ABSTRACT
Within this statement, James refers to the selectivity of attention, its apparently limited nature and brings consciousness into the explanation. Although William James reflected carefully on attention
and consciousness, as long as we have no agreed definition for either “attention” or “consciousness”, or for any of their varieties, we are in danger of trying to explain something we do not properly understand in terms of something else that we do not properly understand. For example, we have talked about “conscious control”, “intentional control”, “willed behaviour”, all implying conscious attentional involvement. We have explained the acquisition of skill by saying that, with practice, “attention” is not required and the performance of aspects of the skill become “automatic” or “unconscious”. Within the chapters of this book, we shall probably have been as guilty of this as anyone else of using these terms as if one could explain the other. There is, however, a growing body of knowledge that is refining our conceptions of attention, as we have seen in the previous chapters. Also we are beginning to understand what consciousness is, how it arises and what it might be for. In addition, the relationship between attention and consciousness is being considered in the way that James appreciated so long ago. Some of this evidence has come from studies of neuropsychological patients, but evidence is also available from experiments on neurological intact participants. It is with these studies we shall begin.
