These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
The Paradox of Attention Attention is the process by
which we focus on something. This sounds like an oxymoron, because the brain is
always reacting to everything. Therefore it can't focus on
"something". The sheer amount
of data that enters the brain at every second is a distraction. The brain is always
processing everything that comes in, whether from the eyes or from the ears.
The brain behaves like a machine reacting to all the inputs it receives. It
doesn't have a choice: those inputs are transformed into electrochemical
messages that cause electrochemical reactions spreading from the senses to the
inner units of the brain. Limiting the brain's work to just one of these
electrochemical processes is impossible. All the processes are going on at the
same time, just because data hit our senses, and just because the senses always
send signals to the brain, and just because every signal causes processing in
the brain. That is why, when we are
driving and looking for a street in an unfamiliar neighborhood, we often turn
down the radio. We cannot control the
processing of the brain but we can control what data enter the brain. Attention is a contradiction
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