EDITORIAL
Attending to the Skills of Attention

 
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EDITORIAL
Attending to the Skills of Attention

Eric Booth, Cofounder and Contributing Editor, The Ensemble; Cofounder, ITAC; Senior Faculty, AIM

06-03-2026

“Spotlight attention vs. lantern attention.” I first encountered this distinction in the work of the U.S. psychologist Alison Gopnik. 

Spotlight attention means bringing full focus to a specific task. We develop this capacity over time, and we must!—it’s hard to succeed in life without the ability to focus well. Schooling is dedicated to developing this capacity: all those hours sitting at a desk and “paying attention” to information that rarely feels relevant; all those tests to measure spotlight skills. 

Eric Booth leads a session at the ESUSA 2026 Symposium. Photo: Melissa Taylor.

A psychically richer version of spotlight attention is the “flow” experience that we all know and treasure, and that we want our students to find in music-making. “Flow” means complete absorption in a task that is a match between our skills, our interests, and the difficulty of the challenge. In flow, we lose self-consciousness, anxiety, and self-critique; we lose our sense of time passing, and we feel a sense of effortless endeavor. 

It’s a prescription for mental health—literally! “Social prescribing,” which involves medical professionals prescribing arts activities for health outcomes, is widespread in the U.K. and growing fast in the U.S. 

Spotlight attention doesn’t always lead to flow experience, of course, as you know from at least some of your hours in a practice room. But when students are guided well by their teachers, music can be an unusually rich medium that leads to flow.

Lantern attention, on the other hand, illuminates a panoramic view, wherein we lean back, reflect, consider context, and connect with others empathically. We want our students to develop these attentive skills, too—skills necessary in order to live wisely and well, appreciate the music they’re making, and make meaning of all the crazy stuff that happens in the world. 

In healthy music-making (and in all kinds of learning) students need to go back and forth between spotlight attention and lantern attention. They need to be able to focus on their part and to hear, and relish, the sound and feel of the whole. It’s the going back and forth that makes the music-making experience transformative. 

The late psychologist and philosopher Elliot Eisner proposed that learning in the arts is the best way to gain a life-crucial understanding of the relationships between parts and wholes. No wonder ensemble music-making presents such a powerful opportunity for the developing mind and spirit.

The neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang also writes about the dialectic between two kinds of attention. She uses the phrase “transcendent” attention to denote the lantern-focused, reflective, meaning-making kind of attention—it transcends spotlight focus—and she asserts that it is essential for identity formation and moral development. She is concerned that modern life, with its constant digital stimulation, suppresses the natural development of transcendent thinking. 

Mental health, she proposes, comes from going back and forth between these two kinds of thinking, focused and transcendent. This is a crucial point: it’s not just the access to these two kinds of thinking that builds mental health; it’s the mental activity of shifting back and forth between them. 

We in the field of music for social impact are positioned to make a big difference for young people’s mental health and success in life. We guide our students’ attention all the time; we teach them how to attend. I’m sad to report that I see a lot of imbalanced instruction in music education (including our field) that relentlessly overemphasizes spotlight skills and suffocates transcendent thinking.

We can do better. We can guide students’ attention in ways that build their capacity to go back and forth between focused (spotlight) and transcendent (lantern) attention. We can build their awareness of these two modes and of the importance of both. 

How do we do this, within our teaching and in our program structures? You probably already do it, to some degree; so maybe the better question is: How can we do it more intentionally and more often?

The most powerful way to develop these skills of attention in our students is to model them ourselves. You may have heard me proclaim “the Law of 80%”—eighty percent of what you teach is who you are. This is by far our most powerful teaching tool. By switching back and forth between these modes in our teaching, we can demonstrate the power of both modes. We can show them that full attention on a task can feel pleasurable—and so can metacognition and reflection. We can help them discover that focus-shifting, going back and forth between the two modes, can accelerate both skill development and the pleasures of ensemble music-making.

Psychologist Gopnik, philosopher Eisner, and neuroscientist Immordino-Yang have illuminated the importance, for mental health, of the capacity to move fluently between these two modes of attention. Music education is a fertile field for developing this crucial, overlooked capacity. In a world that is diabolically designed to damage young people’s mental health, we have an opportunity to guide them in developing strong attentive focus and flexibility, as they discover the skills and pleasures of making music with friends.

Allison Gopnick, Arts and Health, Attention And Learning, Attention Flexibility, Attention Shifting, Attention Skills, Cognitive Development, Collaborative Music-Making, Creative Learning, Digital Stimulation, Editorial, Educational Psychology, Eliot Eisner, Ensemble Music-Making, Eric Booth, flow state, Focus And Reflection, Focused Attention, Human Development, Identity Formation, June 2026, Lantern Attention, Learning In The Arts, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Meaning Making, Mental Health, Metacognition, Moral Development, Music Education, Music for Social Impact, Neuroscience, personal growth, Reflective Thinking, Skill Development, Social Prescribing, Spotlight Attention, Student Learning, teaching practices, Transcendent Attention, Transformative Learning, Well-Being Through Music, Youth Mental Health

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