D. Graham Burnett’s essay for The Public Domain Review traces a forgotten apparatus — the “pursuit test,” built during the First World War to measure whether a man could hold his attention on a machine. His argument is that the attention our feeds now price so relentlessly was engineered in military psychology labs a century ago, and that what we call an attention crisis is really about which kind of attention we have left.

What the tests asked of a subject:

  • Knight Dunlap (1875–1949), working at the Air Service’s Medical Research Laboratory, built an attentional stress test: fourteen stimulus lights, fourteen brass pins, and a stylus that had to touch the pin beside the lit lamp without nicking the surrounding washer — a nick counted as an error.
  • The same panel ran two more problems concurrently: an amp-meter needle the subject had to hold at center against the experimenter’s rheostat, and a motor whose speed he had to restore with a foot pedal.
  • All of it for twenty-five minutes, while the cadet wore a “rebreather” — a closed-loop respiration system that amounts, in Burnett’s phrase, to a gradual asphyxiation machine.
  • Walter R. Miles’ Pursuitmeter (1921) automated the setup: a slit-sight, a motile white dot driven by internal clockwork, a rheostat to chase it, and a paper record of every drift. No longer a duel with an experimenter — a duel with a program.

Burnett’s sharpest observation is an inversion of the word. The Greek kybernētēs is the helmsman who steers; the Pursuitmeter flipped the relation and made the machine steer its human through a sequence of cues, recording how well he followed. “Robotic Simon Says,” he calls it.

The line to our own lives runs through advertising rather than the military: the Nielsen audiometer that logged American radio dials, then the eye-tracking systems that priced the “attention value” of each glance. Attention became a thing worth studying precisely because an instrument could elicit it and a score could be attached to it.

The distinction worth keeping is his closing one. The quick-twitch vigilance we practise all day is cybernetic attention, and it is not the same faculty as reading, daydreaming, or being with another person. “Love, too, is an act of attention. And it quantifies very badly indeed.”