The role of will in attention

 

Crow and the Moon, by Kawanabe Kyōsai, ca. 1887

In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell cites William James' definition of attention: "the ability to hold something before the mind.  James observes that the inclination of attention is toward fleetingness." James quotes Hermann von Helmholtz:

The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of tits object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.

Odell: 

attention is a state of openness that assumes there is something new to be seen, it is also true that this state must resist our tendency to declare our observations finished -- to be done.  For James as for von Helmholtz, this means that there is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention. Instead, what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency.  Furthermore, if attention attaches to what is new, we must be finding ever new angles on the object of our sustained attention -- no small task.  James thus makes explicit the role of will in attention:

Though the spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept strained on that one object until at last it grows, so as to maintain itself before the kind with ease.  This strain of attention is the fundamental act of will.