ECS 190: Attention!

ECS 190: ATTENTION! Reading, Focusing, and Expanding Your Mind

Everyone wants your attention: advertisers, social media, politicians, college professors. But what will you pay attention to? Do you get to choose? Should you even try to control your attention?

In this seminar we will explore how our views on attention relate to big questions in life: what to concentrate on, what to filter out, and how to open yourself to new ideas and experiences. We will be guided by transformative texts from a range of cultures, time periods, and disciplines that pull us into different kinds of attentive states toward our surroundings, literature and the arts, our inner lives, and the lives of others. Readings include works of literature, psychology, spirituality, and science by authors such as Sophocles, Virginia Woolf, Rabindranath Tagore, and W.E.B. Dubois.

You will be part of a project—designed by faculty from thirteen different departments—that will change the way Emory students experience the life of the mind and find intellectual community. All three sections of this course will join together for activities outside of class in which you will pay attention to our campus and its surroundings, as well as to your classmates’ perspectives.