It’s said that we live in an attention economy. What we watch, listen to, and even subscribe to—we’re constantly making choices about where to focus our time, money, and energy. And as many wisdom traditions remind us, we often pay attention to things that don’t matter all that much and forget to pay attention to the things that really do.
This briefing explores how scientists are discovering new insights about how we can cultivate our attention. But what do we mean by that word “attention?”
Many of today’s researchers still turn to a book published in 1918 for an answer. In The Principles of Psychology, philosopher and psychologist William James describes attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”1 To attend to one thing, James argues, is to withdraw from others, contrasting true attentiveness with the “confused, dazed, and scatter-brained state” of multitasking.
And contemporary researchers agree. Neuroscientist Amishi Jha describes the brain’s attention system as an evolutionary response to environmental overload.2 Attention acts kind of like the brain’s boss; managing distractions to support perceptual, emotional, and social functioning.
Many of us will be familiar with mindfulness meditation, and Jha indeed identifies mindfulness as one way to train attention to be a better boss. But there’s a wide array of attention-strengthening practices that you might want to integrate into your community or spiritual innovation project.
Tip 1: Focus Attention to Lower Fear
First, not all attention is the same. Academic research explains how practices that focus attention differ from those that increase alertness. Unlike alertness, focused attention reduces our emotional reactivity and fear.
For example, psychiatrist Brendan D. Kelly has reviewed contemplative practices in the Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, and Taoist traditions.3 And while these practices differ in form, he shows that they produce similar persistent changes in the same regions of the brain—improving attention and rational thinking while helping us feel less afraid.
Kelly also highlights their clinical benefits: focused-attention practices can help with depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive tendencies, substance misuse, posttraumatic stress, and more. 4
And perhaps most interestingly, there’s real value in engaging in these practices in their spiritual contexts. Compared to secular versions of similar practices, spiritual forms appear to have slightly stronger effects on mood, anxiety, and pain modulation.
So whether you’re exploring centering prayer, mantra recitations, chanting, or Dhikr—focused-attention practices can cultivate calm and clear decision-making that will support your community’s individual and collective wellbeing.
Tip 2: Hold Postures to Cultivate Praise and Humility
To cultivate attention doesn’t just mean sitting quietly on a cushion. Across wisdom traditions, attention practices are often linked to movement. Physical actions—like kneeling, bowing, lifting hands, or prostration—are frequently paired with attentive prayer and meditation.
Social psychologists Patty Van Cappellen and Megan E. Edwards challenge Cartesian dualism—the idea that mind and body are separate—by examining how movement influences feelings, thoughts, and actions.5 Summarizing studies of religious embodiment, they show how bodily positions help build and mark spiritual rituals, memory, and communities.
In experiments across three countries, Van Cappellen and her colleagues studied attentive prayer postures among Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.6 Participants associated expansive upward postures (e.g., looking or reaching up) with praise and positive emotions, and downward constrictive postures (e.g., kneeling and bowing) with subdued emotions and intercession. Religious and national contexts shaped these interpretations, revealing that, while bodily practices guide attention, culture influences their meaning.
You might think about incorporating physical postures into shared activities at the start of a gathering, or when you want to welcome people into a reflective moment. Being mindful about cultural differences, inviting people to place their hands on their heart, raising arms above their head, or touching their forehead to the ground can all be transformative practices.
Tip 3: Hold Your Gaze and Transcend the Self
Even focusing one’s attention on a specific image can help people transcend themselves. For example, across multiple traditions, sacred texts and images often anchor spiritual attention.
David Morgan, a Professor of Religious Studies and Art History, analyzes how people engage sacred imagery across faiths. In The Embodied Eye, he describes the “devotional gaze,” an intense visual absorption of a revered image that can lead to new states of consciousness through the quieting and transcending of self.7 Yet, for Morgan, sacred seeing is also social: what we attend to and how we attend is learned—and formative.8 So what we notice in an image is shaped by our cultural context.
Philosopher Aidan Lyon reviews research that supports Morgan’s main premise.9 According to Lyon, selective sensorial attention trains us to filter out distractions and use attention more wisely. Such deep attending can allow previously unconscious processes to enter awareness, producing a “mini psychedelic experience.”
To create a transcendent practice, consider using images or texts as focal points. If you integrate a familiar image, try to step outside existing frameworks to notice new things about it—who or what is represented? How? And why?
Tip 4: Choose a Limit to Make Space for the Sacred
Choosing to pay attention to one thing, means taking away our attention from something else. And so many spiritual lineages cultivate our capacity to make space through ascetic practices, or abstaining from particular pleasures.
Paulist Father Thomas Ryan characterizes fasting from food as a “sacred art,” describing how Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Mormon communities fast to discipline and purify the body and spirit, mark events and emotions, and connect to others and the divine.10 For Ryan, deprivation can be liberating: it quiets the self and redirects attention toward sacred texts and practice.
Sociologists Daniel Winchester and Michal Pagis characterize fasting and meditation as “somatic inversions”—practices that bring normally unnoticed aspects of bodily life into awareness.11 This awareness reshapes the embodied self, disrupts habits, and invites interpretation. And it’s this interpretive turn that makes inversion social: to make sense of bodily disruptions, we connect and reflect with others. Think of the celebration of Iftar dinners after Muslims complete their daily fast during Ramadan, for example, and how the absence of food during the day makes the sharing of it later all the sweeter.
Remember that attention can be additive and subtractive. As you integrate new techniques, consider changing patterns and removing stimuli, as well.
Attention In Practice
Community Village in San Francisco practices a “community-first approach to meditation.” Gathering people in their 20s and 30s, but open to all, they teach meditation and offer a welcoming and supportive environment to build meaningful connections, get inspired, and bring meditation practice into everyday life.
The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s wisdom is a guiding light for the community. He wrote that, “It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.”
This social element of attention-cultivation is baked into the rhythm of the community, as every gathering is peer-led. Furthermore, shared attention on things like budgets is cultivated, too, with transparency about community finances.
Tip 5: Pay Attention Together
We may assume that cultivating attention is best practiced alone; and, indeed, many traditional practices can be personal and introspective. But practicing together has a myriad of benefits!
Most importantly, practicing paying attention can help us move beyond our own desires and towards the needs of others. In an interview with The New Yorker, Buddhist teacher and Professor of Management Ron Purser explores this idea of “social mindfulness.”12 For Purser, mindful attentional practices may not be activism, but their demands of being present and moving beyond the self awaken us to the world and our place in it.
Research affirms this perspective. Working with neuroscientists, psychologist Matthew Fox reviewed neuroanatomy studies of meditation and found that even brief periods of loving-kindness and compassion practices can increase empathy and motivate social action.13
As you encourage mindful attention, avoid framing it as a purely individual exercise. Instead, present it as a practice rooted in relational awareness and responsibility, and highlight how a shared practice cultivates attention and community.
Additional Resources
Bombaerts, G., Hannes, T., Adam, M., et al. (2026). Beyond the attention economy, towards an ecology of attending. A manifesto. AI & Society, 41, 477-492. A declaration of support for political limits on attentional technologies; integrates Buddhist thought and practice.
Burnett, D. G., Loh, A., & Schmidt, P. (2023, November 24). Powerful forces are fracking our attention. We can fight back. The New York Times. An article written by members of The Strother School of Radical Attention, a non-profit organization focused on education, organizing, and art for attention activism.
Csordas, T. J. (1993). Somatic modes of attention. Cultural Anthropology, 8(2), 135-156. A classic anthropological work on culture, the body, and attention; includes case studies of spiritual (Catholic Charismatic and Puerto Rican espiritismo) and secular healers.
Doblmeier, M. (2019). Backs against the wall: The Howard Thurman story. Journey Films. A documentary about Dr. Howard Thurman’s contemplative thought and practice and his impacts on non-violent civil-rights activism.
Goleman, D., & Davidson, R. J. (2017). Altered traits: Science reveals how meditation changes your mind, brain, and body. Penguin Random House. An approachable scientific exploration of meditation, including its mechanisms, particularities, and impacts.
Granberg-Michaelson, W. (2025). The soulwork of justice: Four movements for contemplative action. Orbis Books. An exploration of the tools and practices that integrate contemplative movements and social-justice work.
Hall, C. (2024). Queering contemplation: Finding queerness in the roots and future of contemplative spirituality. An invitation to thinking creatively and expansively about contemplative practice.
Jackson, M. (2018). Distracted: Reclaiming our focus in a world of lost attention. Prometheus Books. An inquiry into distraction and attentional techniques; includes important chapters on seeing and reading.
Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House Publishing. A serious reflection on attention (and art) in our technology-driven age. (For more from Odell, see this recent Emergence Magazine interview on attention and time.)
Owens, R. (2023). The new saints: From broken hearts to spiritual warriors. Sounds True. A reflection on contemplative and embodied practices, with guidance.
Pollan, M. (2026). A world appears: A journey into consciousness. Penguin Random House. A new book that brings philosophical, scientific, and artistic insights to bear on consciousness.
Winchester, D. (2025). Becoming religious as an education of attention. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 64, 279-290. An article describing attention as a feature and form of religious formation; engages an ethnographic case-study of religious converts to Eastern Orthodoxy.
Worthen, M. (2023, May 25). Why universities should be more like monasteries. The New York Times. An analysis of tech-free attention interventions in higher education.
Wu, T. (2017). The attention merchants: The epic scramble to get inside our heads. Penguin Random House. A popular book that historicizes the industrialized commodification of our attention.
Footnotes
1 James, W. (1918). The principles of psychology. Henry Holt and Company.
2 Jha, A. P. (2021, Spring). Being in the now. Scientific American, 86-93. (See also Jha’s TED talk, How to tame your wandering mind.)
3 Kelly, B. D. (2024). Psychology, meditation, and the brain across contemplative traditions. In L. J. Miller (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of psychology and spirituality (2nd ed.) (pp. 451-483). Oxford University Press.
4 Kelly, B. D. (2008). Meditation, mindfulness, and mental health. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 25(1), 3-4.
5 Van Cappellen, P., & Edwards, M. E. (2021). The embodiment of worship: Relations among postural, psychological, and physiological aspects of religious practice. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 6(1-2), 56-79.
6 Van Cappellen, P., Edwards, M. E., Kamble, S. V., et al. (2024). Kneel, stand, prostrate: The psychology of prayer postures in three world religions. PLoS ONE, 19(8): e0306924.
7 Morgan, D. (2012). The embodied eye: Religious visual culture and the social life of feeling. University of California Press.
8 Morgan, D. (2005). The sacred gaze: Religious visual culture in theory and practice. University of California Press.
9 Lyon, A. (2023). Psychedelic experience: Revealing the mind. Oxford University Press.
10 Ryan, T. (2005). The sacred art of fasting: Preparing to practice. SkyLight Paths Publishing.
11 Winchester, D., & Pagis, M. (2022). Sensing the sacred: Religious experience, somatic inversions, and the religious education of attention. Sociology of Religion, 83(1),12-35.
12 Kang, J. C. (2026). Can “mindfulness” be a path to activism? The New Yorker. February 10.
13 Fox, K. C. R., Dixon, M. L., Nijeboer, S., et al. (2016). Functional neuroanatomy of meditation: A review and meta-analysis of 78 functional neuroimaging investigations. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 65, 208-228.
