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.
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