Understanding Attention

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Attention is necessary for connection.

Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness style is a lesson in the art of attention.

A preponderance of writing on distraction in the digital age suggests a yearning for attention.

Reading Virginia Woolf in 2026 feels like an answer to a widespread cultural yearning to reclaim our fleeting attention spans.

Virginia Woolf is famous her stream-of-consciousness technique. As she describes it in her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf sought to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind” and “trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each site or incident scores upon the consciousness.” Woolf's atoms and “scores” are fundamental to her narrative techniques—revolutionary during her time and newly relevant today. How we pay attention, she is arguing, changes us.

Woolf anticipates a book like Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell's book reads like a manifesto, decrying "the invasive logic of commercial social media to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction." Like all good manifestos, it focuses more on solutions—new ways of being—than critique. Odell advocates for what she calls bioregionalism, "an awareness not only of the many life-forms of each place, but how they are interrelated." Later, discussing David Hockney's paintings, John Cage's experiments with the musicality of ambient sound, and William Blake's poetry, she makes the point that "Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside ourselves."

A stream of consciousness is inherently open-ended. That much seems obvious. Woolf is attuned to the attention's unpredictable non-linearity. She would not have used a term like bioregional, but her portrayals of her characters' mental experience is "oriented" to the interrelationships of the many somethings—objects, people, feelings—outside ourselves. In her fiction, Woolf portrays consciousness as a roving, transmittable process.

In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, Woolf's characters' absorb the bustle of London streets and the grandeur of Bourton Hall. Their surroundings become part of them. “The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body,” she writes in the famous passage in which Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith witness the chaos of traffic created by a stopped car purportedly occupied by the Prime Minister. As the passage continues, the effects of this car reverberate from the sun through popping parasols, the sweet peas in Clarissa’s pursed face, finally “scoring” Septimus’s combustible psyche:

The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

In Woolf's fiction, moments when one character's stream of consciounsess pours into another are all-important. Woolf blends her characters’ interior monologues by mingling their responses to the environmental stimulus they share. We feel the “throb of the motor engines” through the lens of two filters. Clarissa has been watching Septimus, imagining what life feels like for him. Now they both feel the traffic as they watch the car come to a halt. As the passage progresses, Septimus’s fragile psyche dominates, his shell-shock the catalyst that makes the world waver and quiver. But Woolf makes it clear that Septimus’s symptoms are an exaggerated form of a sensitivity to environment shared by Clarissa—and, presumably, “every one” of the people on that street looking at that motor car.

Throughout the novel, the mental experience of characters is interactive, rather than strictly internal. In fact, Woolf goes so far as to suggest that consciousness may be shared. “They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort,” Clarissa reminisces about the passionate friendship she once shared with Peter Walsh:

Understanding Attention

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They sat on the ground and talked—he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, “She will marry that man,” dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing, Dalloway would marry Clarissa. And then in a second it was over.

They sat on the ground and talked—he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, “She will marry that man,” dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing, Dalloway would marry Clarissa. And then in a second it was over.

In her book Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Lisa Zunshine argues that Woolf engages in forms of "mind reading" that mirror the experience of her characters. Woolf, she observes, trains readers in the art of "cognitive embedment." Our mental experience is embedded in the narrator's, which is embedded in Peter's, which is embedded in Clarissa's. And so on. Through the puzzle of these interrelated mental experiences, we discern the waning of Peter and Clarissa's intimacy. In the process, we are primed to feel their re-connection after many years more fully.

Literary critics borrowed the term stream of consciousness from William James's 1892 work of that name. Crucially, for James, consciousness is persona, continuously changing and focused on objects outside ourselves. Our screens—specifically, per Odell's point, the platforms that commercialize them—are dispersing the streams of our attention to such a degree that it feels like they no longer belong to us. In Woolf's terms, they "score" our consciousness in ways we are increasingly unsatisfied with. In the process, we feel isolated. We feel disconnected from our immediate environments and from each other.

As it is for Odell, attention is a close cousin of connection in Woolf's writing. This may account for the yearning quality of so much writing about attention in the digital age. (Some key titles listed in the sources below.) Connection, of course, is a central theme for any number of novelists. Zunshine argues that the act of reading any fiction exercises our capacity for so-called mind reading—attending to the thoughts and feelings of others. When it comes to the art of attention, though, Woolf is masterful.

If you're tired of the way your phone is "scoring" your brain, try spending some time with Virginia Woolf.

Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. W. W. Norton.

Crawford, M. B. (2015). The world beyond your head: On becoming an individual in an age of distraction. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hari, J. (2022). Stolen focus: Why you can’t pay attention—and how to think deeply again. Crown.

Heller, N. (2024, April 29). "The battle for attention: How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age?" The New Yorker. newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/the-battle-for-attention

Lanier, J. (2018). Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. Henry Holt.

Mark, G. (2023). Attention span: A groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity. Hanover Square Press.

Masoud, R. H. (2025, July 15). "The attention economy and the collapse of cognitive autonomy." Georgetown Law Denny Center Blog. law.georgetown.edu/denny-center/blog/the-attention-economy/

Nelson, M. (2015). The argonauts. Graywolf Press.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Grand Central Publishing.

Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.

Simarmata, F. M. (2026, February 2). "The decline of attention span in the digital era." SGU Academic. sgu.ac.id/the-decline-of-attention-span-in-the-digital-era/

Smith, Z. (2010, November 25). "Generation why?" The New York Review of Books. nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why/

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