Article 6: Attention and Invisibility

Framing

You do not see everything in front of you. At any moment, your visual field contains far more information than you can process. But you do not perceive it as overwhelming. Instead, you perceive a coherent world with certain things standing out and others fading into the background.

This is not because the background is less real. It is because your attention has been directed elsewhere. You are looking at the speaker and not noticing the color of the wall. You are reading these words and not noticing the temperature of the room. You are focused on one conversation and filtering out dozens of other conversations happening around you.

Attention is selective. It must be. The human nervous system cannot process all available information simultaneously. Attention is a mechanism for managing this limitation. It directs resources toward what is deemed important and away from what is deemed irrelevant.

But who decides what is important? And what happens to the things that are deemed irrelevant?

When something is not attended to, it does not cease to exist. It continues to be present. But it ceases to be present to consciousness. It becomes invisible not because it is hidden, but because attention has been directed elsewhere.

This creates a peculiar situation: the invisible is not absent. It is simply unattended. And what is unattended can exert powerful effects while remaining unnoticed.

The question is whether attention simply reveals what is already salient in the world, or whether attention creates salience. Does attention discover importance, or does attention construct it?

I. The Bandwidth Problem

The human sensory system receives information at a rate far exceeding what consciousness can process. The retina contains approximately 126 million photoreceptors. Each one is responding to incoming light. Each one is generating a signal. The optic nerve transmits these signals to the brain at a rate of about 9 million bits per second.

But consciousness can process information at a much slower rate. The conscious mind can handle roughly 40 to 50 bits per second. This means that at any moment, the brain is discarding roughly 99.9 percent of the sensory information available to it.

This discarding is not random. It is highly selective. The brain has mechanisms for deciding what information to keep and what to discard. Attention is one of those mechanisms.

Attention acts as a filter. It allows certain information to reach consciousness while preventing other information from reaching consciousness. The information that is filtered out does not disappear. It is processed by the brain at non-conscious levels. It influences behavior and perception. But it does not become conscious.

This filtering is necessary. Without it, consciousness would be overwhelmed. We would experience the world as an undifferentiated chaos of sensory data. We would be unable to think, unable to act, unable to maintain a coherent sense of self.

But the filtering is also consequential. What is filtered out shapes what is possible to think and perceive. If the filter is constructed in a certain way, certain possibilities become invisible.

Consider the famous "invisible gorilla" experiment. Subjects are asked to watch a video of two teams passing a basketball. They are told to count how many times one team passes the ball. While watching the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks across the screen, pounds their chest, and walks off. More than half of the subjects do not see the gorilla. Not because the gorilla is hidden. But because attention is directed toward counting basketball passes. The gorilla is in the visual field but not in the attentional field. It is invisible.

This shows something important: attention is not the same as perception. You can perceive something without attending to it. The gorilla is perceived at non-conscious levels. The brain registers that there is something unusual in the visual field. But because attention is directed elsewhere, the unusual thing does not reach consciousness. It does not become part of what you experience.

Now, most of what we call "reality" is constructed at this non-conscious level. Most of what reaches consciousness is already heavily filtered, already organized, already structured according to patterns of attention that were laid down long before this moment.

The question is: who or what is doing the filtering? What determines what reaches consciousness and what does not?

II. The Sources of Attentional Direction

Attention can be directed in several ways. Some directions are automatic, arising from the structure of the nervous system itself. Some are voluntary, arising from intention and choice. Some are social, arising from the presence and expectations of others.

Automatic attention is driven by salience. A loud noise grabs attention automatically. A sudden movement in the visual field grabs attention. A stimulus that is novel or unexpected grabs attention. These automatic attentional responses likely evolved because they served survival purposes. The sudden movement might be a predator. The loud noise might signal danger. Attending to the novel and unexpected could mean the difference between life and death.

But in the modern world, these automatic responses often direct attention toward things that are not actually important for survival. A notification on your phone pings. Your attention is automatically drawn to it. The notification system exploits automatic attention mechanisms for commercial purposes. It grabs attention not because the notification is important to you, but because the notification system is designed to be salient.

Voluntary attention is directed by intention. You can choose to attend to something even if it is not salient. You can focus on a difficult task even though your mind wants to wander. You can notice the color of the wall even though you were not looking for it. This voluntary attention requires effort. It consumes cognitive resources. You cannot maintain voluntary attention on many things simultaneously.

Social attention is directed by the presence and expectations of others. When you are with other people, your attention is influenced by where they are looking, what they are talking about, what they seem to think is important. Children learn what to attend to largely by following the gaze and attention of adults. Over time, we internalize these patterns. We learn which things in the world are considered important and worthy of attention and which things are considered unimportant and can be ignored.

Different cultures direct attention toward different things. A culture that depends on hunting might train attention toward subtle signs of animal movement. A culture that depends on farming might train attention toward signs of weather and soil conditions. A culture that depends on trade might train attention toward the qualities of goods and the trustworthiness of other traders.

These different directions of attention do not simply reveal different aspects of a pre-existing world. They actually construct different worlds. They make certain features salient and other features invisible. They determine what people learn to notice and what people learn to ignore.

When a child grows up in a culture that attends to kinship relations, the child learns to see the world as structured by kinship. They notice which people are related to them, what obligations and relationships flow from those connections. A child growing up in a culture that does not emphasize kinship relations learns to see the world differently. Different people are salient. Different relationships matter.

This does not mean that kinship relations do not exist for children raised in the second culture. It means that kinship relations are not attended to. They are not organized as a primary feature of social reality.

III. What Becomes Invisible

When attention is directed away from something, that something becomes invisible. But invisibility is not the same as non-existence.

A person can become invisible simply by being ignored. If people consistently fail to attend to a person—if they interrupt them, fail to make eye contact, fail to acknowledge their presence—the person becomes socially invisible. They are still there. They are still perceiving and acting. But they are not part of the social world that other people attend to. Their actions do not register. Their words go unheard.

This kind of invisibility has profound effects. It shapes what the invisible person can do, what they can think, what they can become. To be invisible is to have less power to shape the social world.

The invisibility is not chosen by the invisible person. It is imposed by the patterns of attention of others. The invisible person is made invisible by being excluded from the attentional field of the visible people.

Similarly, features of the world can become invisible through systematic patterns of inattention. Poverty becomes invisible to those who are not poor. The poor are present, but the affluent may not attend to the signs of poverty. They may drive through poor neighborhoods without noticing the conditions. They may encounter poor people without registering their poverty.

This inattention does not mean poverty does not exist. It means that those who do not attend to poverty do not have to confront it. They can maintain a picture of the world in which poverty is marginal or rare because their attention does not direct them toward evidence of widespread poverty.

Similarly, injustice can become invisible. If you do not attend to the ways that a system disadvantages certain groups, you will not see the injustice. You will see individual cases and might attribute them to bad luck or personal failure. You will not see the pattern.

But the pattern is still there. It is still shaping outcomes. It is still producing effects. It is invisible not because it is hidden, but because attention is directed away from it.

Attention can be directed away from something intentionally. Those who benefit from an invisible injustice have an interest in maintaining that invisibility. If they could make themselves attend to the injustice, they might feel obligated to change it. Better, from their perspective, to simply not attend to it.

But often, inattention is not intentional. It is built into the culture. It is built into the language, the institutions, the common-sense ways of perceiving the world. People are trained, from childhood, to not attend to certain things. The training is invisible. The inattention feels natural.

IV. Attention and Meaning

What you attend to shapes what things mean to you. A piece of music means something different depending on what you attend to. If you attend to the melody, you hear a certain thing. If you attend to the harmony, you hear something different. If you attend to the rhythm, something else. If you attend to the timbral qualities of the instruments, yet something else.

All of these attentions are attended to the same piece of music. But what they hear is different. Not because the music is different, but because what they are listening for is different.

The meaning emerges from the interaction between the thing and the attention directed toward it. The same thing can have radically different meanings depending on what attention is brought to it.

A face has meaning. The meaning is not in the face itself. The meaning is constructed by the attention you bring to the face. You might attend to the person's beauty or lack thereof. You might attend to the emotions expressed in the face. You might attend to the signs of age or health. You might attend to how the face resembles someone else you know.

Each attention constructs a different meaning. The same face is beautiful or ugly, open or closed, young or old, familiar or strange, depending on the attention brought to it.

This is not to say that meaning is arbitrary. The face constrains what meanings are possible. A face cannot mean "friendly and open" while simultaneously expressing signs of fear and closure. There are constraints from the thing itself.

But within those constraints, meaning is constructed through attention. Different people will construct different meanings from the same face depending on what they attend to.

This has important implications. It means that to change what something means, you must change what attention is brought to it. You must train people to attend to different features. You must make visible what was invisible.

This is the work of art, of teaching, of consciousness-raising. A skilled artist can direct your attention toward features of the world you had not noticed. A good teacher can train your attention toward patterns you had not seen. A consciousness-raising conversation can make visible the invisible patterns of injustice.

But the work is not simple. Attention is shaped by decades of habituation. It is shaped by culture, by language, by power structures. To redirect attention is to work against these deep structures.

V. The Attention Economy

In the modern world, attention has become a scarce resource. Many people and institutions are competing for your attention. Your attention is valuable because it determines what reaches your consciousness and what remains invisible.

This has given rise to what is sometimes called the "attention economy." Advertisers, media companies, technology platforms—all are competing for the limited resource of your attention. They employ sophisticated techniques to make their content salient, to grab automatic attention, to direct voluntary attention toward themselves.

From the perspective of these attention-seekers, your attentional resources are a territory to be conquered. They want your attention to be directed toward their products, their messages, their platforms.

The techniques are increasingly sophisticated. They exploit automatic attention mechanisms. A notification pings at just the right moment to grab your attention. A headline is crafted to provoke emotion and curiosity. An algorithm is designed to show you content that is most likely to engage your attention.

The result is that attention is increasingly colonized. More and more of the attentional resources of more and more people are being directed by systems designed to capture that attention. The attention is directed away from many things and toward specific targets chosen by the designers of these systems.

What becomes invisible in this process? Everything that is not designed to be salient. Everything that is boring, unglamorous, not optimized for engagement. Everything that is complex and requires sustained voluntary attention.

This might include: careful thought, sustained reading, the lives of people distant from you, the long-term consequences of actions, alternative possibilities, uncomfortable truths.

These things do not disappear. They continue to exist. They continue to shape outcomes. But they become invisible to consciousness because attention is directed elsewhere.

The question is whether this is sustainable. Can a society continue to function well when attention is so thoroughly colonized, when what remains invisible is so consequential?

But there is a deeper question: what was the distribution of attention before the attention economy? Was attention then distributed according to what was actually important? Or has it simply been redistributed—from things that were important to things that are profitable to keep attention on?

It is not clear that we can answer this question. We do not have a neutral vantage point from which to evaluate what deserves attention. We are always already embedded in systems that direct attention. We cannot step outside those systems to see what "really" deserves attention.

VI. The Voluntary Redirection of Attention

It is possible to redirect attention voluntarily. It is difficult and requires effort, but it is possible.

You can choose to attend to something even if it is not automatically salient and even if you have not been trained to attend to it. You can direct your attention toward the color of the wall if you want to. You can attend to the ambient sounds in a room that you had not noticed before. You can attend to the physical sensations in your body that you normally ignore.

This voluntary redirection of attention makes visible what was invisible. The wall's color was always there, but you had not been attending to it. The ambient sounds were always present, but you had not been listening. The sensations in your body were always being generated, but you had not been noticing them.

When you attend to something that was previously invisible, it can feel like a discovery. It feels like you have learned something new about the world. But what has actually happened is that you have changed your attention. The thing was always there. It is your attentional relationship to the thing that has changed.

This capacity for voluntary attention is important. It is one way that you can partially free yourself from the patterns of attention that have been instilled in you. You can choose to notice what you have been trained to ignore. You can choose to ignore what you have been trained to notice.

But this freedom is limited. Voluntary attention requires effort and cannot be sustained indefinitely. And even when you successfully redirect attention, you are still selecting what to attend to. You are still ignoring most of what is present. You are still constructing invisibility.

Moreover, the very ability to voluntarily redirect attention depends on having options. If your attention is completely colonized—if your mind is completely occupied with urgent demands—you may not have the cognitive resources available to redirect attention voluntarily. You may be trapped in patterns of attention that you have no capacity to escape.

VII. Attention and Reality

This raises a fundamental question: what is the relationship between what we attend to and what is real?

One possibility is that what is real is independent of what we attend to. Reality exists as it is, and attention simply reveals or conceals what is already there. From this perspective, attention is like a spotlight. It illuminates certain parts of the world, but the world exists whether the spotlight is on it or not.

But this perspective faces a difficulty. We have no access to reality except through what we attend to. We cannot see the parts of the world that the spotlight does not illuminate. We cannot even know that they are there, except by inference. So in what sense are they real to us?

Another possibility is that attention constructs reality. What we attend to is real. What we do not attend to is not real—at least, not real in the way that matters to consciousness.

But this perspective also faces difficulties. If attention constructs reality, then changing attention should change reality. But clearly, there are constraints. You cannot make a wall disappear by not attending to it. You cannot make gravity stop working by not thinking about it.

A third possibility is that reality has a structure that is independent of attention, but the world as we experience it—the meaningful world, the lived world—is constructed through patterns of attention. The thing-in-itself may exist independent of all consciousness, but the thing-as-it-appears-to-us is always constructed through attention.

This third possibility suggests that reality is not simply divided into "what is attended to" and "what is not attended to." Rather, there are degrees of reality. What is attended to reaches consciousness. What is not attended to remains at non-conscious levels but still influences behavior and thought. What is not registered at all by the nervous system is, for practical purposes, completely absent from the world as we know it.

But this still leaves the question: what determines how attention is distributed? Is it simply a biological and psychological fact—determined by the structure of the nervous system and the history of the individual? Or is it malleable—shaped by culture, by power, by deliberate choice?

The answer seems to be both. Attention is shaped by biology—by what is automatically salient to human perception. But it is also shaped by culture—by what people are trained to notice. And it is shaped by power—by systems designed to direct attention toward specific targets.

Understanding which is which is difficult. It is difficult to distinguish between what is naturally salient and what has been made to seem naturally salient through cultural training.

Closing: The Politics and Metaphysics of Attention

Attention is not a neutral mechanism for revealing reality. Attention is also a political and social mechanism. Control of attention is control over what becomes visible and what remains invisible.

Those who can direct the attention of others have power. They can make certain things important and other things irrelevant. They can make certain patterns visible and other patterns invisible. They can shape what people think and perceive and care about.

But attention is not completely controllable. There is always slippage. There is always the possibility that attention will wander, will notice something unexpected, will turn toward what was meant to remain invisible.

Moreover, the capacity for voluntary attention means that people can, to some degree, redirect their own attention. They can choose to look at what they have been trained to ignore. They can choose to ignore what they have been trained to notice.

The question is whether this capacity for voluntary attention is being strengthened or weakened in societies increasingly organized around attention capture. Is the ability to redirect attention something that is cultivated, or something that is eroded by systems designed to keep attention fixed?

And underlying all of this is a metaphysical question that may not have a simple answer: are we discovering reality through attention, or are we constructing reality through attention? Is attention a window onto what is, or is attention the mechanism through which "what is" becomes articulated and real?

The answer may depend on what we mean by "reality." And what we mean by "reality" may itself be shaped by our patterns of attention.