The thing I’m giving to this post instead of giving to the growing pile of laundry I need to do.
Attention is like a flashlight. You can shine it upon your laundry, or upon this post, or upon… other stuff.
It’s partially under your control and partially not.
I think usually they are referring to “undivided attention” because technically, even though we’re pretty bad at it, you can do multiple things at the same time. I can drive, listen to music, and have a conversation but it starts to overload my brain at that point, as most of my attention is focusing on driving.
If we think of our brains & attention-span as RAM (memory), then some tasks take up more memory, and we have a limit to the RAM, so there are only so many processes that can run at the same time.
Advertisers/products/lovers, they’re all fighting for a bigger slice of your RAM.
If you’re not sure what attention is, then how can you make all those claims in your title? When you say “attention is required for thinking”, what did you have in mind? Are you sure you’re not just calling several different things by the same name? How would attention be a prerequisite to thinking and not just a component of it?
From a modern psych perspective, attention is kind of filter. We receive countless stimuli and the brain chooses which ones to ignore and which to attend to. That might be called “thinking” but even an earwig can do it. It is indeed the “axis of reality” because it’s what shapes our perception. And attention, or rather attending behaviors, can indeed be a component of love.
When you play a video game or watch a movie or read a book or do stuff on social media, the first thing you do is direct your attention at it.
This is such an awesome question! I never gave it much thought but the things we focus on, or that to which we give attention, has some amount of value in our minds. By giving it value, we increase its importance. While it may be an inanimate or abstract object or concept that has received our focus, by increasing its importance it could have lasting effects on the future relevance of that particular object or concept.
