No copy-pasted definitions please. Use your own words.
One ttention
Your ability to focus on one thing voluntarily
Focus what on one thing?
Your thoughts.
(And to a lesser extent your actions, but that gets tougher to define since external factors will apply more there.)
I would add senses to that. It’s not just thinking about it, but also applying your senses towards it.
The act of directing your thoughts towards something in particular.
You can direct attention at thoughts though. And sights, sounds, etc.
It’s like sights, sounds, thoughts, smells etc are things in a dark room. And attention is a flashlight. And you shine the flashlight upon things.
Why “though”? We usually reserve that word for when we’re about to introduce a counterexample or some other means of contradicting a claim.
But thoughts are also particular things, so clearly one can direct their thoughts to particular thoughts. And even to the act of thinking in particular about thoughts, because that is a thing one can think about.
Because you described attention as “directing your thoughts towards something”.
But thought is one of the things you can direct attention at.
So I would put thought in the class of “things that I can direct my attention at”, with no necessary tie to attention.
Also, “thinking about a thought” looks quite different to me from “directing my attention at a thought”. It looks to me like “directing my attention at a thought about a thought”.
In what way does your second paragraph contradict your first? They seem independent of each other to me. The two together mean that a thought is something that we can attend to, and I believe that’s true in part because I have experienced it.
I agree that a thought is a thing we can attend to and I don’t know how that could possibly conflict with describing attention as the act of directing thoughts to a particular thing, including to a particular thought. I am, right now, attending to the thought “I don’t understand why this person sees these statements as conflicting with each other” in part because I want to remain curious about why you think these statements conflict with each other, and so I am attending to these thoughts in order to be on the lookout for judgmental thoughts that tend to interfere with being curious.
Attention is a kind of surplus mental capacity that we have, which isn’t specialized, but can instead be directed to tasks as needed. Ironically, we also use the term for the dedicated mental system which directs this extra capacity, which makes talking about it a bit more complicated.
Most of the stuff we do, our brains just kinda handle for us. Walking is usually like that; it’s an incredibly complex feat of dynamic balance, movement planning, and adaptation to changes in the environment, but it rarely takes any conscious effort on our part. Conscious effort is directed attention.
Attention is the ability of an intelligent system to temporarily work selectively on a particular subset of its inputs, thus making less use of other simultaneous inputs.
When you attend to a piece of music you’re listening to, your mind makes less use of the visual details of what’s in front of your eyes, or of your memories, or of the texture of the seat your butt is on.
If you reach your hand over and start attending to the thigh of the person sitting next to you, your mind makes less use of the music.
If you’re meditating and attending to your breath, you might still notice the crow cawing outside your window, but you don’t dwell on it; the crow sound passes and you go back to your breath.
Let’s say you are in a dark room with a flashlight.
You direct the flashlight at stuff in the room.
The things in the dark room are sights, sounds, thoughts.
We could call the flashlight “attention”.
We could call the act of directing the flashlight “paying attention” or “directing attention”.
And we can focus the light, make it tight and bright. Concentrate it.
We could also spread it out wide.
But the light itself? I dunno. Is it a magic ray?
Then again, reducing reality to an array of sensations like this is a significant step away from the conventional narrative anyway. Terminology gets screwy.
Attention is where you place focus on something. This is done through both the action of looking and the action of taking that information in and comprehending what you’re looking at. Attention can be applied to other senses too, such as listening, feeling, etc.
It’s also another word for alertness.
Occupying someone’s conscious thought.
Focus placed specifically upon a thing.
Focus what, exactly? Give it a name.
I mean, you could also call the thing that you are focusing “attention”.
Like you finger things with your finger.
Hand things with your hand.
Eyeball somebody with your eyeball.
It can be any sort of focus. Physical, mental, emotional, etc.
Elsewhere in this thread I likened attention to a flashlight in a dark room. And the things in the dark room being the sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions, etc. And then you direct the flashlight at the things.
What do you think of that way of thinking about it?
Yeah that sounds about right :)
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The ability for a brain to continue to focus on one concept without getting distracted.
Attention is the connection of the brain waves of two living subjects
You never pay attention to a car. Nor did you get attention from a car. Only from humans or animals.
You never pay attention to a car.
Your tires and oil change are in severely desperate shape, then.
Indeed, they are. Riding bike way too often. Currently my car is painted with spider webs, leaves, and moss
I’d like to talk to you about your insurance premium…
Nah. I pay attention to the driver not the car.
man dies crossing street
I‘m German. I even wait at the red traffic light if no car is on the street.
(German) man dies waiting for green light.
Where/what a given amount of time’s energy allotment is focused towards
Attention is a thing that we focus?
What you stand to when I tell you to soldier, if you’ve quite finished asking questions!
It’s a song by The Academy Is
Conscience that focuses on either an object of the physical world and/or a subject of the nonphysical realm
Selecting a particular stream of sensory data to be of higher importance or validity over other streams of data and over mental picture generated by brain based on other data and prior assumptions.
