Episode 176 - Attention Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] Ellie: The podcast where two philosophy professors talk about our discipline's relation to everyday life.

[00:00:25] David: I'm David Peña-Guzmán,

[00:00:26] Ellie: And I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:28] David: And as always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

[00:00:36] Ellie: All right, David, I have been super excited to do this episode, and one of the reasons for that is that I've recently become aware of this manifesto called Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement that I've been seeing in, like, every bookstore in the various cities that I've traveled to recently for professional things. And so I was like, "Hey, this is my chance," and I wanna start off by telling you a little bit about what attention activism is.

[00:01:02] David: I do wanna hear about this, and especially in connection to this book, because I have seen this book all over the place, and just about a week ago, I saw a woman reading it next to me at the coffee shop, and I kept being creepy and looking over at her to see if her book was any good from over her shoulder, and it seemed like a pop book.

[00:01:22] Ellie: Let's say your attention was drawn to the book.

[00:01:24] David: Yeah, my attention was definitely siphoned over to somebody else's text, but I wanna know whether it was good 'cause I have to say it looked a little too colorful.

[00:01:35] Ellie: Yeah, I think it's a little too colorful for me as well. But I actually really like some of the features graphic-wise of the book because I think the authors were trying to do something with the format of the book that also speaks to its contents. It has a bright red cover with white text, and then on the inside there's a short manifesto that then...

Like, I read through the first time, and then I realized with every new chapter they repeat that same manifesto, but they highlight one sentence of it. And so each chapter of the book is about one sentence from this short and pithy manifesto. So I think that's a super cool approach. 

But I will say, so it was written by a collective association that has now become a nonprofit. It started as a collective association of artists, performers, and interventionists, and it was written by 30 of them collectively.

[00:02:31] David: Oh my gosh, 30 authors?

[00:02:34] Ellie: Yeah, I'm gonna say it. I think 30 people is too many people to write a book. And in particular, I do think that there are some inconsistencies in their account of attention and what to do about it that emerge.

Nonetheless, I think it is a powerful statement for our current moment, and so I do think it had a lot of food for thought. And one of the main pieces of food for thought is their claim that attention is the key question of our moment, both in our politics and in our experience. And they make an analogy to environmentalism a few decades ago where they say a few decades ago with all this new attention on environmentalism was born a generation of environmental activists. And there have now been numerous generations of environmental activists, but environmental activism is very much still a thing, and environmental activists are responding to the environmental issues of their time. And they're calling for us to do the same thing with attention. They're calling for the establishment of attention activism, and they think that that's crucial for us to meet the political moment and overcome some of the negative features of it.

One of which is this idea of human fracking, which I'm gonna talk about later in the episode. This not only co-opting of attention, but a kind of extraction of attention that is part of what is often called the attention economy or the attention age.

[00:04:01] David: Okay. And so their model of attention activism, I want to know, is it modeled on environmental activism? Like, we should be activists in relation to attention using the same strategies that the environmentalist movement has used in order to protect and conserve natural spaces.

[00:04:19] Ellie: Not necessarily. For instance, one of the things that they see as a part of attention activism is study, which I think, you know, it's not that environmental activists are like anti-intellectual or anything, but I think when we think of environmental activism, we think of things like blowing up pipelines, not like studying a book. And so the forms of resistance that are going to take place within attention activism are at least partially gonna be, I would say, like a little bit more personal and psychological. Although they would say study is a collective thing, so it doesn't have to be more personal. But I think because attention is like very different from the environment, there's obviously be more of a psychological dimension. But they do have specific policy proposals as well. 

I will say though, in terms of their overall picture of attention activism, I found there to be something really cool and promising, but also maybe a falling short of their message. And so I mentioned that they're against this idea of human fracking, which I'm gonna articulate later in the episode. It seems clear to me that one of the main, if not the main focus of attention activism then should be to stop human fracking, stop corporations from stealing our attention, extracting it, exploiting it. But instead, when they talk about attention liberation, they say that attention activism stakes a claim for human dignity and demands a world that accommodates the range of human attentions. There are like various types of human attention, and we need a world that accommodates, like honors these various kinds. 

When I read that, I was just sort of like, I feel like this is a dilution of the message because that's far less actionable than stopping human fracking. And it also is like Utopian in a way that is not really cashed out by their account of attention in the book, which is like a pretty fuzzy account of attention. They think of attention as the actual stuff of all connection and the immediate and experiential reality of you. And so I think this idea that we need a world that accommodates the range of human attention is just not nearly as salient a message for activists as "stop human fracking."

[00:06:18] David: It sounds a little weak sauce because it seems like it depends on what the diagnosis of the problem is. So to say let's embrace and honor all the types of attention makes it seem as if we are hiding or suppressing some forms of attention, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening. In fact, the problem is that we are trying to exploit and capitalize on every iteration of attention that the human mind is capable of generating, such that just saying, "Let's honor this," doesn't really capture the problem.

And also to say let's honor the diversity and the varieties of human attention seems somewhat passive, right? All you have to do to honor things is to sort of sit back and let them be, and that seems at odds, with the ethos of the book as a manifesto. It's like, a manifesto is a call to action, but here it's a call to action to just let things be in to attention.

[00:07:10] Ellie: To be fair, honor was my word. They use "accommodates." And so I do think they're thinking about it structurally, like in school systems, in ways that we're connecting with one another, we need to accommodate the full range of human attentions. I just think that even still that's a kind of dilution of what could otherwise be a really salient political message.

But I think this speaks to the way that attention very quickly becomes an unwieldy topic because what does it mean to accommodate the full range of human attentions? What is the full range of human attentions? And... 

[00:07:40] David: What is attention?

Are you paying attention to us right now or not?

[00:07:47] Ellie: Today we're talking about attention.

[00:07:50] David: Does anybody know what attention is?

[00:07:52] Ellie: How is the attention economy changing not just our attention spans, but our very consciousness?

[00:07:57] David: And is attention a resource that can be exploited?

[00:08:10] Ellie: I wanna turn now to my old boy, William James. I say old boy because I wrote my undergrad thesis on him, and for a time thought I was gonna become a William James specialist, which I didn't. Sorry, James. Not that he minds. He's good. He doesn't need me. Anyway, in his book, The Principles of Psychology--

[00:08:28] David: Which I'm reading right now for the first time ever from beginning to end.

[00:08:31] Ellie: Wait, wait, wait, really? Why? 

[00:08:33] David: Yeah. I mean, I've read segments- oh, I like James and I have never read The Principles of Psychology, so I'm about a third of the way in.

[00:08:40] Ellie: Oh, I love this for you. Are you enjoying it? 

[00:08:42] David: I'm really enjoying it. I mean, some things I don't agree with at all, but I am really enjoying, and I love his writing style.

[00:08:49] Ellie: Okay. Yeah. 

see, I feel like some of his writing style is amazing. Like, his speeches are awesome, and then sometimes it's kind of dry and boring, so I feel like it depends. The Sentiment of Rationality was always my favorite piece by him when I was working on him, which who knows, maybe I will do again.

But I think James is a really interesting figure because he's both a philosopher and a psychologist. He established this early psychology lab in the US and is a major figure at the time when psychology is dividing itself off from philosophy, but he is also very much, you know, a philosopher. 

He writes in The Principles of Psychology that everyone knows what attention is. It seems obvious, right? Like, I know attention when I see it. But in spite of that, many people have given very different definitions of the concept.

[00:09:38] David: And there is so little consensus in the field, both of philosophy and psychology and their more recent union in philosophical psychology, that not that long ago, a few years ago, a group of scientists co-authored an article that was entitled No One Knows What Attention Is, where they basically argued that attention itself is a misleading concept that is incoherent and useless, and that we might do better thinking about human cognition and human perception using other terms. So attention, according to them, is out.

[00:10:13] Ellie: In fact, that's actually not such a new idea. The author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on attention, Christopher Mohl, notes that already by the time James came along in the late 19th century, theorizing about attention was in a state of flux because theorists couldn't decide on what attention was. They had assigned it so many different roles in their philosophy of mind, often like really abstruse speculative roles, and then James comes along and takes a very common sense approach to attention in his work, which is a feature of his philosophy in general

[00:10:45] David: Yeah, that's thing. 

[00:10:45] Ellie: Yeah, he's a pragmatist. 

[00:10:46] David: Yeah, common sense. 

[00:10:47] Ellie: He loves common sense. That's also why I moved away from him, I realized that there was like a kind of problem with valorizing common sense from like a dialectical materialist perspective. That is neither here nor there in any case. So yeah, he takes this common sense approach to attention, and he aims to ground the new field of experimental psychology by casting aside all this abstruse speculation about what attention is. For James, attention is an essential feature of experience. He even writes, "Experience is what I agree to attend to." So what I notice is the content of my experience. When I pay attention to something, my mind seizes that thing out of what seem like various possible objects. My consciousness then becomes focused or concentrated on that thing, withdrawing from other things. That's what attention is for him. 

[00:11:43] David: And the model of attention that is informing this is the idea of attending to an object. So if I go to a museum and I'm looking at a particular painting, all of my attentional resources go to the painting. I'm focusing on it. I'm looking at the colors and the form and the figures in it. But in doing so, I am also bracketing out the rest of the world, right?

I'm not paying attention to the other paintings. I'm not paying attention to the wall or to my friend or to the people talking behind me. And so there, the idea is that it's almost as if my experience funnels into just the thing that I agreed to pay attention to. 

[00:12:20] Ellie: Exactly, and attention isn't just this focusing of consciousness for James, but it also has a special relationship with our will. And because attention is what allows us to decide where to direct not only our perceptual attention, as in like that focus on the painting that you were describing, but also where to direct our thoughts. The effort of attention, James says, is the essential phenomenon of will.

[00:12:46] David: So this view from James, I think has really good intuitive appeal, right? So like us, somebody who has free will, I decide where I look, what I pay attention to, and that's how I know that I am free, right? So right now, Ellie, I'm looking at you because I choose to, and if I choose to look somewhere else, I can just redirect my attention to that other thing. And this equation of attention with the will in more recent years has been articulated as an identity of attention and consciousness.

So I pay attention to something, and that is what I am conscious of, which has led some thinkers to say that attention is the same thing as consciousness, that the two terms are synonymous. So for example, the philosopher Jesse Prinz has defended this view, which is known as the identity thesis. Attention equals consciousness.

[00:13:43] Ellie: Husserl's rolling over in his grave.

[00:13:45] David: Oh my God, I mean, so many cognitive psychologists also, as well as the two authors of the book that I wanna talk about who are not rolling in their graves because they're still alive, but they're rolling in their office chairs at the moment. And I'm here thinking about this book called Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention by Carlos Montemayor, who is one of my colleagues and a close friend here at SFSU, 

[00:14:11] Ellie: So he's rolling in his office just down the hall.

[00:14:13] David: Yeah, I can hear it. I can hear it. And his co-author, Harry Haroutioun Haladjian. And in this book, they argue that this idea that attention is the same as consciousness , is really an outdated way of thinking and is just inconsistent with what we know nowadays about the way our brains work and how attention functions.

So they argue that consciousness and attention can overlap, but they also dissociate. And so they put forth what they call the CAD, the consciousness attention dissociation thesis, which basically encourages us to think about all the ways in which our attention and our conscious awareness actually come apart in really complicated ways.

[00:15:04] Ellie: So, I guess like my thought on this would just be that, from a phenomenological perspective, consciousness doesn't have to be explicit or reflective in order to be consciousness. And so I don't know exactly how that relates to this point of view, but I think consciousness would just be such a broader category from a phenomenological perspective that we either we need to say attention is a specific phenomenon of it, or maybe attention is a misnomer, to go back to that possibility that we raised earlier.

[00:15:38] David: Yeah. So there are different ways of explaining what the dissociation looks like, right? So one would be to say, look, consciousness is the bigger circle and attention is a little circle within it. Another one is to say, look, they're entirely different categories, but they overlap in certain ways.

And so just like visually, you can represent the dissociation in different ways. So they begin the book by pointing out that just definitionally, there is a huge difference between consciousness and attention. Consciousness is about unifying and integrating experience for a subject, right? It's about synthesizing a world for an I.

Attention, on the other hand, is about selecting and analyzing a sliver, a little piece of everything that is otherwise available to us in order to subject it to further cognitive processing, t o think about it, to interpret it, to make decisions, to achieve a task. And so in their book, they invite us to think about how we can have one without the other.

More specifically, we can have attention, our brain is constantly picking up details, without those details ever rising above the threshold for conscious attention. So what they're getting at is what in other contexts is just called unconscious attention, right? That our brain can pick up things without us being consciously aware of what those things are or how they are affecting us.

[00:17:07] Ellie: Okay, but why not just say that you're conscious implicitly of something, and then reserve attention for something that you are explicitly selecting, picking out of the general stream of consciousness, so to say? I feel like that for me is a more intelligible way to think about consciousness.

[00:17:28] David: I don't know, because they're not working with a model of implicit versus explicit consciousness as the primary distinction.

[00:17:36] Ellie: Well, maybe let's say unconscious. Well, I guess maybe, no,

[00:17:39] David: You can't say unconscious consciousness. 

[00:17:41] Ellie: Okay, fair. 

[00:17:43] David: No, but I think maybe one way of thinking about it has to do with reportability. So when I am implicitly aware of something, maybe I can still report it in the moment. I think unconscious attention is a broader category that includes things that I can report if I suddenly turn to them, whereas it also can include things that I can never report because they're fully unconscious, but nonetheless, they're still getting picked up by my central nervous system.

So for example, our brains are constantly picking up sensory information from the world even though we're not conscious of it. My brain is registering the noise of the AC. It is registering maybe letters and messages on the wall even though I'm not consciously thinking about them in a more explicit way.

We are also susceptible to what are known as priming effects, right? That if I'm exposed to a particular stimulus for a number of times, it can prime me to behave in one particular way or another even though if somebody were to ask me if there's a causal connection between the two, I would say no because I don't even register the original priming effect.

I mean, this is how a lot of subliminal messaging works, that you're exposed to things below the threshold of conscious awareness, and nonetheless, there is a trackable empirical impact on your mood, on your emotion, on your comportment. 

[00:19:13] Ellie: Okay. I think maybe what's tripping me up is the fact that when you describe their picture of consciousness as being about unifying and integrating experience for a subject, that seemed unobjectionable to me. But as you're spelling out the distinction between consciousness and attention on their view, I think maybe it's becoming clear that my view of consciousness is actually pretty different from theirs.

Maybe theirs is more specific because it seems like maybe they are thinking about consciousness as some sort of explicit thing. The way that I would explain something like priming effects is that you're conscious, you have this sort of general field of consciousness, but you're not paying attention to those things that are constituting the priming effects. You're paying attention to something else. That seems like a quicker way of explaining the issue.

[00:20:03] David: So you are reversing the terms, right? Like, here we are conscious but not paying attention to, whereas they wanna say our bodies and minds are paying attention to a thing, but it's not actually reaching our global conscious experience of the world, right? It's not an actual content of our experience.

[00:20:21] Ellie: I think I'm in favor of a reversal there. If I wanna even, you know, buy the terms as drawn.

[00:20:27] David: Of course. But if you do that reversal, then the question gets tossed to you, Ellie, whether on your view there can ever be unconscious attention, and it seems like on your view there couldn't be 'cause to pay attention to something would always be conscious. And so it might be that you're closer to James, in associating--

[00:20:45] Ellie: I mean, I might be, but I would just say from a phenomenological point of view, there actually could be no unconscious experience. So it's not just that, like I would be very happy to grant there's no unconscious attention, and I would go farther. I would say there's not unconscious experience.

That doesn't mean there is unconscious, it just is a question about how we are defining experience and consciousness

[00:21:03] David: Yeah, there is. it's partly a definitional issue, but they also point to the phenomenon of blindsight, this is a really complex phenomenon that has received a lot of attention in philosophy and psychology where individuals who are cortically blind, meaning that their visual cortex doesn't process visual information in a typical way, they report seeing nothing in front of them. And yet if you ask them to, for example, put a letter in a hole that is at a particular angle that they say they don't see, nonetheless, they actually succeed at putting it in the hole. And the question is how are they doing the motor action so well if they don't see where the hole is?

And so they point to this as an example where obviously they're attending to something, they're just not conscious. And the not being conscious of the hole is reflected in the fact that if you ask them, "Do you see where the hole is and what its angle is?" they will say no. And so I think about attention just as like picking up, picking something up and making it available for further cognitive processing.

And there are a lot of other examples that I don't, I don't want to go into detail about all of these. But they even interpret flow experiences in this way. You know, where when you're in flow, like you're playing the violin and you're a master violinist, you know what you're doing, and you are paying attention to the violin, otherwise you wouldn't be able to move your fingers, but you're not conscious of paying attention to it, which is why it feels like it's flowing organically out of you.

[00:22:40] Ellie: Okay, I'll leave my definitional quibble aside because I could rabbit hole there for sure. But we've been talking about how consciousness and attention come apart for them. Are they completely separate phenomena on their view, or do they have some overlap?

[00:22:59] David: They're not 100% separate because if you take the dissociation thesis all the way to its furthest extreme, it would mean that there's consciousness on one side and there is attention on another one, then they never overlap, which would imply that there is no such thing as conscious attention.

And so that's a really hard sell, right? Because we do know that we can consciously pay attention to things, which is actually our most intuitive sense of how experience and attention work.

[00:23:30] Ellie: Yeah, I'd say all attention is conscious, but that's just me. 

[00:23:33] David: No, and so they wanna say that they're dissociated, but just how far you go into the dissociation, they argue, will depend on your definition of consciousness and awareness, on how many types of consciousness and of awareness you believe that there are, and then how you cash out the relationship between all of them. So they don't actually take a position on this. They just say it's really dissociated, but maybe not entirely.

[00:24:01] Ellie: Wait, okay. Well, that doesn't sound particularly satisfying, but okay. It's clear that I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I actually want us to take a step back from both James's and this definition of attention because you've presented this as an alternative to James's view, right, which I think makes sense. I think it is fair to say that James sees consciousness and attention as at minimum less dissociated than this other theory, maybe not dissociated at all. 

But what both of these views share is that they treat attention as the capacity to select for a task, to sort of pick something out from our experience. And this is a very common way of understanding attention today. But the authors of The Attensity Manifesto note, and this was one of the parts of the book I found super interesting, that narrow definition arises with the establishment of psychology as an experimental science in the long 20th century, so that would include James, who's writing at the end of the 19th century. The idea is that because we can measure the capacity to select for a task better than other forms of attention, that's then the form of attention scientists have come to fixate on, so much that it's become the very definition of attention. 

The authors of The Attensity Manifesto say that especially with the rise of computer-based attention tests in recent decades, so like if you're getting tested for ADD or ADHD, you're likely gonna have to take a computer-based task that's tracking your responses, and associating that with attention. Scientists through this rise of the computer-based testing of attention have come to treat attention not just as the capacity to select for a task, but specifically the capacity to select for a screen-based task, the kind of Candy Crush model of attention. And there are three features of this particular view of attention that are specific to the Candy Crush model. One is that this attention is mainly visual. Second, it's durational, right? It has to do with a span of attention. It's not about how deeply you're attending to something in a given moment, but for how long your attention lasts. And third, it's cybernetic. It has to do with the relationship between people and machines. And they're just like, look, it's not that that's not a form of attention, but it's really messed up that that's what we've come to associate with attention writ large.

[00:26:30] David: I think this is such a good argument. I love it when scholars take concepts that scientists think are objective and then they show how historically and materially contingent they are. Because in this case, it means that our very definition of attention depends on the material techniques that we use in science in order to study it. It's almost as if the technology or the technique determines the definition of the phenomenon that it's trying to pick out from the world. And it reminds me of a similar argument that I've seen in debates about vision, because often when you look at definitions of vision, a lot of scientists and philosophers focus on vision as our capacity to pick out images from the world.

And at least one scholar has pointed out that the reason that we think of vision in terms of images is actually because vision scientists carry out experiments throughout the 20th century where they essentially just take people into the lab and they show them photographs, like actual 2D images. And they ask them, like, "Select the bigger ones, select the brighter ones, select the one that has higher resolution." But they never use other techniques. They very rarely use, for example, video recordings. And so the fact that the experiments are conducted with photographs ends up shaping the whole experimental setup and molding the way in which they think about vision to the point of actually shifting the very definition. And then we think of vision as being related to images, but it's because of the experimental method.

Ellie, there are a lot of ways of dividing and categorizing attention. Some experts talk about the difference between bottom-up attentional processes and top-down attentional processes. Others distinguish between effortful versus effortless attention, as in the case of flow experiences that I mentioned earlier. Other people distinguish between attention that is specifically dedicated to the recognition of spatial relationships and attention that is specifically devoted to the recognition of objects and their features. And there are many other ways of dividing this cake. 

So one distinction that I learned about recently, that I had never heard about but I really like, is the difference between overt and covert attention. Overt attention is what we usually think of when we think about attention. It's when I look at something with my eyes and then I attend to it with my mind. And so eye and brain collide. But then there is this very weird kind of attention called covert attention, which is when we pay attention to something that is outside of the center of our gaze, but without turning our eyes or our head to bring that thing into the center of our vision. So you're like intentionally paying attention to something that is on your peripheral vision, like in the margin of your visual field, but without looking at it, but still trying to recognize it.

[00:29:45] Ellie: Girls are so good at this. This is, like, one of the things we learn as teenagers.

[00:29:52] David: Like how to look at something without looking at them.

[00:29:55] Ellie: Yeah, our crush. I know what it's like to know exactly where your crush is in the room at the party, and have a sense of who they're talking to without ever turning my eyes. 

[00:30:11] David: We need to talk about the difference between the male gaze and the female covert attentional gaze, which is not a gaze at all 'cause your neck is stiff and your eyes are not moving. But I think these distinctions at the very least highlight just how complex and interesting and multifaceted attention is.

[00:30:33] Ellie: I wanna bring in a different way of thinking about various kinds of attention, which I read about in Chris Hayes' book, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. So in addition to The Attensity Manifesto, which I mentioned before and will come back to again, the other core book I read in advance of this episode is this book. And I was really excited to read it because Chris Hayes wrote the book on meritocracy that I loved and talked a lot about in that episode. And this attention book was also really interesting, although we'll get to some potential criticisms of it later. 

He talks about three different kinds of attention: voluntary, involuntary, and social attention. I wanna start with voluntary attention. This is an intentional choosing of focus, kind of like what you were talking about before, although I actually think it could be covert or overt. It's a sort of spotlight of attention. So you're looking at the painting in the museum, to go back to the example that you mentioned before. Or maybe, covertly, you're actually attending to your crush next to you in the museum, but it seems like you're looking at the painting. So again, could be covert or overt. But this voluntary attention is a willful holding of attention. It's what we usually would call paying attention. 

Then we've got involuntary attention. This form of attention, the second form, operates tacitly, monitoring our environment for threats and disruptions. So it can pull us away from conscious focus sometimes. So let's say you're looking at the painting and then suddenly next to you a climate activist whips out a soup can and throws it at a Van Gogh. This, th- your attention is suddenly pulled from the painting or from your crush to this activist with a soup can. And this involuntary attention is a super important form of attention. It's more or less what is known as attention grabbing. 

Third is social attention. And for Hayes, social attention refers to the fact that we can be the object of others' attention, and that this is the foundation of human bonds. Think about how human beings would literally not survive if others didn't pay attention to us. Seeking attention is key to human socialization. The cry is meant to call attention to you so that your needs can be met. And this, he thinks, is why you have things like the cocktail party effect, the phenomenon of being in a loud room, but then if somebody says your name like four conversations over, you're immediately gonna tune in. There's a lot of research showing that we're especially attuned to people uttering our own name, and that Hayes associates with social attention.

[00:33:08] David: Can I ask a quick question here? Just like you had questions about the previous definition I had of consciousness and attention, I have questions about these definitions because the third one doesn't quite click for me yet. Because you define social attention as being the object of somebody else's attention, but that means that it's not a type of attention that I exercise like the first two. It's just the fact that I can be the recipient of somebody else's attention, so it's not a third type. 

And the cocktail party effect seems to sustain this view. The cocktail party effect is when I hear my name and then I turn involuntarily, and that would put it in the second category. So can you say more about how social attention is different from the other two and why it's even included as a kind of attention, whereas it just seems to be the way in which attention plays out in a social space?

[00:34:04] Ellie: I'm gonna be honest. I was hoping you wouldn't pick up on that because this is all meant to position Hayes' main claim. But maybe it's better that you picked up on it, 'cause after all this is a philosophy podcast and we should be clear about things. So I actually wonder that too. I don't know whether it really makes sense to talk about social attention as a form of attention, and I think you did a really good job of articulating why it might not be considered a form of attention itself. 

He defines it as any instance in which the object of our attention is another person as opposed to, say, the natural world. And so my initial description of it focused on the way that we're the object of other social attention. And that is fair, he does talk about that a lot. But then hence your question. So I think the answer to that question is that technically what he means by this is any instance in which the object of our attention is another person.

However, I think there's a version of your question that still remains, which is it seems weird to pick out a special kind of attention that has this particular object, right?

[00:35:12] David: Yes, that's exactly right. 

[00:35:14] Ellie: Yeah, so I agree with you. I think it is unclear whether this actually constitutes a third form of attention. But the reason I think he wants to at least position it as such is because it helps him articulate how social media plays on these three different forms of attention differently.

So whether or not we wanna call this social attention or not, I think what he's trying to draw attention to is the way that social media and digital life broadly play on these three different things. So the model of the scroll that you have on so many apps appeals to our involuntary attention, where things are constantly grabbing our attention as we move down. We can also engage voluntary attention by, say, choosing to watch a YouTube video or to read an article, sustain our attention there. And social attention is at the heart of social media. It's what sustains parasociality. He thinks that one of the important features of social attention is that it does not need to be reciprocal. And so this idea that digital media is capturing our need for social bonds and the kind of attention that that involves is crucial for him. I don't know whether that justifies a potential vagueness or insufficiency in the argument around this as a third form of attention or not.

[00:36:36] David: No, but I think it's fine to incorporate it as a third one if it's a question of focus, because he wants to focus in on social media, and so thinking about the social dimension of attention helps him get there. So that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. But it is arbitrary to select one kind of attention based on object.

At that point, he would have to differentiate between social attention and natural attention, not between it and these other forms. Either way, I think he is right that social media preys on various forms of attention. And we can talk about the specific ways in which that predatory aspect of social media plays out. But I think we also have to think about how this has changed our relationship to attention pretty drastically in the last few decades, right?

And as a philosopher, I'm really worried about what this attention grabbing is doing to our cognitive abilities, to our way of relating to one another, and our way of relating to oneself. And the rise of digital spaces, and of course the explosion of social media more recently, they have restructured how we attend to the world.

And now we have, as a result of this change, companies going out of their way to find ways of exploiting every cognitive vulnerability, every mental weakness that we have in order to make a profit, right? That's why we talk not just about attention grabbing, but the attention economy, because there's a lot of money to be made by entering this space.

And I think this is something that we have to think very seriously about. What is the price that we pay as individuals for having our attention exploited or grabbed in these ways with or without our consent? Although the question of consent, of course, gets really complicated when we are choosing to participate in technologies that are designed to control us.

[00:38:34] Ellie: Exactly. And I think the discourse around this is changing at the moment because we've had a discourse that has mainly focused around moral condemnation, seeing these addictive social media apps as tempting, and as individuals, seeing ourselves as needing to resist temptation.

[00:38:52] David: On a model of drugs and drug addiction. 

[00:38:54] Ellie: And I mean, the scroll is, like Hayes discusses, basically modeled on the slot machine, and we very much moralize gambling. But yeah, something that he points out is that this whole language of moral condemnation, and in general, the critiques of the attention economy that say we just need to resist this attention capture are actually really not going far enough. We tend to speak of the attention economy and its effects far too narrowly and actually far too weakly. The attention economy, or what he says, "It's not even just an attention economy. We live in the age of attention," is fundamentally restructuring how we live.

[00:39:37] David: I think he's right again about this point and this is where I think the science of attention,, can actually give us tools for launching a political critique of the attention economy and for developing better language to say exactly what is wrong with these technologies. So think about the term doomscrolling. We all agree that doom scrolling is bad, but it almost makes it seem as if the reason that it's bad is because it's a waste of time.

And the problem is deeper and much more serious than that. And one way to think about what's wrong with doomscrolling is that there's a massive trade-off that we make, or that we suffer rather, when we engage in doomscrolling in the kind of mental activity that we perform. 

So when you are glued to your screen going up and down the feed, the time you spend doing that is time that you don't spend doing other things. Obviously, it's time that you don't spend doing wonderful things, like hanging out with friends, playing sports, cooking, painting, whatever. But it's also time that we don't spend literally doing nothing, and doing nothing is better than scrolling.

And here I want to bring in recent research on what is called spontaneous thinking. So think about what's happening in your mind when you're just sitting there not doing anything, when you're not performing any particular task, you're not trying to solve any problem, you're not trying to meet a deadline, when you're just existing. We know from neuroscientific research that when we're just there, our brain is not really static or inactive. Rather, there is an activation of what is called the default mode network. And the default mode network, as its name suggests, is our baseline cognitive neural functioning standard. It's what our brains do when we just are.

And what we now know the default mode network to do is that when we're just sitting there, we're actually engaging a lot of spontaneous thoughts, right? We are remembering things from our past, we are thinking about our values, we are daydreaming, mind-wandering. We're making connections that are relevant to our lives, and there is a lot of existential and cognitive value to that.

And one of the most recent developments that has made my ears perk up a little bit is that, in fact, all this spontaneous activity that we only do when we're not having our attention grabbed by something else or not devoting it to a specific task, it's really important for consolidating a sense of self.

I get to know who David is, and I get to build a sense of myself largely through this thinking about my past, my present, and my future. And so spontaneous thinking, which is something that we are robbed of by the attention economy because it's constantly grabbing our attention and preventing us from just being there with ourselves, that kind of thinking is also really important for having a sense that our life is meaningful, and for having a sense of freedom, that we are choosing the life that we want to choose.

[00:42:59] Ellie: Yeah, something I think a lot about is when people talk about how they have their best ideas in the shower, and I'm just like, why is that? That's because that's the only time that you're not looking at a screen or doing something. You could have shower thoughts at other times if you decided to just sit there and do nothing, but then we have the Pascal problem, which is, like, we can't sit alone with ourselves in a room. I also feel like it's become more popular lately, and I mean, no shade to people who have great thoughts in the shower, I often do, and I'm also not on some moral high ground about scrolling given that I have publicly defended my 45 minutes of scroll when I first wake up in the morning.

But I think also walks without, listening to a podcast have become popularized lately. Raw dogging planes became a thing. Yeah. Oh my God. 

[00:43:50] David: Although I have to say, the raw dogging language is more characteristic of men who see it as a test of strength and, just, like, their mental fortitude more so than--

[00:44:01] Ellie: The Jenny Odell How to Do Nothing girlies going on their walks without a podcast.

[00:44:06] David: Yeah. So I prefer the generative girly model than the bro stoic, "I'm just gonna sit here and look at nothing because I'm strong enough to do it." 

[00:44:15] Ellie: Oh, the term raw dogging is associated with masculinity? Shocking, David. 

We've described how our current age involves an attention economy or maybe even goes beyond that and should just be called the age of attention. How has attention come to be co-opted, extracted, and used as a resource in our present day? Here I want us to trace how attention has been, arguably, commodified.

[00:44:47] David: So for this, we have to look into the origin of how we think about the attention economy. Virtually all past treatments of the attention economy refer to the work of a really influential economist and cognitive scientist named Herbert Simon, and he is often cited as the source of this popular idea that when you live in a world where there is a lot of information, your attention becomes scarce 'cause you can't pay attention to everything.

So the way he puts it is, abundance of information leads to scarcity of attention. So for Simon, the advent of new technologies such as digital computing and mass media have completely transformed the parameters and the conditions of human attention. Nowadays, we have a lot more information that's available to us and information that we have to deal with, so we have moved as a culture from a relatively information scarce environment to an information abundant one.

And given our biologically limited capacity for attention, that you can't pay attention to everything, this new abundance leads to an allocation problem. We are overwhelmed with choices of what to focus on. However, more recently, the scholar Jelle Bruineberg has argued that Simon's way of thinking about attention isn't actually all that helpful for thinking about the attention economy, for these newer developments having to do with social media and attention grabbing and attentional load.

[00:46:27] Ellie: Jelle is one of my friends from when I did my sabbatical at University of Copenhagen as well, so we're to mention his work here.

[00:46:36] David: He has this really interesting critique of Simon where he says, look, one problem with Simon's interpretation of attention is that he believed that humans have this singular central system that is responsible for our attention, t hink about it as a human CPU. And Bruineberg points out that this is not really how the mind works. It's just not based on a contemporary understanding of cognitive science. Nowadays, cognitive scientists view attention as distributed throughout our entire cognitive architecture rather than being located in one particular module, for example, that gets activated for all the tasks that are performed by that architecture that involve attention.

On top of that, Bruineberg points out that Simon also thought that attention allocation is always an active process. Like I decide how to allocate my attention through decisions. And that runs the risk of committing the homuncular fallacy, the idea that inside my brain there is this tiny David, this tiny subject making intelligent decisions about where to allocate these precious resources. But that again is philosophically incoherent, we cannot posit a homunculus inside our mind making decisions that explain our behavior.

[00:48:05] Ellie: Who's like shining a light, I'm gonna focus on the painting right now versus I'm gonna focus on my crush versus I'm gonna focus on the... Well, I guess when you're focusing on the activist who threw a soup can, that's not your choice.

[00:48:17] David: That's involuntary. On the whole, I think the basic point that attention is a resource that is scarce stands. In an age like ours, which is an age of informational abundance, it does seem fair to say that attention becomes scarce, and because it's scarce, it becomes valuable in a new way, and that that value is what triggers the attention economy.

[00:48:44] Ellie: Okay. So there's a lot here. I think a question though is like whether it's right to think about attention as a resource and what follows I think presumes that it is, but I wanna leave open that question. If we think of attention as a resource, then it allows us to think of that resource as being extracted economically and eventually also being commodified. This is where I wanna talk about human fracking. That term, I mentioned, comes from the Attensity Manifesto. I think this is a super powerful metaphor because what the authors of the Attensity Manifesto say is that in the same way that literal fracking involves pumping a ton of toxic chemicals into the ground in order to extract this really valuable resource of fossil fuels from the earth itself. So fracking is super wasteful and super toxic because it involves this giant dump of chemicals for a relatively small amount of resources that then get extracted. 

Corporations now invade our minds for eight-plus hours a day in order to extract the valuable resource of human attention. And so a lot of times when we're scrolling, we might not actually be really paying a ton of attention to what we're looking at, or what we're looking at might not really translate into behavior. But if you just pump a ton of stuff at us for many hours a day, you will get some value out of it. You will get some attention. I might click on that Instagram ad link, whatever. And also, it's not just in terms of hours a day and content that I'm viewing, it's also in terms of the number of eyeballs worldwide that corporations are getting in virtue of having simply so many users.

And so I think that's a really powerful metaphor for thinking about attention as a resource. And again, they're understanding this kind of attention that corporations are extracting on that narrow experimental psychology model, which is selection for a task.

[00:50:47] David: I have to say I love the concept of human fracking and thinking about the attention economy in that way. One thing that you didn't mention is that one of the consequences of fracking is that it actually breaks the underground, right? It has these mechanical effects, and I think that also connects to what we were saying earlier about what it can do to young children. It can crack their minds and prevent a natural development or a full development of capacities like memory, focus, so on and so forth. But I think the question here really is, is thinking about attention as a resource a useful or a limiting framing mechanism, is it the right analogy? 

In some ways I can see the value. For instance, our attention is limited in the sense that it is finite, so in that sense it is kind of like oil. It runs out. At the end of the day, after a very busy day, I have no more attentional energy to give. Even if I want to,, it's run out, and that is tied to the scarcity and also the question of value.

Beyond that, I think it also makes sense to think about attention as a resource in the sense that it can be taken from me. I can be alienated from my attention insofar as somebody can steal it or appropriate it, and that's connected to the concept that you introduced, Ellie, of attention grabbing. These companies are grabbing or stealing our attention in a way that a thief might steal my resources, my water, my natural gas, my oil.

[00:52:22] Ellie: Well, and this is exactly the place where Hayes lands. In The Siren's Call, Hayes talks about how attention as a resource that gets extracted then gets alienated from us and commodified. And so he actually thinks that the modern attention economy does to attention something like what industrial capitalism did to labor. Labor is a human activity that we undertake as part of the kind of world-building species that we are. But under capitalism, labor gets alienated from us where we don't see our projects through till the end. We kind of become alienated from not only the product, especially through an assembly line model. You're not building a shoe from beginning to end, you might just be lacing it up or something. But we also get alienated from ourselves, alienated from each other. We have an entire episode on alienation if you wanna hear about that. 

Hayes thinks that something similar is happening with attention today. Our attention, in being so constantly grabbed through this scrolling model that's based on the slot machine, these addictive algorithms, is really no longer our own, and that's a scary prospect.

[00:53:31] David: Yeah, and even though I just said that I kind of like thinking about attention as a resource, I am also interested in thinking about how that metaphor might break down, 'cause I am very receptive to the idea that our attention is being alienated and commodified. But there are ways in which attention is different from labor in significant ways.

So for example, you said labor is an activity that we can choose to do, right? I can work. I don't think attention is an activity that we can choose to do. We are attentive subjects by nature. 

[00:54:04] Ellie: Fair. 

[00:54:05] David: You can't really have the labor leisure distinction in connection to attention unless you go through the world just like raw dogging every minute of your life without paying attention to any one thing, which is impossible, right? So that's one difference. I think another difference is that labor and attention are not commodified in the same way.

[00:54:27] Ellie: Yeah, this is something we were talking a little bit... We were talking about this in our production meeting yesterday with our producer Aaron too, and we got into a lot of debates about whether Hayes is right about this. So David, give us a little taste of that, 'cause this was something that came up for Aaron.

[00:54:42] David: So what Aaron was alluding to, and I agree with this, is that often what we mean by commodified attention is that, for instance, on social media, there's a bunch of ads that are thrown at us, like the platform profits precisely from our watch time because they will sell ad space or whatever. Like I'll click on the thing and buy the product. 

But I do think this is different from labor time because the companies that are selling this ad time, they don't really own my attention, and they don't control it directly in the same way that my boss can control my labor time and does kind of own it directly when I've sold it to them via a contract. Also, there is no real contract for selling our attention, in the same way that we do have contracts for selling our labor time. So that would be an additional point here. And so I would say that attention isn't being sold directly or in the same way that we sell our labor power.

What's happening rather is that the platforms are leveraging their indirect monopoly on our attention, the fact that they have access to our attention via our consumption, to sell access to our attention to other companies. So if anything, it's more like a rental model, if you wanna use that term, where by using these technologies, I'm kind of renting my attention, and then the companies can share it with others in order to sell me things. But I think the point here is that the metaphor also breaks down 'cause it's not really a resource in the traditional sense of the term.

[00:56:25] Ellie: We don't have space to determine whether or not we think it is a resource, but I will say what is common among critiques of the attention economy and also of the attention age, and I saw this explicitly both in the Attensity Manifesto and in Chris Hayes' book, The Siren Call, is the idea that attention is a resource. And what is unique about this particular era we're living in is the fact that corporations have figured out how to extract this resource in uniquely productive and coercive ways.

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[00:57:08] David: To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one-time tax-deductible donations, go to overthinkpodcast.com. You can also check us out on YouTube as well as TikTok and Instagram at overthink_pod. We'd like to thank co-producer and audio editor Aaron Morgan, production assistants Ila Assegaf and Xavier Callan, and Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.