Very few people escape the attention rigidifying impact of our immediate familial and broadly social education. This educational process is heavily weighted toward specific attention biases. A preponderance of our educational resource is spent on intellectual development. This entails, with gradually greater subtlety and specificity, the singling out, or in my language, narrow focusing upon and objectification of sensations and concepts (concepts are also objects of sensation). We learn repeatedly to narrow our focus upon and grasp onto experiences as objects. That is, we learn to grasp with our attention the thousands of distinctions between almost every sense experience available to us. In addition, we are rewarded, cajoled, applauded, respected, despised, criticized, loved and punished, accepted and rejected based upon our ability to focus upon, objectify, recall and verbalize our experience throughout our lives.

In most societies, an individual is rewarded when one is able to communicate objective, commonly accepted, life-world experience. To be unable to do so is to feel left out, alienated, to be experienced and labeled as different, or to be ignored or ostracized by one’s peers. Therefore, even people who would not be considered intellectuals by any relative standards are also subject to these judgments and suffer the consequences. We are constantly reaffirming the level of our interpersonal connection through the repeated establishment of re-constructions and verbalizations of narrowly focused, objective common experience. This shared narrow-objective intellectual process, particularly shared views and shared meaning, is seen as a major component of socialization, of what we humans continually reiterate that we have in common, as social beings, a mutual ability to objectify each other and everything else, usually one small bit at a time.

This ubiquitous use of narrowly focused objective attention also represents an attempt to achieve a useful, and satisfying level and scope of connection, closeness and intimacy with others, and with experience itself. Ironically, however, in reality, this intimacy, immersion or familiar union with experience can be accomplished to truly satisfying depths only with other more immersed forms of attention.

Doomed to limited success we, nevertheless, hone our narrow and objective attention skills with the result of ever increasing use and fixation of narrow-objective attention. Thus, it seems to me that the major reason that the relationship between attentional change and brain wave activity has not been more widely appreciated, is that most of us do not vary our style of attention very much. We are more or less fixated in a predominantly narrow-objective style of attention. ... 

– Les Fehmi, Princeton Biofeedback Center,
Consciousness Quotient Institute