Greetings, Friendlies.:) The verb inside the noun. Dhamma teachers know all about this. Alan Watts says of a candle flame: a candle flame is not a thing. It’s hot streaming gas. It’s activity. And yet we noun it as though it was a thing – a fixed, stable entity. What might we do to help […]
Tag: Attention
Greetings, Friendlies.:) In 2006 Anne Treisman published an article describing her explorations into visual attention. Right out of the gate she defines her terms: “Attention is a tool to adapt what we see to our current needs.” For many of us, when we hear a noun like “attention”, we tend to reify it. We want […]
You keep using that word…
Greetings, Friendlies. :) In The Master and His Emissary Iain McGilchrist says that one explanation of why hemisphere lateralization arose is the evolutionary advantage to a single organism having two types of attention. One attention is focused, capable of discerning objects from their background, breaking things into parts. This attention dwells in the left hemisphere. […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Alan Watts differentiates between what he calls “spotlight” and “floodlight” attention (he sometimes uses the terms “awareness” or “consciousness”. Standardizing to “attention” for now). Spotlight attention, just like it sounds, is a narrow beam of intense attention. It picks things out. You can imagine standing in a dark room using a bright, […]
