Why Attention Needs a Technical Upgrade
- Philip Lorenzo
- Oct 24
- 1 min read
Despite over 45,000 scientific papers on attention since 1950, we still face a deep confusion: What is attention, really? Theories about it are often inconsistent, saying too many different things. Philosopher Wayne Wu argues that it's time to stop using “attention” as a vague explainer and start treating it as what it really is—a phenomenon that needs explaining. Wu proposes a unifying view: attention is the subject’s mental selection of a target to guide response. Making this definition explicit provides a technical, testable foundation that can finally bring clarity and coherence to attention science.