The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

by Florence Williams

Attention is our currency, and it’s precious. William James, the philosopher, pioneering experimental psychologist and brother of Henry James, devoted an entire chapter of his classic The Principles of Psychology to attention, published in 1890. In it, he writes, “Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind. . . .” and “My experience is what I agree to attend to . . . Without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” Notably, James divided attention into two basic types that continue to define the way we think about it: voluntary, active attention (such as when we attend to tasks) and involuntary or reflex attention, as when something demands our focus, like a noise or sound or play of light or even a wayward thought. Decades before text alerts, philosophers were concerned by what James refers to as the “confused, dazed, scatter-brained state which in French is called distraction.” (Before I leave James, I can’t resist mentioning that he suffered from depression and experienced a transformative experience while hiking in the Adirondacks in 1898. As he wrote to his wife, he “got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description.” Emerson was his godfather, so perhaps he was primed to attend voluntarily to this possibility.)