(noticing the grooves)
On attention, bodily state, and the quiet difference between drifting and choosing
Happy New Year.
I’ve always paid attention through photography. Long before feeds and algorithms, there were photoblogs, then Flickr, then Tumblr. Each felt slow enough to reward looking. Instagram once belonged to that lineage too. It felt adjacent to photography, even as it began to tilt toward something else. At some point the photographs receded and what remained was content. I find myself watching things I never set out to see. A minute of ASMR woodworking slides by. It is well made, oddly soothing, and instantly forgettable. When it ends, a small question sometimes appears: why did I just watch that, and where did that time go?
That question has followed me into this year. I am not trying to quit anything. I am not announcing a fast or a reset. I am trying to understand where my attention goes, how it gets there, and whether I can notice the moment it slips into a familiar groove.
One of the quieter lessons from neuroscience is that attention is inseparable from bodily state. Stress, inflammation, and emotional salience bias what feels urgent or absorbing long before reflection enters the picture. This shows up in obvious negative forms. A physical wound, a lingering cough, or a relational injury can occupy the entire mind. In the middle of it, the sensation feels complete. Time compresses around it. It feels endless. Then, one day, it fades, and attention widens again without ceremony. The same mechanism appears on the positive side as well. Falling in love can be just as consuming. Thought narrows, social imagination blooms, and the world reorganizes itself around a single axis. In both cases, attention obeys state rather than intention. Empirically, internal bodily signals shape perception and salience before deliberation arrives (PMID: 40349741; PMID: 23663284).
Attention behaves less like a spotlight and more like a gate. It changes how strongly signals register, both from the world and from within the body. Experiments show that simply directing attention toward or away from internal bodily signals alters how the brain processes each heartbeat, even when the heart itself does nothing different (PMID: 30472370). Some stimuli capture attention despite offering little information, a limitation acknowledged even within predictive frameworks (PMID: 32593013). The point is not mastery. The point is timing.
Over time, I began to notice that my attention tends to settle into a small number of recognizable modes. They recur across days. None of them are pathological (probably). Many are useful (kinda). Trouble arises when one mode runs far longer than intended, or when I mistake internal rehearsal for shared reality. I wrote them down to see whether naming them changed anything.
| Attention mode | How it usually starts | What’s happening | Where it tends to lead | A small redirect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Autopilot | Routine tasks, familiar paths | Learned patterns run quietly | Time passes unnoticed | Pause, name the next deliberate step |
| Foraging | Feeds, links, suggested videos | Sampling novelty without commitment | Endless scrolling | Close the app, save one thing worth keeping |
| Threat watch | News, uncertainty, social stress | Attention narrows toward risk | Anxiety loops | Check once, set a limit, step away |
| Emotional capture | Visually or emotionally charged content | Attention pulled without asking | “Why am I watching this?” moments | Name the feeling, change posture or room |
| Learning / naming | Reading, categorizing | Experience compressed into concepts | Abstraction without action | Note one idea, return to the session |
| Imagining / planning | Thinking ahead, reflecting | Futures and hypotheses unfold | Drift or rumination | Write one sentence or make one choice |
| Social simulation | Remembered moments, imagined reactions | Replaying past interactions and desired co-created futures | Self-monitoring loops | Name the loop, return to a physical task |
| Resting integration | Fatigue, transitions | Background consolidation | Avoidance if it lingers | Do nothing briefly, then re-enter |
| Contemplative attention | Walking, looking, being still | Attention settles on what is | Coherence, calm | Stay |
| Scale-shifting attention | Nature, physics, deep time | Perspective expands across scales | Orientation | Look closer or farther |
One mode deserves special care. Social simulation borrows the structure of planning while outrunning the evidence. The mind replays past interactions, anticipates reactions, and constructs desired co-created futures. These thoughts feel actionable, yet they rely on assumptions about what others are thinking, feeling, or wanting. The model grows more detailed than the shared reality. Pressure to act follows. Restraint becomes the wiser move. Allowing the simulation to dissolve respects the boundary between internal rehearsal and the world as it actually unfolds.
Another mode I return to deliberately is contemplative attention, and my particular flavor of it is scale-shifting. This is personal. It comes from a life spent around cellular and molecular biology, chemistry, and physics. While walking, attention drifts toward the space between atoms in the ground, toward enzymatic reactions unfolding inside blades of grass, toward photons arriving from the sun and nudging electrons into new arrangements that quietly sustain the scene. A tree becomes a mesh of chemical negotiations. A rock becomes a stabilized moment in a longer history of matter moving through aggregation, melting, cooling, and re-stabilization as the planet learned how to hold shape. Earth has passed through furnace-like phases and quieter intervals, never entirely uniform, always negotiating form. Seen this way, objects stop being static. They become records of process. This kind of attention pulls experience out of narrative and into structure. It grounds without demanding resolution.
Some forms of attention seize control despite naming. Emotional salience remains powerful. The science is clear about that. Still, naming changes timing. When I catch myself drifting, I try to identify the mode once. Foraging. Social simulation. Threat watch. Sometimes I stay. Sometimes I redirect. Often the act of noticing alone restores proportion. A minute becomes a minute again rather than an absence.
The modern internet excels at keeping attention in states that never quite resolve. It rewards sampling over settling and vigilance over completion. That efficiency is part of its design. This year, I am learning the scaffolding of my own attention. I am learning its favored grooves and its quieter refuges. When choice appears, I try to recognize it. When the pressure to act arises from a moment that exists only in my head, I practice something simpler: to just let it be.