Why does it feel so hard (and important) to define attention?

An emerging playbook for where to begin

Mar 24, 2026

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Human attention is not a new topic. We can trace the word “attention” back to the stoics, and follow its journey through various cultural, philosophical, religious and social science lenses. We’ve been attending to attention for a long time. And, yet, per Google trends, our already keen interest in “attention” has doubled in recent years.

But what is attention, really? And, specifically, what is attention in its most powerful form–the version of attention that we and our kids need in order to fully experience our lives, especially in a world as dynamic as ours?

Starting with why

To start, why do we have attention in the first place?

Even before notifications, likes, and infinite scrolling, there was always too much information in our environment for our minds to absorb and process. As a matter of survival, we evolved to have attention. It is an incredible system that allows us to sense the world around us, select which information to focus on, and decide how to hold or shift our focus in response to whatever our current goal(s) might be and whatever is happening around us.

Attention also allows us to time travel—to focus on past events and to take walks into the future. It’s all of these superpowers that help us to think, feel and connect as well as plan, prioritize and act effectively—all as we navigate a dynamic and complicated world.

And, when you think about it, attention is ever so much more than these utilitarian definitions. It is the gateway to our lived experience. What you pay attention to is your life. You are what you attend to.

Attention is “the success story of what makes us unique as human beings” —Amishi Jha

Sound powerful, right? It is! Helping kids see attention as a superpower with a super purpose can be a massive motivator for them to want to learn more. This is especially true for kids who have been labeled with attention-related challenges or who have been exposed to a limited view of what attention really means, in and out of school.

Why attention gets so complicated

Attention, like other human superpowers, such as empathy and creativity, is wonderfully nuanced and complex.

How we think about attention—let alone how we help kids understand their attention—is also complicated by the fact that it often is mis, or really under-understood.

The 1950s saw a burst in interest in attention research which heavily rotated around that which is measurable about attention. This desire to quantify was, in large part, inspired by studies designed to maximize human vigilance in the service of the military, and later by advertisers who sought to influence people’s purchasing behavior. For decades since, studies have focused on our “attention span”—for how long we can remain “on task.”

In many classrooms, kids learn something similar, that “paying attention” means staying still, looking and listening to someone or something for stretches of time, or completing a worksheet or assigned set of tasks.

When we focus on what is measurable about something, we often miss the meat of the matter. In his book The Score, C. Thi Nguyen, author and philosopher, uses the term “the gap” to refer to “the distance between what’s being measured and what actually matters” about it. Attention means so much more than the number of sustained seconds we can focus on a screen or do a task, so the gap here is wide.

In their 2026 manifesto Attensity!, The Friends of Attention do a great job of peeling back the history here, and they remind us how this metrics-based definition led us right to some of our biggest current struggles. “To put it bluntly, human attention was sliced and diced in those laboratories, en route to being priced in the marketplace of the attention economy.”

How can we think about attention?

If we want kids to understand and harness their own attention, we need to help them build a robust definition that is more worthy of this human superpower—something greater than just “time on task.”

Such work takes time, and yet, it really helps to have a starting place. For example, I love this starter definition:

Attention is our ability to notice the world around us, direct our focus, and either hold or shift our focus on the things and the people we care most about.

Though seemingly simple, there’s a lot packed in there. First, attention involves both being open to the world around us and being selective about where we aim our focus. It’s also important to be able to both aim and to shift our attention. And, it’s all about doing these things in the service of the relationships and wishes (aka goals) we value most.

Remember…attention is also magic.

Attention is a powerful system with an incredibly important set of jobs to do. But, attention is also something that may always be just a bit beyond our reach. In many ways, there is magic in the gap between what we can define and what really matters about attention. Stay alert for that magic, and you’ll see it everywhere.

Like when you experience awe, and for a moment, nothing exists but you and the source of your wonder. Or when you feel the energy between you and someone else who is, just like you, wholly present in the moment. When you’ve forgotten where you are during savasana in a yoga class. When your heart skips as you turn a corner and spot the full moon. When you’re so deep into a game that you’ve lost all track of time. When you’re baking something not only from scratch, but from feel, smell and sound. When you laugh so hard that you cry. When you are doing something—anything—that you truly, madly, deeply love to do.

It takes take time for kids (and us) to explore, stretch and refine our understanding of what attention is and can be. As we learn about how attention works, feels and operates in our lives, kids can come to feel and know, in their own way, that attention is, very much, everything in life.