Attention is not a spotlight

The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

Attention is often described as a spotlight: a narrow beam you control to reveal different parts of the world.

This metaphor makes some intuitive sense but it obscures more than it reveals.

The spotlight model suggests detachment—attention is something we wield to light up an inert world. It suggests that the whole question of attention is a case of locking in on the right things, to meet our fixed needs.

But there is no such transaction. The self and the world are in constant conversation. Everything is continually—yet partially—revealing itself. You can never know something “all at once.” The conversation never concludes.

And what stands out to you in the first place precedes your decisions about what to attend to. The world is already alive with relevance, calling to you based on your name, nationality, culture and preferences. It’s ecological, not mechanical.

The self who attends is never quite the same either. Each act of attending changes us slightly and the more we infuse our attention with our values, the more the world around us appears to change. Certain things fade into the background whilst others leap into stark relief.

If you bring your attention to what you care about and notice when you’re being pulled in other directions, you create a kind of gravitational force that shapes your character.

If you let anything capture your attention, your character is still being shaped. You just don’t have much say in it.

All of this is to say that attention is much, much more than a spotlight.