Freddie Mercury used to describe it as electricity.
A current moving through his body the moment the crowd connected with him.
Not metaphorically.
Physically.
Shivers of energy running through him while he performed.
Every major performer says some version of this.
The stadium gives them something.
Something biological. Something real.
And then consider this.
Elderly couples who have spent fifty years together, when one dies, the other often follows within months. Not from illness. From something harder to name.
As if a source of power was switched off.
As if attention, given and received across decades, had been quietly keeping them alive.
These two things, the performer electrified by a crowd and the widower who loses the will to continue, are the same phenomenon at different scales.
Attention is not just something we want.
It is something we run on.
Spend an hour with a friend who is genuinely glad to see you.
No agenda. No advice.
Just someone who notices you are there. Y
ou leave feeling different. More solid. More real.
The conversation doesn’t even need to be meaningful. The attention is enough.
This is not sentiment. It is biology.
We are wired to register the attention of others as a signal of safety, of belonging, of mattering.
When it is present, something in the nervous system settles.
When it is absent for long enough, something in the nervous system starts to give way.
Which means something remarkable is true.
You can change the biological state of another person simply by paying attention to them. Without touching them.
Without saying anything profound.
Without solving their problem.
Just by being genuinely present with them.
And if that is what attention does to others, imagine what becoming truly flexible in the way you pay attention could do for you.
Not locked into one style. Not always narrowed, or always wide.
Not always merged with everything around you, or always watching from a distance.
But able to move. To choose.
To save your energy when you need to, or give more when you want to give more.
And to recharge fast when necessary.
That is the conversation worth having.
You can recharge another person just by paying attention to them.
Your thoughts here
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Leave a Comment
Tomas…I think you are right on target with your remarks. This phenomnon can also explain why people who are prayed over when ill can do better, whether or not there is a Divine Being that inserts into our lives. But I have a question. How do we make a decision to direct our attention.? Is it done consciously or is a decision made unconsciously and then we recognize it consciously. From hypnosis experiments we know that the conscious mind and unconscious mind ma yseem to want something different or a person might come up with a rational explanation for something that is unconssciouly caused, What are your thoughts on HOW we direct attention/intent?
Hi Daniel,
a really important question and one I think about a lot. My honest answer is that most of our attentional defaults run unconsciously, and the style we’ve developed over decades operates automatically, below the level of deliberate choice.
We don’t decide to narrow or widen; we simply find ourselves already there. What can be trained is the conscious override, the ability to notice the attentional state you’re in and shift it deliberately.
That’s what attention flexibility training is essentially about: building enough awareness of your own attentional mode that you can intervene in it rather than just be carried by it.
I think, being prayed over creates conditions of genuine presence, of being held in someone else’s wide, open, non-anxious attention. The nervous system receives that as a safety signal. Whether or not anything divine is occurring, something physiologically real is.
Tomas, Your remark “the style we’ve developed over decades operates automatically, below the level of deliberate choice.” is clearly relevant. But it does seem there are times that we make a conscious decision outside of the unconscious attentional focus. The question in my mind is how does that happen? We can alter our attention by imagining space when we decide to do that. Is choosing to do that via open focus a conscious choice until we train ourselves to do it unconsciously? If conscious, it is effortful and can become exhausting. Also, our ability to focus on more than one object of attention at once and bring one to the front of our attention while not completely losing the other focus seems to have a conscious quality. It is effortful, but is that only because we have not trained our unconscious to do it automatically? It reminds me of two expressions:
1. In the battle between the will and the imagination, the imagination usually wins.
2. Once a performance is learned unconsciously, consciousness is a hindrance. Intent then becomes more powerful than exercising will power which is exhausting).
Daniel, the distinction you’re drawing is exactly right and it maps onto something I observe consistently in practice. Conscious attentional choice is effortful and finite, it depletes. But the goal of training is never to keep it conscious, it’s to move the new pattern below the threshold of effort, so what was once a deliberate act becomes the default. Open Focus works precisely this way: initially it requires conscious intention, feels effortful, competes with the old habit. With repetition the nervous system adopts it as a lower-cost baseline and the effort dissolves. Your two expressions capture this well. Fighting the existing pattern exhausts itself, but imagination and repeated intent gradually reshape what the unconscious reaches for automatically.