ИСТИНА

Attention is one of the most important yet mysterious cognitive functions. On the one hand, in most cognitive or everyday tasks it never appears as a separate process (but is always coupled with perception, thought, memory, or motor action) and hasn't got its own product (but rather reveals itself through a more detailed perceptual image or more fast and accurate performance). On the other hand, attention is obvious introspectively, and it has got its effects on cognition, performance, and even brain function. Since the end of the 19th century, there have been two broad classes of attentional theories, labeled by William James as “cause theories” and “effect theories”, with the former considering attention as a separate causal “force” and the latter understanding it as a by-product of the functional system involved in the task accomplishment. Over a century, the empirical support is lacking to incline toward any of the two viewpoints, with the state of the art cognitive science favoring predominantly effect theories. Recent findings from Buddhist meditation show that the experience of meditation as an attentive practice (described by practitioners as “attention to the flow of consciousness” or “bare attention”) has long-lasting effects upon performance across various attentional paradigms. In Russian psychology of the 20th century, there are at least two relevant original theoretical traditions to unravel the nature of attention: cultural-historical psychology by Lev Vygotsky and activity theory by Alexey Leontiev, sometimes conjoined in a common cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framework. First, meditation as a cultural practice or a cultural tool, in Vygotsky's terms, might be considered as reconstructing the whole system of human cognitive processes, leading to a totally different mode of its functioning. Second, within the activity theory framework there are also “cause” and “effect” hypotheses on the nature of attention in its relation to activity. Attention is treated either as a by-product of any goal-driven activity (for example, perceptual or motor) or as an activity with its own structure, goals, and contents. The phenomenon of meditation might become a critical test for these two hypotheses.