The Fracking of the Mind

I’ve long been aware what a dreadful attention sink we’re in now as a society.

It’s a topic that Laura Marsh talks about in the March 27, 2025, New York Review of Books.

“In The Attention Merchants, (Tim) Wu likened these developments to another kind of resource extraction. The smartphone ‘appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way that fracking would later recover vast reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible.’ Wu, a legal scholar who has written extensively on antitrust, tells this story through sketches of the corporations that unlocked new segments of our attention. (Chris) Hayes writes more often from the perspective of the user; the person whose mind is being fracked feels, he remarks, ‘that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.’ Distraction has always been big business, but the immersive quality of digital media, in his account, makes it much more powerful and toxic.”

“(T)he algorithms of social networks can show each user content tailored specifically to them, based on all the things they’ve clicked on before. (This is how Hayes loses an entire hour, one stoned evening, watching videos of people assembling sandwiches and slicing them in half.)

“Social media can also capitalize on direct appeals to the audience by name. One of the more intriguing facts that Hayes cites comes from a 1959 study of people’s ability to tune out background noise and conversation when they wanted to focus: ‘The only stimulus so far found that will break through,’ the researchers wrote, ‘is the subject’s own name.’ Platforms that notify users each time they are ‘mentioned’ work on this principle; the most reliable way to draw someone in, even if the content on offer doesn’t particularly appeal to them, is by creating the impression that other people are talking about them.”

The Answer is Attention

The more I consider it, the more I realize that attention, properly directed, is the solution to many of our difficulties. 

We tend to underrate the value of the simple act of attention, but I assure you that Madison Avenue and political propagandists do not.

After all, as the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”

And the poet Mary Oliver advised, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

Merely momentarily shift your attention from your driving to your phone, for example, and a child may die. This isn’t a metaphor, but a memory. The driver was a teenage girl, and the child was an 8-year-old boy.

Guarding the Mind's Eye

Theoretical philosopher Thomas Metzinger warns we are being overwhelmed as “…social media and tech firms aim to maximize user engagement by creating ever better attention sinks and developing pathological, addictive forms of media consumption.”

As New Scientist magazine reported, “Our attention, says Metzinger, is the resource they want, and that entails destroying our mental autonomy — our ability to control the focus of our minds — ceding it to who knows what algorithm.”

And what does Metzinger recommend? “Of course, meditation, which opens up news states of consciousness and provides mental control. He asks whether it should be a standard part of education, and argues strongly for robust intellectual honesty as well as old-fashioned values like integrity and sincerity. We need, he suggests, a fusion of critical rationality with mindful attention to help us grapple with rapid techno-cultural change.”

In Control of Consciousness

“Despite its great powers, attention cannot step beyond (its) limits,” observed Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  “It cannot notice or hold in focus more information than can be processed simultaneously. Retrieving information from memory storage and bringing it into the focus of awareness, comparing information, evaluating, deciding — all make demands on the mind’s limited processing capacity. For example, the driver who notices the swerving car will have to stop talking on his cellular phone if he wants to avoid an accident.

“Some people learn to use this priceless resource efficiently, while others waste it. The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.”

Now consider what digital media has done to shorten the human attention span in the decades since this was written. What does that imply about the ability “to enjoy the normal course of everyday life?”

A Container for Fear and Frustration

“The key to the transformational potential of bare attention lies in the deceptively simply injunction to separate out one’s reactions from the core events themselves,” wrote Mark Epstein in his book  Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective.

“Much of the time, it turns out, our everyday minds are in a state of reactivity. We take this for granted, we do not question our automatic identification with our reactions, and we experience ourselves at the mercy of an often hostile or frustrating outside world or an overwhelmingly or frightening inner one. With bare attention, we move from this automatic identification with our fear or frustration to a vantage point from which the fear or frustration is attended to with the same dispassionate interest as anything else.

“There is enormous freedom to be gained from such a shift. Instead of running from difficult emotions (or hanging on to enticing ones), the practitioner or bare attention becomes able to contain any reaction; making space for it, but not completely identifying with it because of the concomitant presence of nonjudgmental awareness.”

(Emphasis added)

The Teddy Bear of Bare Attention

“Like a stray dog that has no owner, the stray thoughts that are attended to with bare attention are treated as if they, too, are ownerless,” observed Dr. Mark Epstein in his book Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective.

The Buddhist concept of bare attention is akin to the psychological process known as “transitional space,” Epstein observed.

“Long recognized as the crucial stepping stone between infantile dependence and the ability to tolerate being alone, transitional space has been called an ‘intermediate area of experience’ that permits the child a feeling of comfort when separated from the parents.”

“The transitional object — the teddy bear, stuffed animal, blanket or favorite toy — makes possible the movement from a purely subjective experience to one in which other people are experienced as truly ‘other.’ Neither ‘me’ nor ‘not-me,’ the transitional object enjoys a special in-between status that the parents instinctively respect. It is the raft by which the infant crosses over to the understanding of the other.

“Many qualities of the transitional object — its ability to survive intense love and hate, its resistance to change unless changed by the infant, its ability to provide refuge and warmth and its gradual relinquishment — are all shared by bare attention… (which) is different from our usual subjective awareness and has been portrayed in the Tibetan tradition as a kind of ‘spy consciousness’ that observes from the corners of the mind.”

“An image that is sometimes used to convey this constancy is that of a stream rushing under a stone bridge. Through bare attention, it is said, the meditator becomes not like the stream but like the bridge with the stream rushing underneath.”

Epstein describes bare attention as “… impartial, nonjudgmental and open. It is also deeply interested, like a child with a new toy.”

On the Path

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.
— Howard Rheingold

Attention Must Be Paid (For)

By Dan Hagen 

Over the course of months, I’ve become increasingly convinced of the underrated existential importance of the simple act of shifting your attention.

For example, this morning I awoke before dawn, started the coffee and read a front page newspaper article about further cuts in higher education to be caused by the state’s terrible finances. I immediately began to worry, to feel threatened, even though nothing had objectively changed from my situation a few moments before.

Then I took my beagle and book to the sofa and found my place on page 97 in the biography of the British author Christopher Isherwood. Within mere moments, I was cheerfully absorbed.

Again, nothing had objectively changed for me, but now I was learning something — in this case, about life as another had lived it — and that alone made my clinging worries vanish like a mist in sunlight.

In our new century, we are trained by our tools to seek constant digital stimulation, a practice that shortens our attention spans and leaves us open — vulnerable — to millions of messages that may not do us any good at all.

We are under constant digital bombardment. The digital media seeks “eyeballs.” Our eyeballs. We shouldn’t sell them so cheaply.

Our attention colors the world, and yet we usually pay no attention to it. Start. Do. Shift your attention.

Watch the Rain Shadows

Late yesterday afternoon, while waiting in the car in a parking lot in the rain, I was fascinated to notice that the sun, shining through the rain drops clinging to my driver's side window, was casting gem-like, almost 3D shadows on the arm of my windbreaker. Each dark-ringed little shadow droplet had a bright diamond for a heart. Shadows made of brightness.

This is something that must have been visible all my 58 years on earth, something I had never consciously seen.

Shift your attention.

Rob Brezny said, "Try this: Prime your connection with spirit by focusing your attention on tones and shapes you usually miss: reflections in windows, the sky between the oak tree's branches, the shadows on the water, the two different emotions in a friend's eyes and mouth."

And Steve Sampson said, "The freedom from stress; the attainment of stillness, inner peace, even Nirvana, are already and always within us. We do not need to search for them anywhere. We already have them. We just need to sit down, be quiet and look."

Expand the Awareness

By Dan Hagen

Mindfulness.

Examining one’s thoughts as if they were as remote as the dancing reflection in the pond of the distant streaks of clouds high in the sky.

Mindfulness is awareness of one’s physical and emotional state in the precise here and now of the immediate world. It is not urgency, but calm. It is not tying your courage to the sticking point and trying, but untying and untrying.

Think of your mind as a broad lake, reflecting the world and the sky clearly when calm, and distortedly when agitated. Breathe deeply, fill the senses, expand the field of awareness within and without, and restore calm.

“The adult brain remains open to change throughout the lifespan,” wrote psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel. “Though many brain scientists have … stated that the mind is just the activity of the brain, we now can look at the connection between these two dimensions of our lives from a different perspective. When we consider the mind as an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information, we come to realize that we can actually use the mind to change the brain. The simple truth is that how we focus our attention, how we intentionally direct the flow of energy and information through our neural circuits, can directly alter the brain's activity and its structure.”

In the New York Times, they call mindfulness “presence.” You can also call it “meditation,” as author Alan Watts did.

“We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose,” Watts wrote. “In this respect, it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”

Whatever you call it, it’s the necessary counterweight to the nerve-deadening, attention-fragmenting, solitude-extinguishing daily distractions inherent in the digital age.

Alan Watts and his influences