Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude-Day 12

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

DAY 12 - Attention to Attention

Woke up before dawn and lingered in bed. Had images of myself huddled over a desk, immersed in results from calculations about the environmental conditions of Earth. I’ve had a lot of that in reality. I wondered what would happen if I could put an equivalent amount of attention, with the same intensity and duration of focus, into thinking about thinking. Professional cognitive scientists do this every day. But I am talking about an introspective focus for anyone, such as me. Though difficult for a formal scientific community to study, it seems amenable for doing by any of us.

Later, while eating breakfast on the porch, a rufous-sided towhee bird called to me from a nearby cedar tree. He’s a daily visitor. I heard the bird and my attention right quick went outwards, to seek his image within the tree branches. I threw a pinched-off corner of bread to the porch step. The towhee fluttered down, landed, grabbed the bread with its beak, and flew off.

This is one typical unfolding of the process of attention: an event from the sensory world startles, you turn, ponder, make a conclusion, move on. The ability to perform this procedure, which functions to turn the unknown (the call that startles) into the known (the bird and our morning ritual), must have evolved. The ability to proceed like this is biological; it’s so obviously basic.

Potentially, I could treat attention itself as a call to myself, the psyche’s equivalent to the outer world’s bird. When turning my eye in the direction from which where my ear hears the song—“Ah, the towhee comes!”—I could at the same time note the turning of my attention. I could also say, “Ah, I attended!” This would give attention to attention. Who is looking into this level of introspection, which we might call meta-attention? My guess is that Zen monks do. And so do many others, anyone with a bent to self-observation.

At first glance the two meta-levels—attention to attention and, secondly, thinking about thinking—appear closely related. Perhaps they can be distinguished in the following way. Attention usually sets a context for thought. Attention is like a tree, which, over a course of a time interval that could be short or long, gives rise to acorns of connected thoughts and actions. I searched for and spotted the towhee, broke a piece of bread, tossed it, watched the bird land, grab, then exit up. A number of small actions spun off from maintaining a focus of attention.

So, if we put attention to attention, then thoughts about that attention might similarly spin off. Here is a first initial observation about attention: Often, attention is associated with want or worry. There is a problem to be solved, a puzzle to consider. The bird’s call surprised me—where is it? Oh, the bird requests food. This analysis provides a clue. To focus attention on attention, we should make attention itself a worry, a puzzle to figure out. But usually we are not worried about the process of attention itself. How, then, could it be made into a worry?

We could become concerned about how conditioned we are, how robotic. Attention is obviously part of this conditioning, and attention determines a lot of our cognitive dynamics, about who we are and our inner quests.

I once spent a holiday in Japan. One morning, after an overnight trip on a ferry along the inland sea, we had a two-day visit to the Zen monastery of Eihei-ji. A senior monk helped with logistics, explained his views on proper thinking, and, as he pointed the way for a self-guided tour, gave advise on how to experience the temple grounds. Walk around and enjoy the beautiful architecture, he said, but don’t neglect to stop and listen to the birds and the wind in the trees. What does that mean? What can one learn from birds and wind in trees? Well, they can teach us how we are inwardly. Perhaps they can teach us about attention.

There’s a song in my head, just one line and a melody playing over and over: “We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder.”

© 2024 by Tyler Volk