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This book traces the theory of attention, including effortless attention and action, which help an individual to achieve more with little effort. The stage at which attention and action become efforts results in increased efficiency without any detrimental effect on the individual’s performance or productivity. The book reveals that such effortless attention and action are observed across a wide range of activities, extending from rock climbing to personal conversation. Research in this field needs to concentrate on examining and testing the existing models and theories on attention and action, improving respective contributions into making attention and action more effortless.

This chapter presents an overview of the research on visual attention, which has been studied extensively in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The studies discussed are limited to the major empirical findings on visual attention that have implications for the scientific understanding of consciousness. The chapter includes studies on feature-based attention, spatial attention, object-based attention, effortless attention, the mechanisms supporting the different forms of attention (e.g., neural structures and pathways), and the evolution of these mechanisms. This review is important for the book’s primary argument that consciousness and attention must be dissociated at some level, as there are functionally different forms of attention that seem to operate independently and to have evolved at different times from each other—an argument that is difficult to make for consciousness.

This chapter focuses on the use of effortless attention in performing daily activities and tasks. It details a study developed by The University of Chicago and Claremont Graduate University, and named the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to collect data from subjects of the study investigating the use of effortless attention in daily life. The findings are based on an ESM study of subjects consisting of middle and high school students from around the United States and the Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development. The Sloan study focuses on investigating both effortful and effortless attention experiences of the subjects. A large number of students reveal how effortless attention has helped them to focus better on several tasks without much effort.

This chapter reviews how human reasoning and decision making evolves from the cognitive sciences, challenging basic assumptions of objectivism-rationalism along with ethical models based on reason. It emphasizes the significance of effortless attention in human reasoning and suggests that virtue ethics is preferable to authoritative thinking. By examining an early text from China, entitled “Analects of Confucius,” the chapter demonstrates how effortless attention and action can be developed and incorporated into moral behavior. This text is an important source of evidence regarding the earliest examples of virtue ethic in world literature. These findings also reveal the presence of different human thinking systems that work on implicit and explicit levels, with knowledge operating at the implicit level.

This chapter examines the relationships between effortless attention, reduced mental ability, and perfectionism. It examines the findings of earlier neuroscientific studies in this regard to understand neurocognitive mechanisms driving the autotelic experience or the flow state. This is required to understand the fact that two distinct information-processing systems operate in the brain, viz. the explicit system and the implicit system, where the flexibility-efficiency feature is applied to find a solution for the computational problem related to skilled motor performance. The chapter also describes the hypofrontality theory or the theory of reduced mental ability in the frontal cortex region and reveals that this deficiency results in the inability to differentiate between different emotions and control and the motor reflexes required for performing and controlling different tasks. Individuals suffering from this deficiency are unable to differentiate between awareness and action, with the added inability of sensing the significance of time.

This chapter examines the theoretical possibility of having systematic forms of overlap between consciousness and attention—what has been termed ‘conscious attention.’ This is a possibility that is compatible only with views that dissociate consciousness and attention, but without denying that they can overlap in regular ways. The views that preclude such an overlap are identity theories and full dissociation theories. For identity theories, by assumption, all forms of consciousness are automatically forms of attention. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is no possible overlap between consciousness and attention for full dissociation theories; although they might seem to occur in tandem, such theories must claim that there are no systematic overlaps between them. In this chapter, several forms of conscious attention are described, including those related to phenomenal experiences, dreams, self-awareness, autobiographical memories, reflexive thoughts, epistemic seeing, and effortless attention. The chapter’s conclusion is that conscious attention is an important form of attention that requires further study and will ultimately help us better understand the purpose of consciousness.