The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

by Alison Gopnik

Or consider certain types of meditation. Meditative practices involve manipulating attention in novel ways. In some of these traditions, the idea is to focus and sustain vivid attention on a single object—a mandala or a koan or a crucifix. But in other types of meditation the idea is to distribute attention as much as possible. Certain types of “open awareness” meditative practices are about not focusing on a single object. They are recipes for defeating inattentional blindness, and escaping attentional inhibition. In these practices you begin by heightening your overall level of attentiveness and arousal. You sit in an upright and unsupported posture—you don’t lie down or sit in chairs, because you don’t want to just get drowsy. Meditators also imbibe notoriously large quantities of caffeine. Indeed, tea was originally cultivated by monks in China who had discovered how helpful a little neurotransmitter modification was for maintaining attention. It is still a mainstay in every Zen monastery, and evidently many modern Japanese monks are devoted to thick, awful, instant Nescafé.