William James (the coiner of "stream of consciousness," who pops up elsewhere in this note index) was interested in the "'phenomenology' of attention (the study of the experiences of perception, cognition, and 'being' itself," (236))
he theorized the "'deep distraction' part of an attentive mind"
for James, a "pinpoint focus that locks statically on an object cannot really be called 'attention' at all! For him, it's really kind of inert stultification" (the example they use on 236 is television, though they note that "James himself was dead by the time TV rolled around")
Ultimately, "James came to believe that in the healthy state a human mind was basically incapable of simply 'staying with' a discrete object for more than a moment. It was, in his view, the essential nature of human cognition to be DYNAMIC, to be moving, to be constantly in what he called the 'stream' of consciousness" (236)
being able to perceive your own consciousness in this attempt to focus is part of what James called introspection
However, "James proposed a truly brilliant account of what we actually mean when we talk about the beautiful thing that attention can be: For him, the genius of real attention is the ability, again and again, to bend the path of those moving thoughts back around to the object. In other words, genuine attention, the phenomenology of human attention, is a kind of centripetal distraction. Imagine the lovely looping rings of a spirograph, as it petals out and away and then back again to whatever is at the center of its attentional whorl."