Not what I said. I moved my attention to your post instantly. Then I sustained attention to reply.

Does it? I put all my attention on your post and could do so instantly. Sustaining attention of course takes as long a time as it does.

I appreciate that you seem to think that my brain is any better than that an low-effort and low quality idiot but it’s not.

The neurotransmitter person gave a quite confident account about the nature of attention and nature of human psychology. They clearly felt it was relevant to the point I was making. Surely someone like this has an university level degree in the subject and isn’t just a random computer nerd who occasionally consumes some pop-science content online. It makes more sense to me to dip into their reservoir of knowledge instead of making a feeble attempt at reading some AI Summary on the topic.

And what are those? There’s actually a few reasons I’m asking and not just looking it up online.

One of the reasons is that a 5 second search on neurobiology does not give me actual understanding. It just gives me a free-floating data point. And I wouldn’t offer that data point to others because it’s not coming from a place of real understanding.

And what are neurotransmitters?

Quite frankly it’s somewhat disturbing that you take a fairly neutral description of an unspecified event as “writing an entire paragraph about how work meetings suck”. You are overlaying a hell of a thought framework of your own onto the text I wrote and then telling me I’m the one with a problem. Ironic really, since you started off saying the world is illiterate.

work

Attention isn’t always good, being followed around by a person who can’t pick up social cues who wants to give you all of their attention doesn’t feel good

Actually this is kinda what I was thinking when I wrote the last bit. I was specifically thinking about ASMR and how ASMRtists are at risk for unhealthy attention and attachments from people who look at them for hours and hours. However it’s a bit besides my point. Your attention remains valuable to you (one hopes) but obviously unwanted attention is… well, unwanted. There’s a big tangent of course on if someone giving unwanted attention to someone else is really giving their attention to that person, or are they giving their attention to their personal, subjective idea about that person (I’d argue the latter, because I prefer to give attention as a concept a somewhat virtuous vibe - because I want to encourage people to value their attention).

Time matters because it’s a limited resource

So is attention. We can multitask to some degree but sooner or later the plates will start falling. But as I said, you can put a number on time but you can’t give 3.5 attentions to something. For the human mind it’s easier to grasp the idea of “giving time” because you can measure, compare and contrast it*. Attention just is, and it’s extremely subjective specifically because in daily life it’s very hard to know if someone is objectively giving their full attention to something or are they just physically present while engaging with something entirely different in their mind.

Edit: Important of course to note that we can only measure time because we developed a system for it. “10 minutes” doesn’t exist in reality. There’s just things that we observed to behave in certain, predictable ways and we built systems to represent the behavior, like the idea of the 24h clock.

I wrote very broadly (on purpose). Never defined the nature of the meeting. What your mind says about me has little to do with my life.

Eh, I see what you mean but I think in this culture and point in time, it’s useful for human well-being to see them as separate things. Like I said, conflating them is a sleight of hand. Because the reality is that you can book 1h for a meeting and then be totally mentally absent from it. People think that you’re committed in the meeting, you’re giving it your time as can be measured. You are not actually giving your time to the meeting but due to being physically present, you’re also not using your time (and attention) freely on what you really want to. So you’re doing a sleight of hand possibly on yourself and people observing you in the meeting.

No, I don’t think so. You can be physically present somewhere while your attention is in whatever is going on in your head. Though I grant you that in that case you’re not doing either very well.

Learn to be bored.

I don’t know about that. Many artists are too preoccupied trying to figure out how to conceptualize their experience, which is exactly the opposite of seeing reality.

Opinion of an expert is worth more than the opinions of non-experts.