THE SELF EMERGES BY PAYING ATTENTION.

THE SELF EMERGES BY PAYING ATTENTION. Jonah Lehrer illustrates Virginia Woolf’s view of the mind with a passage from TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. Mrs. Ramsay has stopped paying attention to the dinner table conversation, which is about mathematics. Her eyes drift over a bowl of fruit on the table. “With a ‘sudden exhilaration,’ her mind becomes ‘like a light….piercing through the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral.’” The book follows her glance as she decides she does not want a pear. Lehrer concludes that: “Woolf realized that the self emerges via the act of attention [emphasis in Lehrer].” The self is what selects from the stream of impressions that the mind receives.