In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford called attention “the thing that is most one’s own” because what we pay attention to determines what is real to us, what is “actually present to our consciousness.” Just as we become what we eat, our reality becomes what we pay attention to. And just like our appetite has been hijacked by food engineers (by “manipulating levels of sugar, fat, and salt”) so are attention engineers trying to conquer our minds. Crawford called distractibility, or lack of ability to focus, the “mental equivalent of obesity”. - via