On the Ability to “Attend.”

Posted on | January 11, 2026 | 5 Comments

Mike Magee

Society is so concerned with the medicalized issue of “attention deficit” that many experts jump right over a more fundamental query: “What do you attend to?”

In a recent New York Times Guest Opinion piece, three attention activist members of the Friends of Attention (more on that in a moment) delve into the topic.

This comment caught my eye: “Does it need to be said? We are not machines. Our lives are not data problems that can be quantitatively optimized. And the actual human ability to attend is something much more expansive and much more beautiful than a tool for filtering information or extending our time on task. True attention lies at the heart of personhood: reason, judgment, memory, curiosity, responsibility, the feeling of a summer day, the burying of our dead. All of these require and activate our presence.”

That struck a note because we just spent a few days with children and grandchildren on vacation. And one of the active topics was a discussion of what our grandchildren (many college age) should focus on (or attend to) in their studies. All of the parents had graduated from Liberal Arts institutions (many of them run by the Jesuit order) which highly valued core curricula that included humanities, social and natural sciences, and the arts. But clearly that approach is under attack. Parents struggle to manage college costs that have spiraled out of control, and worry that a future job market that is highly AI-constricted may undercut their kids future financial independence.

The Friends of Attention say the problem is a mis-direction of what humans attend to that dates back to organizational theory research first launched more than a century ago. Their words: “Begun in the 1880s and spanning the long 20th century, quantitative thinking about attention was conceived in a spirit of bold inquiry and undertaken with the goal of civic and medical betterment. The scientists who led the research succeeded in making many human experiences safer and more efficient. They helped to advance innovation and win wars. By using increasingly complex instruments to optimize our capacities, however, they established a powerful paradigm that saw humans as attention-paying machines, paying attention to machines. That model helped give rise to the present era, when most of us spend more than half our waking hours on devices designed to keep us enthralled to the taps and swipes of the attention economy.”

The Jesuits are no slouches when it comes to “attending.” After all St. Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus – also known as the Jesuit Order – holed up in a natural cave by the Cardener River in Catalonia (a province of Barcelona) for a year in 1522, to focus on “attentive contemplation.”

Apparently the time was well spent yielding two significant outcomes: 1) Conversion of Ignatius from a “worldly soldier” to a “dedicated spiritual leader” and, 2) the compilation of his Spiritual Exercises – meditations on his feelings of “gratitude and anguish, consolation and sadness” – which continue to be used in Jesuit’s formal training and daily life to this day.

The emergence of the Friends in 2018 roughly mirrors the appearance of AI. Who are they? “The Friends of Attention are a loose, informal network of creative collaborators, colleagues, and actual friends who share an interest in ‘ATTENTION’.”

Tell me more. Well,  eighteen artists, scholars, and activists first gathered at the  2018 Sao Paulo Biennial, with a common interest in the study and practice of attention. Since then, they have been gathering virtually  The distinctive vision—”to place the economies of attention at the center of our relationship to works of art… Attention lies at the nexus of perception and action, aesthetics and ethics, wealth and power.”  They make a special point of stating that “there is no ‘membership’ in the Friends. There are friends.”

Which brings me back to our family discussion and the role of Liberal Arts in a modern college education. Our kids continue to support a broad, multidisciplinary approach for our grandkids education. As for AI,  AI’s description of the components of a Liberal Arts education is reassuring. Here it is:

• Humanities: Literature, History, Philosophy, Languages, Art.
• Social Sciences: Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Anthropology.
• Natural Sciences: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science.
• Mathematics: Algebra, Statistics, Logic.
• Arts: Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Music. 

• Broad Knowledge: Provides a foundational understanding across disciplines.
• Critical Thinking: Analyzing complex issues from multiple perspectives.
• Communication: Strong reading, writing, and persuasive expression.
• Adaptability: Learning how to learn and apply knowledge in new contexts.
• Problem-Solving: Identifying, analyzing, and solving complex problems

Full disclosure: I am a graduate of a Jesuit High School (Fordham Prep) and a Jesuit College (LeMoyne College).

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