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.” And 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 pay attention to 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. 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 let our attention 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 on itself 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. If you want to know more about these sorts of mental states, I recommend José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente’s recent write-up of his experiences, Nadia Asparouhova on her experiences, and her how-to guide. Here is José, whose blog is normally detailed reflections on cell biology and longevity and metascience, describing the second evening of a jhana retreat: So I went down to the beach. “Kinda nice”, I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had ‘the right size’, their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up (“Huh? I thought”). 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. As tears ran down my face and lowkey insane grin settled on my face I found myself mumbling “It’s... always been like this!!!!” “What the fuck??!” followed by “This is too much!! Too much!!!”. The experience seemed to be demanding from me to feel more joy and awe than I was born to feel or something like that. In that precise moment I felt what “painfully beautiful” means for the first time in my life. 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? The footnotes here take you to examples of people who have done that. There are so many things to pay attention to and experience. 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 attentional field 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 mood suggested to me the image of a cottage overlooking a sloping meadow and a thick wood of pines, a few hours from Helsinki. It was a pretty obvious image, since I knew that Sibelius wrote the piece at Aniola, which is 38 km north of Helsinki. But then I saw an old man walking up the meadow and into the house. The camera cut. Through an open door, I saw the man, alone, working at a desk. I saw it as clearly as if it had been projected on a screen before me: the camera moved slowly toward the back of the man. Through the window above his desk, I could see a light in the distance. Perhaps it was Helsinki? No, it felt alive, like a being—something alive and growing, something that was headed here. But then again, if you were to see a city from space, watching it sped up by 100,000x, it would look like a being moving through the landscape, spreading, getting closer. The old man sat there for a hundred years, watching the light. There was a sinking feeling in my body. One spring, birds fell dead from the sky. They littered the fields, whole droves of them filled the ditches—blue birds, red birds, and black. The man carried them into his woodshed and placed them in waist-high piles. The film kept going, and the emotional intensity and complexity gradually ramped up. For the thirty minutes that it took the orchestra to play the three movements of the symphony, I experienced what felt like two or three feature films, all interconnected by some strange emotional logic. In the third movement, a group of hunter-gatherers was living in a cave that reminded me of the entrance to a nuclear waste facility. A girl hiding behind a tree saw men with cars arrive… 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.” Like always, the research for this essay was funded by the contribution of paying subscribers. Thank you! We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you. If you enjoy the essays and want to support Escaping Flatland, we are not yet fully funded: A special thanks to Johanna Karlsson, Nadia Asparouhova, Packy McCormick, and Esha Rana, who all read and commented on drafts of this essay. The image of the University Hall is by Ann-Sofi Cullhed. If you liked this essay, you might also like: