Do not think about the light bulb above

Assuming I have your attention, are you still mentally picturing a light bulb despite wanting to see something else? Welcome to the black magic we call attention. The greater your intention to avoid it, the more likely your attention will discover that thing elsewhere in your world. And once introduced to a novel idea or a new fashion, you frequently discover its prior presence in places you had not noticed before.

How does our attention materialise such things as if by magic? What's going on here?

Come with me on a brief journey of the mind and I will illuminate this phenomenon. Leave your baggage about what is in the heart and what is in the mind aside for a moment; we'll come back to it after. Let's look around the space we call consciousness and consider why we seem to have this inner world to ourselves while everything else outside you and me is apparently shared with everyone; let's call that the universe. From the moment your life began, you've been attempting to make sense of that universe by directing attention to models that are constantly forming inside your consciousness. Although imperfect, these offer an accessible version of the universe to engage; actually internalising the universe in its entirety is manifestly not possible. Nevertheless this useful substitution (models for reality) remains life's greatest trick of consciousness; we can't manage any feat of awareness without bootstrapping on shared social delusion.

Why is this substitution an illusion? Simply put, the map is not the territory.

Just how vast is the gap between an infinitely complex universe and a human operating at maximum abilities of perception? Even if we are engaging all the models in our head with our senses, our memories, and the language and culture we share with others, the full measure of we can perceive at any moment is impossibly small by any comparison we might propose. Into this gap charges our attention, like a flashlight shining a narrow beam of light over the surfaces of a vast dark cavern. We capture a picture of what's there as the light of our attention is reflected back to us by someone or something caught in its illumination. But mostly we can't see what's there because what exists outside our models fails to reflect back to us coherently; these register nothing recognisable to us yet. So what we can perceive within our consciousness are mainly things we have directed our attention to discovering (including those things we hoped to avoid). This circularity feels problematic.

Somehow, new things manage to pop up and once we recognise their presence, we update our models as we interact with newly-coherent aspects reality. Our ability to learn suggests some process must exist by which we expand the scope of our consciousness even if most of the universe remains manifestly beyond our grasp. Of all the models I've encountered that try to explain how this happens, the bicameral approach suggested by Dr Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and His Emissary feels most convincing: within our right brain we experience everything as if there were no boundary between us and the rest of the universe; within it we can infer new knowledge which becomes labelled in an explicit model applied by the left brain that generates structures like boundaries and hierarchy.

Consequently, regardless of whether you go looking for groceries, social status, authority, or beauty, an object of your attention which exist in reality tends to materialise from sustained attention just like potential food comes into view when you direct it to satisfy your hunger. The food was always there. You simply couldn't see it before because your attention was elsewhere. The iterative nature of such searches form fractal patterns over time that we associate with emotions; cultural aspects of our social surroundings are similarly integrated into models that allow us to reproduce their programming on demand. Contrary to popular perception, emotion has nothing to do with flawed logic (this enlightenment-era canard ought to have been let go back when Kurt G?del destroyed formal mathematicians' great hope for self-proving formal logic a century ago but I'll leave that topic for another post).

Emotions under examination, just like mathematically generated fractals, have boundaries which appear to grow more complex as they're approached. Yet both have their characteristic patterns that offer up to us a similar impression no matter the scale. This latter property is known as self-similarity or scale invariance or more commonly: "I know it when I see it" (or feel it). Each fractal pattern (or emotion) has distinctive character; models within us are essentially fractal patterns captured and re-generated by our neural networks. We say "I know it in my gut" when asked to explain them, yet those who carefully make the attempt can convert many of them into accessible language or even mathematical formulae. The magic of AI comes out of the fact that neural networks can be trained to reproduce these fractal patterns if given enough human output from which to learn.

It is in a similar vein that attention-grabbing popular mindsets like "The Power of Positive Thinking" or "The Law of Attraction" find such fertile ground. They describe aspects of how our attention genuinely appears to materialise that which we're paying attention to within our consciousness. But because they can't (or won't) acknowledge the gap with reality and the role it plays in fooling us, they attach instead a pseudoscientific explanation which (conveniently) cannot be falsified. Hapless adherents may end up advocating for the self-defeating command "do not think negative thoughts" which then immediately causes their attention to surface great quantities of what they're told not to engage. Naturally, a kind of race condition emerges in which a valiant attempt to suppress such thoughts captures all their remaining capacity for attention and a great deal of their energy.

With that, we find ourselves back in the room in which you left your baggage. You may pick up again the popular notion of heart and mind, locked in an eternal struggle represented by the angel and devil on our shoulders whispering into our ears. There's a certain utility to this model, if only to retain currency with the many social constructs that rely on it to explain human behaviour and the role of attention in driving it. Ultimately it's inertia that makes collectively updating shared models such a heavy lift, whether one traces why it took germ theory centuries to be accepted by medicine or how it could be that so many outcome chains form naturally around patterns of attention which amplify whatever we select as their target. Either way the result feels like magic when we look back at how the choice of what we pay attention to actually matters.