Thoughts Not Our Own Whatever Happened to Selective Attention?

There are now many important contributions to the scientific study of the brain-mind continuum. These results come both from research into non-ordinary states of consciousness and into the brain’s intrinsic, largely un-conscious mechanisms. The larger potential of such investigations consists precisely in making the parameters of our cognitive system apparent. But they also reveal the socio-cultural uses to which these parameters are currently, or in the foreseeable future, being applied. This article wrestles with that fact. Specifically, it examines the implications for those of us inter-ested in the dynamics of visual awareness and the structural and phenom-enological aspects of noticing. Because some of the key characteristics of consciousness are so ingrained that we are usually blind to them, it is all the more important to understand how and why we pay attention to certain features of our environment. Subjective consciousness pertains to the realm of inner experience as well as focusing on the external world. What Daniel Dennett terms ‘intentionality ’ or directedness towards an object is a sign of our connectedness to the outside world. Beyond connection, I am interested in how complex works of art help us cognize, confer reality, or have knowl-edge of what lies before our eyes. I will argue that this calibration of the agent’s experience and her perception of the world is under threat today. Key words attention ■ art ■ neuroscience All longing converges on this mystery: revelation, unraveling secret spaces, the suggestion that the world’s valence lies just behind a scrambled facade, where only the limits of ingenuity stand between him and sunken gardens. Cryptography alone slips beneath the cheat of surface. (Powers, 1991: 48