How attention is created and exchanged?

At any given moment in time we can only pay attention to limited number of inputs. This applies to individuals, groups of individuals, societies, nations and humanity at large.

Most humans will direct attention to inputs on the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy over the higher levels. If their safety is in danger 100% of attention will be directed to the source of danger. Once safety, physiological needs are secured and satisfied attention can move to the higher levels.

Attention can span in space (from individual through societal to the humanity level) and in time (from seconds to lifetimes) but there will be always a limited amount of it.

Personality is a sum of individual acts of paying attention accumulated on a lifetime level - ‘you are what you pay attention to’.

The culture is a sum of collective acts of paying attention accumulated over many lifetimes etc - multiple individuals paying attention to same cultural memes over longer periods of time.

Attention is non-linear and non-local - with ubiquitous connectivity - 100% of our attention at any time can be occupied by inputs not related to immediate environment.

Each act of paying attention rewires the neural pathways in observer’s brain, connecting existing structures created by the previous ‘acts of paying attention’ and leaves new imprints for the future. These imprints are permanent and each future act of paying attention will be influenced by imprints left by previous acts of paying attention (smells triggering childhood memories, places reminding you of people, future information interpreted in the context of existing knowledge). This relationship is non-linear - small trigger can cause large response.

By paying attention the observer allows the ‘meme’ to alter their brain’s neural real estate and immutably change the state of their mind. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. You can just divert your attention to other inputs.

Attention can be aggregated and focused elsewhere. If I have attention 1000 people looking at me while speaking on the stage and suddenly I pull out a flower I can briefly direct their attention to the flower.

For the brief moment in time the flower will have the majority share of attention of the room. If I have your attention now and show you this ASCII flower: @=>- and I ask you stop reading for a second… this flower will have a majority share of your attention for this brief moment in time. And as you start reading further this share will decrease and further memes I present will take over.

Because attention is a finite resource and we only have so much of it, you can calculate the share of attention this ASCII flower had in your momentary, daily, yearly and lifetime attention. This share of attention will be significant in this moment but probably minor in your daily attention.

However, the response is non-linear so it might very well unleash a massive amount of new associations depending on your previous mental connections.

Furthermore, if you share this text with someone who pays attention to you, you will direct their attention to the ASCII flower and its share of attention in the collective attention will grow.