The Sphere of Attention


Book Description

The phone call came mid-afternoon in February of 1996. The program chair for the annual meeting for the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology wanted to make sure he had the facts right. “This is somewhat unusual...” he began. “You’re a philosophy professor who wants to present to psychologists in the psychology portion of the meeting.” “That’s right.” “Well your paper was accepted for that part of the program but the others just wanted me to check and make sure that’s where you want to be presenting.” “That’s right.” Reassured, the professor wished me luck and said good-bye. In my session at the meeting, I was the last to present. As my time approached, the medium-sized room slowly became crowded. I dreamed that these psychologists had left their other meetings early to make sure to catch my presentation on the use of metaphors in attention research. As I arose to present I noticed that the half-full room had become standing room only! Finally, after years of feeling as if I was struggling alone in promoting and defending a phenomenology of attention, I had an eager audience for my message. My persistence had paid off. I delivered my message with passion.




The Sphere of Attention


Book Description

The phone call came mid-afternoon in February of 1996. The program chair for the annual meeting for the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology wanted to make sure he had the facts right. “This is somewhat unusual...” he began. “You’re a philosophy professor who wants to present to psychologists in the psychology portion of the meeting.” “That’s right.” “Well your paper was accepted for that part of the program but the others just wanted me to check and make sure that’s where you want to be presenting.” “That’s right.” Reassured, the professor wished me luck and said good-bye. In my session at the meeting, I was the last to present. As my time approached, the medium-sized room slowly became crowded. I dreamed that these psychologists had left their other meetings early to make sure to catch my presentation on the use of metaphors in attention research. As I arose to present I noticed that the half-full room had become standing room only! Finally, after years of feeling as if I was struggling alone in promoting and defending a phenomenology of attention, I had an eager audience for my message. My persistence had paid off. I delivered my message with passion.




Theatre and Aural Attention


Book Description

Theatre and Aural Attention investigates what it is to attend theatre by means of listening. Focusing on four core aural phenomena in theatre – noise, designed sound, silence, and immersion - George Home-Cook concludes that theatrical listening involves paying attention to atmospheres.




Can I Have Your Attention?


Book Description

"A must read for anyone in the business of leading others." Ken May, CEO of Top Golf; former CEO of Fedex "If you want your team to stay focused, you will want to read Can I Have Your Attention?" Chester Elton, New York Times Best-Selling author of All In, The Carrot Principle and What Motivates Me Inspire better work habits. Focus your team. Get stuff done in the constantly connected workplace. As our workloads expand, attention has never been more valuable. Or more difficult to keep. In Can I Have your Attention?, Curt Steinhorst shows business leaders how to cut through the noise and get their employees back to work. Curt has spent years helping Fortune 500 companies overcome distraction and achieve focus. With technology creating endless opportunites to "improve productivity", people spend so much time responding to the interruptions that they've lost the ability to focus and do their jobs. Yet, the potential for harnessing the power of your team's attention has never been greater--if you can capture it. You'll learn how to: Implement a comprehensive organizational strategy to increase focus and overcome digital distraction. Take back control of the technology in your organization and life. Establish a Communication Compact, defining how, when, and why your team will communicate with each other. Create a "vault" to increase productivity, decrease stress, and boost your creativity. Free yourself and your employees from the never-ending flood of emails and messages. Achieve unmatched focus in the age of distraction. The smartphone isn't going away. Learn the simple rules and guidelines that will improve focus and create the mental space needed for your people to work to their full potential.




Black Social Dance in Television Advertising


Book Description

The influence of dance upon consumers has long been understood by advertisers. This work investigates the use of black social dance in television advertising. Covering the 1950s through the 2010s in the United States, dance is shown to provide value to brands and to affect consumption experiences. An interdisciplinary work drawing upon anthropological, phenomenological and cultural theoretical approaches, the text provides a theory of dance for a culture that has consistently drawn upon African-American arts to sell products.




The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative


Book Description

This book uses attention as a prism through which to interrogate the literary text. It starts from analyses of the changes that the mediasphere and communication technologies have brought for the contemporary subject, submitting him/her to the tyranny of a new attention economy. My point is that the contemporary novel and memoir resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an “ecology of attention” (Citton) based on poetic options whose pragmatic effect is to develop an ethics of the particularist type. To do this, I draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: psychology, but also more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, and analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the ethics of care and vulnerability. By using a selection of fictional and non-fictional narratives, I address such issues as social invisibilities, climate change, AI and cognitive disability and end up drafting a poetics of attention.




Scenes of Attention


Book Description

Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness—to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces? This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying—and often failing—to attend. Authors examine key moments in the history of the study of attention; pose attention as a philosophical problem; explore the links between attention, culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue. Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible.




Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science


Book Description

This volume explores the essential issues involved in bringing phenomenology together with the cognitive sciences, and provides some examples of research located at the intersection of these disciplines. The topics addressed here cover a lot of ground, including questions about naturalizing phenomenology, the precise methods of phenomenology and how they can be used in the empirical cognitive sciences, specific analyses of perception, attention, emotion, imagination, embodied movement, action and agency, representation and cognition, inters- jectivity, language and metaphor. In addition there are chapters that focus on empirical experiments involving psychophysics, perception, and neuro- and psychopathologies. The idea that phenomenology, understood as a philosophical approach taken by thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others, can offer a positive contribution to the cognitive sciences is a relatively recent idea. Prior to the 1990s, phenomenology was employed in a critique of the first wave of cognitivist and computational approaches to the mind (see Dreyfus 1972). What some consider a second wave in cognitive science, with emphasis on connectionism and neuros- ence, opened up possibilities for phenomenological intervention in a more positive way, resulting in proposals like neurophenomenology (Varela 1996). Thus, bra- imaging technologies can turn to phenomenological insights to guide experimen- tion (see, e. g. , Jack and Roepstorff 2003; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008).




The Marketplace of Attention


Book Description

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age.




Attention and Performance XVI


Book Description

The contributions to this volume, the sixteenth in the prestigious Attention and Performance series, revisit the issue of modularity, the idea that many functions are independently realized in specialized, autonomous modules. Although there is much evidence of modularity in the brain, there is also reason to believe that the outcome of processing, across domains, depends on the synthesis of a wide range of constraining influences. The twenty-four chapters in Attention and Performance XVI look at how these influences are integrated in perception, attention, language comprehension, and motor control. They consider the mechanisms of information integration in the brain; examine the status of the modularity hypothesis in light of efforts to understand how information integration can be successfully achieved; and discuss information integration from the viewpoints of psychophysics, physiology, and computational theory. A Bradford Book. Attention and Performance series.