Attention and Experience

(you might wanna skip the first min or so if you don't wanna hear my waffly pre-amble about the podcast) Attention can be thought of as the central locus of our conscious experience, its processes precede many of our most deliberate and conscious engagements with the world. What we attend to is highly deterministic of what we do - through using the metacognitive tools of 'attending to attention' (which is really just mindfulness) one can gain greater insight into how they're attentionally oriented currently and whether this orientation is conducive to one's goals. These mindfulness tools also provide anchors which prevent you from simply being swept up in the ruminative tides of everyday experience - instead you become a more active participant in experience. To become 'mindful' is to notice the difference between seeing and watching, hearing and listening. It is the act of becoming a more astute observer of this curious thing we call consciousness.  Basically this is a nice ramble on the dynamics of attention in our conscious experience. Various interesting and mysterious aspects of attention and experience more generally are discussed, I also touch upon the link between attention and learning plus a load of other tangents are entertained  Episode art is credited to Ernst Mach