What is attention?
A stretch toward, a currency, a generosity, a filter in a noisy room.
Philosophy
A psychologist refuses to cut the mind into pieces that would make a textbook tidy, and names the flow instead.
The Stream of Thought
Cambridge, Massachusetts · 1890
Art & Literature
The Hours, Uncut
A woman buys flowers, and a novel tries to hold an entire consciousness without summarizing it.
Westminster · 1925
Sacred Traditions
Beneath the Fig
A man sits down and vows not to rise until he has seen through the trouble of existing.
Uruvelā, later Bodh Gayā · c. 5th century BCE
Science
A man says he is blind in part of the field, and still posts letters through a slot he claims not to see.
Seeing Without Seeing
Britain, then many labs · 1974 onward
Ordinary Life
Star of Gladness
A canoe leaves Maui with no compass. The navigator who keeps it located learned the method on another island, in another language.
Honolua Bay, Maui, then the ocean toward Tahiti · 1976
Science
Two Ears, One Name
A listener is asked to repeat one voice while another voice speaks into the other ear. Most of the ignored speech is lost. A name sometimes is not.
Imperial College, London · 1953
Science
Observers count basketball passes and miss a person in a gorilla suit. Attention is not a lamp on the whole room.
The Gorilla in the Pass
Harvard, of the 1999 report · 1999
Science
The Door Handle
A psychologist says the world is not a picture in the head. It is a set of offerings: surfaces that can be walked, grasped, sat.
Cornell, on the page · 1979
Ordinary Life
The Grammar of Animacy
A botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation writes that some languages already know how to say a living world. Attention, here, is a practice of address.
Great Lakes, on the page · 2013
Sacred Traditions
An anonymous English book tells a student to put a cloud of forgetting between the self and every created thing, and to beat on a cloud of unknowing with a little naked intent.
A Cloud of Forgetting
The Midlands, on the page · c. 1370s
Philosophy
Waiting, Not Seeking
A woman in Marseille writes that schoolwork is training for prayer: attention is a waiting, not a clenched effort.
Marseille · 1942
Art & Literature
The Sound After
An old pond. A frog jumps in. Water’s sound. The poem is three lines and a whole practice of noticing.
Edo, on the page of a hokku · 1686
Philosophy
A Warring States teacher says that anyone, seeing a child about to fall into a well, would feel alarm. That feeling, he claims, is a sprout of the heart-mind.
The Child and the Well
The courts and dialogues of the *Mencius* · c. 4th century BCE