Whatever the underlying reality may be, we live our lives in a concrete reality defined by what we are willing to pay attention to. “An act of pure attention, if you know it, will bring about its own answer,” wrote DH Lawrence. But we live mostly in an area of irresponsibility because there is no pure attention – the area of our attention is bound by a lot of circumstances and is focused on the brain shaped by millions of years of evolutionary needs, many of which have long since developed.
How the brain generates attention and what that means for our relationship with reality is what a British psychiatrist with a philosophical lens says. Iain McGilchrist he takes his greatness, in both senses of the word, to be a book Matter of Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Making of the World (public library) – an investigation of how “the very processes of the brain that succeed in simplifying the world to put it under our control are opposed to truly understanding it,” and how a rich understanding of those processes can be made to live a close and happy and real communion. At its heart is the realization that “the whole is not the sum of its 'parts'” and that “in fact there are no such 'parts', but that they are the art of a certain way of looking at the world.”
Marking his passionate 3,000-page effort to weave together neuropsychology (how our brains shape our perception of reality), epistemology (how we know anything), and metaphysics (our eagerness to remove meaning from basic reality as we try to decipher the nature of the universe) is our ongoing search for awareness of how to perceive the world. You write:
The world we know cannot be completely independent of the mind, nor can it be completely dependent on the mind… What is required is a careful response to something that is real and not us, of which we only have ideas at first, but which comes into being largely through our reaction to it – if we really respond to it. We grow it into what it is; or not. In this there is something of a romantic structure.
This real aspect is what Iris Murdoch had in mind when she saw that “love is the most difficult realization that something outside of you is real,” and what the poet J.
McGilchrist looks at how our attention shapes our reality and becomes the beating heart with which we love the world:
It illuminates all parts as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience – the only one we know – is affected by the kind of attention we give to it.
Defining attention as “the way our awareness is oriented toward whatever else is present,” he writes:
The choice we make in how we dispose of our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it gives the world what it is. Therefore, it is a moral action: it has consequences.
A century after William James insisted that our experience is what we agree to care about, and two generations after Simone Weil asserted that “attention is a rare and pure form of giving,” McGilchrist adds:
Attention changes the world. How you take care of it changes what you get there. What you get then controls the kind of attention you will think you should pay in the future. And so it is that the world you know (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “reinforced” – and brought into being.
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Attention is not just another “cognitive activity”: it is… the condition that human consciousness acquires in relation to the world. Absent, present, connected, involved, isolated, sensitive, wide or narrow, solid or fragmentary, and therefore has the power to change whatever it encounters. Since our consciousness plays a role in what happens, the game of attention can create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you take care of something – or not take care of it – is very important.
In most of the remaining time A Story About ThingsMcGilchrist goes on to explore how “the type, and level, and extent, of attention we pay changes the nature of the world we experience,” which is largely shaped by the difference between the way the two hemispheres of the brain pay attention — “narrow-beam, focused attention” on the left, “broad, continuous vigilance” on the right. Fill this piece of yours with Mary Oliver with attention and love, then revisit brilliant scientist Alexandra Horowitz's field guide to eleven ways to pay attention to life's everyday miracles.
