the existence of an executive controller that is directing the spotlight this way or that:
Attention can reasonably be thought of as the output of executive control. The executive control system must thus select the targets of attention and communicate that to the systems responsible for implementing it. — Attention in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Machine Learning
This theory of attention separates the executor from the content it observes. Its job is to perform an impartial investigation and integration of data. Just like with your eyes, the controller “gazes into” a channel of inputs without any guarantee about what will be there — its goal is to discover that fact. The trigger for attention may be some impartial signal like novelty. Once received, you orient your eyes, head, and presumably attention towards the source. This is posited, again, by analogy to visual gaze, which naturally turns it attention to external sources of high-frequency contrast or rapid change.
The orienting response is an involuntary shift of attention that appears to be a fundamental biological mechanism necessary for survival. Orienting is a rapid response to new (never experienced before), unexpected (out of context) or unpredictable stimuli, which essentially functions as a “what‐is‐it” detector. — The brain’s orienting response
Clearly the equivalence, or at least analogy between visual-spatial attention and attention proper is a core paradigm of research into attention. This is further reinforced by the fact that most such research tests subjects who are looking at physical objects and spaces, since it is easy to study where a subject’s eyes are directed.
However, there is a considerable difference between paying attention to a visual scene and, say, paying attention to the moral implications of a task, or the financial considerations of a plan, or the phenomenology of an experience¹. The latter are abstractions located solely in your mind — they have no physical presence. And unlike physical space, the space of abstractions is fluid. As you learn new concepts over time — such as learning the difference between business and finance — the space of abstractions you can pay attention to also grows.
In fact, you are more often attending to your internal interpretations of your experiences rather than to the phenomena themselves. For example, when someone gives you directions to a store, you focus on your visualization of walking through the streets, rather than on the words. When that same person tells you the strange name of the store owner, you focus on grouping the sounds in the words into phonemes you recognize.
So how does your mind know which aspect to “look” at? And how does it know it has found what it is looking for?
Learning the right things
There is a popular saying that people “learn best from experience”. Unfortunately, this truism doesn’t then go on to explain how you learn the right things from experience — how you select from the fire-hose of sensations and thoughts those that are relevant to this particular lesson. Paying attention is one possible explanation, but that assumes you know, before you begin, what aspect of the experiences you should be paying attention to, which means you know where to direct your attention.
There must be something peculiar in each act of paying attention that helps you find and record the right information from your stream of experiences and thoughts. The searching query must to some degree determine what you see². Attention cannot be a neutral or “domain-general” function traversing a predefined space of mental objects. Each act of attention must be guided specifically by what the particular need in question is looking for. Even curiosity has specialized tastes. You do not blindly turn your focus in any given direction, you are searching for something, and for a specific reason. In short, there is always a specific motive driving attention, one that predetermines the result.
You may not always be aware of this underlying motive. For example, imagine a five-year-old student who is not particularly attentive in his first few classes, with the carefree naivete of a new initiate into the classroom. After a public and humiliating reprimand by his teacher, suddenly the desire to “pay attention” to the lesson — a desire that was not there before — starts to work on his awareness. Or imagine how a near-accident while crossing a street makes you more attentive during subsequent traversals. Even accidentally bumping into the corner of a table makes you pay attention the next time you walk around that corner. Like an anxious squirrel, every act of paying attention has its cause in some such motivating experience in your history. You must learn the specific instances in which it is necessary to pay attention.
Only by looking at the underlying motive can you explain how attention is specific about what it finds. When a teacher points to a whiteboard and says “pay attention to this”, what you understand is “interpret the written contents”; not “remember the shapes of the marker smudges”, or the reflection of light on the white background. They (and you) are expecting a particular type of interpretation, and a particular type of memory to come from it. What they really want is for you to understand it. “Pay attention” means “care about this, and insert the correct interpretation into your memory”. But the “correct interpretation” can only be framed by a correct search — you must be seeking to interpret it as, say, geometry, and not as an analysis of the writer’s penmanship.
Attention can never be neutral. Even when you are idly looking around you, with seemingly no purpose, what you find, e.g. a car or a bench, is a specific high-level interpretation of your visual inputs as objects, not a set of fluid colours. You could have interpreted what you saw as metal panels on the side of a vehicle, or as an illegally parked Subaru; but you didn’t. What you saw was therefore driven by a specified motive — to identify macro-scale objects in front of you. You didn’t simply find what was “there”; you found what you understood was there.
What we call “paying attention” is the span of time between a need arising, and recording its resolution in memory (aka awareness). The process shuts off once you find what you need. When you ask your crush “do you like me?” you will ignore all background noise, like traffic and cats, and keep paying attention until you hear a word or phrase that counts as an answer. On the other hand, when you are wondering “what sounds can I hear?” you will accept car noises, and once you’ve recorded a few, you will likely stop paying attention. This suggests that the defining feature of attention is, in fact, the memory that arises from it, which is the subject of the next section.
Awareness, and nothing else
Earlier we analogized attention as a “turning of the mind’s eye”. This imagery is, of course, a subsequent interpretation of what happened, and not something you observed directly in the act itself. None of us can see our “mind’s eye”; so how do you know it “turned”? The answer is simple: because you saw something different. But that is also not quite correct, since you were not “seeing” something with your eyes — or more accurately, you were always seeing with your eyes. What changed is that you became aware of something, you noticed and recorded something new into memory.
Have you ever found yourself rereading the same section of a book hoping the next time you will be able to pay attention to what you read? How did you know that you weren’t paying attention in the first place? Obviously because you remembered nothing of it — you certainly turned your eyes, and even mentally recited the words. But you were “recording” something different. You may have felt stressed about paying bills or an upcoming exam, and your attention was drawn towards such thoughts — “did I study every chapter?” — and not to what was immediately before you.
This highlights how the presence of a “recording” or “awareness” is the main evidence you have that you paid attention. You “asked”, and then became aware of something as a result — e.g. your thought of the exam tomorrow, or your current place in the book. In fact, unless you become aware of something, unless you remember something, you have no way to know that you paid attention. Just because you moved your eyes doesn’t mean you were being attentive; your attention may have been elsewhere. The bulk of your thoughts are always unconscious until you become aware of them; like a song playing on a loop in the back of your mind while you focus on another task. It could hypothetically be the case that you are, during conscious life, always “paying attention”. But since you are often unable to find and record the right memories, you can’t prove that you were doing so.
One could argue that there is also a “feeling” of paying attention that arises from the search itself, that doesn’t require you to actually become aware of anything. This may feel like low-level stress, an indication that you are being attentive. But that could simply be low-level stress, and not the act of paying attention. (Or perhaps there is no difference between the two).
Ultimately, there is no way to differentiate between attention and awareness, because you define an experience as “having paid attention” only once you become aware of something. The order of operations is the reverse of what it usually seems. You don’t have a motivation, then pay attention, and finally learn something; rather you have a motivation, then learn something, and finally interpret it after the fact as having “payed attention”:
Attention is not a mental function in itself. It can be reduced to a specific motivation or need, and the act of learning or awareness that encodes what you find. Paying attention is something we believe we can do, but don’t actually do — we only retroactively imagine we did it.
Many people, on reading the previous paragraphs, may have tried to disprove it by immediately paying attention to something around them. This likely involved moving their eyes, and in the act they may feel they had indeed paid attention — to a screen, or a table, etc. Once again they confused gaze with attention. It is the same false analogy with which we began this post. The fact that your eyes often move around when your desires or motives change fools you into believing that the act of attention is analogous to the physiological function.
Attention isn’t a spotlight. It’s like rainwater puddling together on an uneven surface.
People feel they can force themselves to pay attention, just as they can force themselves to lift their hand, and that the act itself is separate from the motivation behind it. This is why they interpret it as a distinct action from awareness. But paying attention isn’t an “action”. Although you can force yourself to turn your eyes to a particular space, you cannot force yourself to pay attention to an aspect of your experiences unless you can first make yourself care about it. And caring requires a specific reason, which shapes what you are looking for, and what you find. Once you care, the mind will carry the rest out automatically.
A social prerogative
So why do you have a concept of paying attention at all? An analogy to visual gaze is not enough to justify this — there must be a reason you found the concept a useful or valuable one to have. As with many concepts, you can understand attention best by considering when you first learned about it. Most likely a parent or teacher was telling you to “pay attention”, which for them was the equivalent of commanding you to “care”. Fruitlessly, I might add — if you already cared, you would have already learned what they asked of you, and if you cared about the right things you would also have learned the right things. A person who is not paying attention simply doesn’t have a reason to care.
Even when you exhort yourself, in your private thoughts, to pay attention, you are internalizing this social imperative. “Pay attention!” you tell yourself, as a teacher would, while your eyes blankly skim over pages of math equations. All the while you are anxious about the social repercussions of failing to be attentive. So you look for some way of alleviating your anxiety. You pay just enough attention, and in just the right ways, to not get yelled at. And so the child pays attention to the words on the chalkboard and not out the window — he has learned what the teacher wants of him.
The concept of “paying attention”, as a neutral action separate from motivated awareness, is a social fiction based on a moral demand others place on you. It only arises when there is a contradiction between your true interests and what others want you to care about. The gap between the two, the discomfort that gap causes, and the way you resolve the discomfort all make up the meaning of the concept.
It must seem strange to think that we have invented an entire psychological concept around a social imperative, to get others to care about things they don’t really care about³. We have concretized this moral impulse into a cognitive function, supported by a weak analogy to eye movements. This is not unexpected, since the opaqueness of your subjective mind makes it difficult to find the right analogies for experiences that are unavoidably abstract. And so we jump on any that seem plausible, and these usually have roots in folk psychology⁴. It takes time and critical analysis to uncover their misguided roots, overcome entrenched social preconceptions, and direct inquiry down a more fruitful path.
¹ One could also phrase this as an equivalence between exogenous or endogenous sources of attention; the argument still holds.
² Attention in the sense of Transformer architectures used in Machine Learning captures this selectivity more faithfully. It focuses on the value of a word to a given query, regardless of its location in the sentence, and thus it equates attention to a lookup (query, key, value).
³ When we measure deficits in attention, like ADHD, we are testing whether subjects fail to care about or remember what we think they should. “Distraction” is indistinguishable from a change in the subject’s concerns away from the prescribed task. This may be caused by a physiological disease, and may even be experienced as problem for the subject herself. Nevertheless, it is a either a failure to maintain a specific motive or a failure of memory. There is no third entity.
⁴ Attention is not the only such example. Though I can’t elaborate on others in this short post, many well-known mental functions do not have a direct correlate in living experience, including planning, prediction, memory, consciousness, and feelings. They are instead introspective interpretations of fundamentally different behaviours. Subsequent posts will show how these concepts are rooted in similar misinterpretations.
