The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

First there is voluntary attention: the intentional choosing of focus, the spotlight of the mind being pointed toward something, illuminating it while keeping everything outside its glow in the relative dark. Then there is involuntary attention, constantly operating in parallel to conscious attention, monitoring our environment for threats and disruptions, pushing and pulling away from conscious focus, sometimes expanding to grab our mind fully. And finally there is social attention, the fact that we can be the object of others’ attention, and the inescapable truth that being the object of others’ attention is the foundational experience of having human bonds. We also pay attention to others, and those forms of social attention, the reciprocity of exchanging attention with other humans, are the covalent bonds of human socialization. We think of other people and other people think of us, and a whole life passes around this very loop of thought.