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.” We have to “pay”1 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 focus on 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.2 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.
Locked in on the same thing, the subsystems begin to reinforce each other: the dopamine makes us aware of our skin, and sensations on the skin ramp up dopamine release, making us even more aware of our skin. A finger touches our belly, and we start to fantasize about where that finger might be going; and so now our fantasies are locked in, too, releasing even more dopamine and making us even more aware of our skin. The more the subsystems lock in, the more intense the feedback loops get, and after twenty minutes, our sense of self has evaporated, and we’re in a realm where we do, feel, and think things that would seem surreal in other contexts.
2.
Similar things happen when we are able to sustain our attention to things other than sex, too. The exact mechanics differ, I presume, but the basic pattern is that when we linger on something, our bodily systems synchronize and feed each other stimuli in an escalatory loop that restructures our attentional field.
Almost anything that we are able to direct sustained attention at will begin to loop on itself and bloom.
To take a dark example, if you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.
And you do the same thing with joy. If you learn to pay sustained attention to your happiness, the pleasant sensation will loop on itself until it explodes and pulls you into a series of almost hallucinogenic states, ending in cessation, where your consciousness lets go and you disappear for a while. This takes practice. The practice is called jhanas, and it is sometimes described as the inverse of a panic attack. I have only ever entered the first jhana, once while spending an hour putting our four-year-old to sleep and meditating on how wonderful it is to lie there next to her. It was really weird and beautiful. If you want to know more about these sorts of mental states, I recommend José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente’s recent write-up of his experiences, Nadia Asparouhova on her experiences, and her how-to guide.
Here is José, whose blog is normally detailed reflections on cell biology and longevity and metascience, describing the second evening of a jhana retreat:
So I went down to the beach. “Kinda nice”, I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had ‘the right size’, their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up (“Huh? I thought”). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy crests as they disintegrate back into the ocean. The feeling of the sun on my skin. I felt overwhelmed. As tears ran down my face and lowkey insane grin settled on my face I found myself mumbling “It’s... always been like this!!!!” “What the fuck??!” followed by “This is too much!! Too much!!!”. The experience seemed to be demanding from me to feel more joy and awe than I was born to feel or something like that. In that precise moment I felt what “painfully beautiful” means for the first time in my life.
The fact that we can enter fundamentally different, and often exhilarating, states of mind by learning how to sustain our attention is fascinating. It makes you wonder what other states are waiting out there. What will happen if you properly pay attention to an octopus?3 What about your sense of loneliness?4 A mathematical idea?5 The weights of a neural net?6 The footnotes here take you to examples of people who have done that. There are so many things that we can let bloom inside of us.
One of my favorite things to sustain attention toward is art.
3.
There was a period in my twenties when I didn’t get art. I thought artists were trying to say something, but I felt superior because I thought there had to be better ways of getting their ideas across (and also, better ideas). But then I realized that good art—at least the art I am spontaneously drawn to—has little to do with communication. Instead, it is about crafting patterns of information that, if you feed them sustained attention, will begin to structure your consciousness in interesting ways. Art is guided meditation. The point isn’t the words, but what happens to your mind when you attend to those words (or images, or sounds). There is nothing there to understand; it is just something to experience, like sex. But the experiences can be very deep and, sometimes, transformative.
In 2019, for example, I saw a performance of Jean Sibelius’s 5th Symphony at the University Hall in Uppsala.
Before the concert began, I spent a few minutes with my eyes closed, doing a body scan, to be fully present when the music began. As the horns at the opening of the piece called out, I decided to keep my eyes closed, so I wouldn’t be distracted by looking at the hands of the musicians. Then… a sort of daydream started up. The mood suggested to me the image of a cottage overlooking a sloping meadow and a thick wood of pines, a few hours from Helsinki. It was a pretty obvious image, since I knew that Sibelius wrote the piece at Aniola, which is 38 km north of Helsinki. But then I saw an old man walking up the meadow and into the house. The camera cut. Through an open door, I saw the man, alone, working at a desk. I saw it as clearly as if it had been projected on a screen before me: the camera moved slowly toward the back of the man.
Through the window above his desk, I could see a light in the distance. Perhaps it was Helsinki? No, it felt alive, like a being—something alive and growing, something that was headed here. But then again, if you were to see a city from space, watching it sped up by 100,000x, it would look like a being moving through the landscape, spreading, getting closer. The old man sat there for a hundred years, watching the light. There was a sinking feeling in my body.
One spring, birds fell dead from the sky. They littered the fields, whole droves of them filled the ditches—blue birds, red birds, and black. The man carried them into his woodshed and placed them in waist-high piles.
The film kept going, and the emotional intensity and complexity gradually ramped up. For the thirty minutes that it took the orchestra to play the three movements of the symphony, I experienced what felt like two or three feature films, all interconnected by some strange emotional logic. In the third movement, a group of hunter-gatherers was living in a cave that reminded me of the entrance to a nuclear waste facility. A girl hiding behind a tree saw men with cars arrive…
The structure of the music was such that it gave me enough predictability and enough surprise to allow my attention to deeply cohere. The melody lines and harmonies dredged up memories and images from my subconscious, weaving them into a rich cinematic web of stories. Guided by the music, my mind could tunnel into an attentional state where I was able to see things I had never seen before and where I could work through some deep emotional pain that seemed to resolve itself through the images.
When the music stopped, I barely knew where I was.
I opened my eyes and remembered that my brother was sitting next to me.
“What did you think?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I felt kind of restless.”
Like always, the research for this essay was funded by the contributions of paying subscribers. Thank you! We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you. If you enjoy the essays and want to support Escaping Flatland, we are not yet fully funded:
A special thanks to Johanna Karlsson, Nadia Asparouhova, Packy McCormick, and Esha Rana, who all read and commented on drafts of this essay. The image of the University Hall is by Ann-Sofi Cullhed.
If you liked this essay, you might also like:
Becoming perceptive
This is the second part of an essay series that began with “Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process.” There is also a third part. It can be read on its own.
In Spanish, you “lend” attention. In Swedish, you “are” attention.
It is not like 30 minutes is some ideal. Attention can, under the right conditions, keep getting deeper and more coherent for much longer, as attested by people who meditate for weeks. Inversely, you can, if you have a well developed dorsal attention network and low cortisol level etc, cohere to a high degree in a few minutes. (Though if you have a lot of stress hormones, thirty minutes will not be nearly enough to get out of a flighty mode of attention.) In other words, I don’t think you can put a precise number at it.
Time to coherence depends on your starting place (mood, hormones, chemical make up in the brain), your skill, and the level of coherence you want to pursue. There is a famous study saying it takes people 23 minutes to get to full productivity after an interruption, which seems like it is correlated to the time it takes them to deeply cohere their attentional field. On the other hand, there is also an upper limit at how long you can cohere, which also depends on a bunch of factors. If I’m working on an essay, I notice that the quality of my thinking drops after about 20 minutes of sustained attention and I need to pause for a few minutes and walk around to get back up to full focus. So in my case, my deepest thinking seem to decohere before I even reach that infamous 23 minute mark! And after 3-4 hours, the quality of my attention goes down so much that everything I write ends up being deleted the day after. For more relaxed attention, like meditation, I haven’t reached the limit for how long I can deepen my coherence—after an hour, which is the longest I’ve gone, I’m still shifting deeper into attention.
Charles Darwin:
[During our stay in Porto Praya,] I was much interested, on several occasions, by watching the habits of an Octopus, or cuttle-fish. Although common in the pools of water left by the retiring tide, these animals were not easily caught. By means of their long arms and suckers, they could drag their bodies into very narrow crevices; and when thus fixed, it required great force to remove them. At other times they darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other, at the same instant discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-brown ink. These animals also escape detection by a very extraordinary, chameleon-like power of changing their colour. They appear to vary their tints according to the nature of the ground over which they pass: when in deep water, their general shade was brownish purple, but when placed on the land, or in shallow water, this dark tint changed into one of a yellowish green.
The colour, examined more carefully, was a French grey, with numerous minute spots of bright yellow: the former of these varied in intensity; the latter entirely disappeared and appeared again by turns. These changes were effected in such a manner, that clouds, varying in tint between a hyacinth red and a chestnut-brown, were continually passing over the body. Any part, being subjected to a slight shock of galvanism, became almost black: a similar effect, but in a less degree, was produced by scratching the skin with a needle. These clouds, or blushes as they may be called, are said to be produced by the alternate expansion and contraction of minute vesicles containing variously coloured fluids.
This cuttle-fish displayed its chameleon-like power both during the act of swimming and whilst remaining stationary at the bottom. I was much amused by the various arts to escape detection used by one individual, which seemed fully aware that I was watching it. Remaining for a time motionless, it would then stealthily advance an inch or two, like a cat after a mouse; sometimes changing its colour: it thus proceeded, till having gained a deeper part, it darted away, leaving a dusky train of ink to hide the hole into which it had crawled.
While looking for marine animals, with my head about two feet above the rocky shore, I was more than once saluted by a jet of water, accompanied by a slight grating noise. At first I could not think what it was, but afterwards I found out that it was this cuttle-fish, which, though concealed in a hole, thus often led me to its discovery. That it possesses the power of ejecting water there is no doubt, and it appeared to me that it could certainly take good aim by directing the tube or siphon on the under side of its body. From the difficulty which these animals have in carrying their heads, they cannot crawl with ease when placed on the ground. I observed that one which I kept in the cabin was slightly phosphorescent in the dark.
Sasha Chapin writes:
In late winter 2024, I noticed that I wasn’t living up to my stated policy of trying to accept every emotion passing through my system. There were certain shades of existential loneliness that I was pushing away. This was causing some friction. Solitude is simply part of my current life chapter, since Cate is more independent than any of my previous partners, and Berkeley is a place where I don’t feel at home socially.
As a response, I made feelings of solitude the central focus of my practice. I tried to become like a sommelier, going out of my way to appreciate all the shades of loneliness that colored my afternoons, trying to zoom in on every micro-pixel and embrace rather than reject.
Again—normal. This is what, for me, long-term practice often consists of: noticing when my reactions don’t line up with my principles, and seeing if I can bring myself into deeper alignment.
However, I noticed something odd. Dropping the resistance to loneliness allowed me to slip into deeper sensations of flow. It was almost as if the emotional resistance had been preventing the emergence of a more intuitive part of my will. There were a few memorable walks I took where the feeling of solitude felt like a portal into an exquisitely smooth parallel world. When I allowed my emotions to pierce me more deeply, I fell into a different degree of cooperation with reality. Every step felt precise and necessary, like a choreographed dance.
Michael Nielsen writes about this in an essay where he describes the experience of pushing himself to go deeper than usual in understanding a mathematical proof:
I gradually internalize the mathematical objects I’m dealing with [using spaced repetition]. It becomes easier and easier to conduct (most of) my work in my head. [. . .] Furthermore, as my understanding of the objects change – as I learn more about their nature, and correct my own misconceptions – my sense of what I can do with the objects changes as well. It’s as though they sprout new affordances, in the language of user interface design, and I get much practice in learning to fluidly apply those affordances in multiple ways. [. . .]
After going through the [time-consuming process of deeply understanding a proof,] I had a rather curious experience. I went for a multi-hour walk along the San Francisco Embarcadero. I found that my mind simply and naturally began discovering other facts related to the result. In particular, I found a handful (perhaps half a dozen) of different proofs of the basic theorem, as well as noticing many related ideas. This wasn’t done especially consciously – rather, my mind simply wanted to find these proofs.
Chris Olah writes:
Research intimacy is different from theoretical knowledge. It involves internalizing information that hasn’t become part of the “scientific cannon” yet. Observations we don’t (yet) see as important, or haven’t (yet) digested. The ideas are raw.
(A personal example: I’ve memorized hundreds of neurons in InceptionV1. I know how they behave, and I know how that behavior is built from earlier neurons. These seem like obscure facts, but they give me powerful, concrete examples to test ideas against.)
Research intimacy is also different from research taste. But it does feed into it, and I suspect it’s one of the key ingredients in beating the “research taste market.”
As your intimacy with a research topic grows, your random thoughts about it become more interesting. Your thoughts in the shower or on a hike bounce against richer context. Your unconscious has more to work with. Your intuition deepens.
I suspect that a lot of “brilliant insights” are natural next steps from someone who has deep intimacy with a research topic. And that actually seems more profound.
Henrik, my favorite mornings are those that begin with reading your essays. Perhaps I should make this a ritual!
Thank you! 🙌🏽
Wonderful piece Henrik. An extension thought: the type of attention matters and changes how information is processed, like attentive consumption vs creation.
Having played piano for many years, I realised that when I listen to a new piece, my mind compresses the music to understand it. The notes and rhythm blend together because there’s not enough mental bandwidth to process everything.
But by learning to play the piece, your mind gets better at comprehending it. It's like the music flows through your brain in a laminar, rather than turbulent, flow. Each note becomes crisper, each harmony more intertwined.
Every time you engage with a form (art, architecture, music, sports, your lover's face), your capacity to experience it increases as the information is more fluent in your head. A chef can break down 'yummy' into the swirl of different spices, an engineer can appreciate the marvel of how a tower stands.
Isn't it wonderful that engaging with the universe leads to a more beautiful life?