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Tallis in Wonderland

Paying Attention to Attention

Raymond Tallis becomes aware that he can’t afford to ignore attention.

Given the hours your columnist has spent thinking about the nature of human consciousness, it is surprising that he has not until now paid much heed to a crucial dimension of it: attention.

The prompt for my recent switch of attention to attention itself was an illuminating paper published in Mind, Tom McClelland’s ‘The Mental Affordance Hypothesis’ (2019). ‘Affordance’ was a term introduced by the American psychologist J.J. Gibson nearly half a century ago.

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