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So, I've been thinking a lot about the capture and management of attention
Now, attention is important because attention is a prerequisite for any kind of interpersonal
persuasion, education, transformation or growth. Attention requires immersion, requires absorption,
a state in which your attention is fully occupied.
One of the greatest “rhetorical” technologies that we have invented to capture and manage
our attention is the cinema. The cinema is a shrine to immersion, it’s
the ultimate attention technology.
Storytelling. One of the magical things that happens when you watch films is that you become
a part of the movie. And this is known as the diactic shift. Narratologists describe
the diactic shift as the moment in which the viewer assumes a viewpoint in the story and
starts to co-create the world as world. That is the point that you enter the dream, that
is the moment that the film breaks through the screen and becomes real. They’ve done
scans of people’s prefrontal lobes when they watch films, when they’re immersed
in films. Their prefrontal lobe actually dims, the activity dims, there is a dwindling of
the ego, your sense of self-awareness dissipates and you’re literally part of the movie.
That kind of immersiveness, that openness, that... thing that happens, is where all extasies
can be found. As Tim Doody says, “it recontextualizes the self as a marvelous conduit in a timeless
hole from which molecules and meanings flow ,from neuron to nebula, and back again”.
And those moments man are what make me believe ultimately that cinema is a cannon to Godliness.
George Youngblood said that “cinema reflects mankind’s historical drive, his desire to
manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes “.