Feeling and Attention : Part 3

The Science of Human Nature: A Psychology For Beginners
by William Henry Pyle

(Page 7 of 12)

The first question that arises in connection with attention is, What are the causes of attention? The first group of causes are hereditary and instinctive. The child attends to loud things, bright things, moving things, etc. But as we grow older, the basis of attention becomes more and more habit. An illustration will make this clear. I once spent a day at a great exposition with a machinist. He was constantly attending to things mechanical, when I would not even see them. He had spent many years working with machinery, and as a result, things mechanical at once attracted him. Similarly, if a man and a woman walk along a street together and look in at the shop windows, the woman sees only hats, dresses, ribbons, and other finery, while the man sees only cigars, pipes, and automobile supplies. Every day we live, we are building up habits of attending to certain types of things. What repeatedly comes into our experience, easily attracts our attention to the exclusion of other things.

The Function of Attention. Attention is the unifying aspect of consciousness. There are always many things in consciousness, and we cannot respond to all at once. The part of consciousness that is clear and focal brings about action. The things to which we attend are the things that count.

In later chapters we shall learn that in habit-formation, attention is an important factor. We must attend to the acts we are trying to make habitual. In getting knowledge, we must attend to what we are trying to learn. In committing to memory, we must attend to the ideas that we are trying to fix and make permanent. In thinking and reasoning, those ideas become associated together that are together in attention.

Attention is therefore the controlling aspect of consciousness. It is the basis of what we call will. The ideas that are clear and focal and that persist in consciousness are the ideas that control our action. When one says he has made up his mind, he has made a choice; that merely means that a certain group of ideas persist in consciousness to the exclusion of others. These are the ideas which ultimately produce action. And it is our past experience that determines what ideas will become focal and persist.

Training the Attention. There are two aspects of the training of attention. (1) We can learn to hold ourselves to a task. When we sit down to a table to study, there may be many things that tend to call us away. There lies a magazine which we might read, there is a play at the theater, there are noises outside, there is a friend calling across the street. But we must study. We have set ourselves to a task and we must hold fast to our purpose.

The young child cannot do this. He must be trained to do it. The instruments used to train him are pleasure and pain, rewards and punishments that come from parents. Gradually, slowly, the child gains control over himself. No one ever amounts to anything till he can hold himself to a task, to a fixed purpose. One must learn to form plans extending over weeks, months, and years, and to hold unflinchingly to them, just as one must hold himself to his study table and allow nothing to distract or to interfere. No training a child can receive is more important than this, for it gives him control over his life, it gives him control over the ideas that are to become focal and determine action. It is for this reason that we call such training a training of attention. It might perhaps better be called a training of the will. But the will is only the attentive consciousness. The idea that is clear, that holds its own in consciousness, is the idea that produces action. When we say that we will to do a certain thing, all we can mean is that the idea of this act is clearest and holds its focal place in consciousness to the exclusion of other ideas. It therefore goes over into action.

(2) The training just discussed may be called a general training of attention giving us a general power and control over our lives, but there is another type of training which is specific. As with the machinist mentioned above, so with all of us; we attend to the type of thing that we have formed a habit of attending to. Continued experience in a certain field makes it more and more easy to attend to things in that field. One can take a certain subject and work at it day after day, year after year. By and by, the whole world takes on the aspect of this chosen subject. The entomologist sees bugs everywhere, the botanist sees only plants, the mechanic sees only machines, the preacher sees only the moral and religious aspects of action, the doctor sees only disease, the mathematician sees always the quantitative aspect of things. Ideas and perceptions related to one's chosen work go at once and readily to the focus of consciousness; other things escape notice.

It is for this reason that we become "crankier" every year that we live. We are attending to only one aspect of the world. While this blinds us to other aspects of the world, it brings mastery in our individual fields. We can, then, by training and practice, get a general control over attention, and by working in a certain field or kind of work, we make it easy to attend to things in that field or work. This to an extent gives us control of our lives, of our destiny.

Interest. The essential elements of interest are attention and feeling. When a person is very attentive to a subject and gets pleasure from experience in that subject, we commonly say that he is interested in that subject.

Since the importance of attention and feeling in learning has already been shown and will be further developed in the chapters which follow in connection with the subjects of habit, memory, and thinking, little more need be said here.

The key to all forms of learning is attention. The key to attention is feeling. Feeling depends upon the nature of the child, inherited and acquired. In our search for the means of arousing interest, we look first to the original nature of the child, to the instincts and the emotions. We look next to the acquired nature, the habits, the ideals, the various needs that have grown up in the individual's life. Educational writers have overemphasized the original nature of the child as a basis of interest and have not paid enough attention to acquired nature. We should not ask so much what a child's needs are, but what they ought to be. Needs can be created. The child's nature to some extent can be changed. The problem of arousing interest is therefore one of finding in the child's nature a basis for attention and pleasure. If the basis is not to be found there, then it must be built up. How this can be done, how human nature can be changed, is to some extent the main problem of psychology. Every chapter in this book, it is hoped, will be found to throw some light on the problem.

Summary. The two elementary feeling states are pleasantness and unpleasantness. The emotions are complex mental states composed of feeling and the sensations from bodily reactions to the situations. Feeling and emotion are the motive forces of life, at the bottom of all important actions. The bodily reactions of emotions are reflex and instinctive. Attention is a matter of the relative clearness of the contents of consciousness. The function of attention is to unify thought and action. It is the important factor in all learning and thinking, for it is only the attentive part of consciousness that is effective.

Copyright 1917 by Silver, Burdett & Company.