Brioches and Knife, Eliot Hodgkin, 08/1961
1.
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. Attention is something we “have to protect.” We have to “pay” attention—like a tribute. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be. Slowing down makes reality vivid, strange, and hot.
Let me start with the most obvious example. As anyone who has had good sex knows, sustained attention and delayed satisfaction are a big part of it. When you resist the urge to go ahead and get what you want and instead stay in the moment, you open up a space for seduction and fantasy. Desire begins to loop on itself and intensify.
I’m not sure what is going on here, but my rough understanding is that the expectation of pleasure activates the dopaminergic system in the brain. Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon. So when we are being seduced and sense that something pleasurable is coming—but it keeps being delayed, and delayed skillfully—the phasic bursts of dopamine ramp up the levels higher and higher, pulling more receptors to the surface of the cells, making us more and more sensitized to the surely-soon-to-come pleasure. We become hyperattuned to the sensations in our genitals, lips, and skin.
And it is not only dopamine ramping up that makes seduction warp our attentional field, infusing reality with intensity and strangeness. There are a myriad of systems that come together to shape our feeling of the present: there are glands and hormones and multiple areas of the brain involved. These are complex physical processes: hormones need to be secreted and absorbed; working memory needs to be cleared and reloaded, and so on. The reason deep attention can’t happen the moment you notice something is that these things take time.
What’s more, each of these subsystems update what they are reacting to at a different rate. Your visual cortex can cohere in less than half a second. A stress hormone like cortisol, on the other hand, has a half-life of 60–90 minutes and so can take up to 6 hours to fully clear out after the onset of an acute stressor. This means that if we switch what we focus on more often than, say, every 30 minutes, our system will be more or less decohered—different parts will be “attending to” different aspects of reality. There will be “attention residue” floating around in our system—leftovers from earlier things we paid attention to (thoughts looping, feelings circling below consciousness, etc.), which crowd out the thing we have in front of us right now, making it less vivid.
Inversely, the longer we are able to sustain the attention without resolving it and without losing interest, the more time the different systems of the body have to synchronize with each other, and the deeper the experience gets.
Locked in on the same thing, the subsystems begin to reinforce each other: the dopamine makes us aware of our skin, and sensations on the skin ramp up dopamine release, making us even more aware of our skin. A finger touches our belly, and we start to fantasize about where that finger might be going; and so now our fantasies are locked in, too, releasing even more dopamine and making us even more aware of our skin. The more the subsystems lock in, the more intense the feedback loops get, and after twenty minutes, our sense of self has evaporated, and we’re in a realm where we do, feel, and think things that would seem surreal in other contexts.
2.
Similar things happen when we are able to sustain our attention to things other than sex, too. The exact mechanics differ, I presume, but the basic pattern is that when we linger on something, our bodily systems synchronize and feed each other stimuli in an escalatory loop that restructures our attentional field.
Almost anything that we are able to direct sustained attention at will begin to loop on itself and bloom.
To take a dark example, if you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.
And you do the same thing with joy. If you learn to pay sustained attention to your happiness, the pleasant sensation will loop on itself until it explodes and pulls you into a series of almost hallucinogenic states, ending in cessation, where your consciousness lets go and you disappear for a while. This takes practice. The practice is called jhanas, and it is sometimes described as the inverse of a panic attack. I have only ever entered the first jhana, once while spending an hour putting our four-year-old to sleep and meditating on how wonderful it is to lie there next to her. It was really weird and beautiful.
“Kinda nice”, I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had ‘the right size’, their roar was pleasant… I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy crests as they disintegrate back into the ocean. The feeling of the sun on my skin. I felt overwhelmed.
The fact that we can enter fundamentally different, and often exhilarating, states of mind by learning how to sustain our attention is fascinating. It makes you wonder what other states are waiting out there. What will happen if you properly pay attention to an octopus? What about your sense of loneliness? A mathematical idea? The weights of a neural net? There are so many things that we can let bloom inside of us.
One of my favorite things to sustain attention toward is art.
3.
There was a period in my twenties when I didn’t get art. I thought artists were trying to say something, but I felt superior because I thought there had to be better ways of getting their ideas across (and also, better ideas). But then I realized that good art—at least the art I am spontaneously drawn to—has little to do with communication. Instead, it is about crafting patterns of information that, if you feed them sustained attention, will begin to structure your consciousness in interesting ways. Art is guided meditation. The point isn’t the words, but what happens to your mind when you attend to those words (or images, or sounds). There is nothing there to understand; it is just something to experience, like sex. But the experiences can be very deep and, sometimes, transformative.
In 2019, for example, I saw a performance of Jean Sibelius’s 5th Symphony at the University Hall in Uppsala. Before the concert began, I spent a few minutes with my eyes closed, doing a body scan, to be fully present when the music began. As the horns at the opening of the piece called out, I decided to keep my eyes closed, so I wouldn’t be distracted by looking at the hands of the musicians. Then… a sort of daydream started up.
The structure of the music was such that it gave me enough predictability and enough surprise to allow my attention to deeply cohere. The melody lines and harmonies dredged up memories and images from my subconscious, weaving them into a rich cinematic web of stories. Guided by the music, my mind could tunnel into an attentional state where I was able to see things I had never seen before and where I could work through some deep emotional pain that seemed to resolve itself through the images.
When the music stopped, I barely knew where I was. I opened my eyes and remembered that my brother was sitting next to me. “What did you think?” I said. “I don’t know,” he said. “I felt kind of restless.”