Quite possibly, the shallowness of much modern poetry can to a great extent be attributed to the poor level of perceptive capacity prevalent in our modern urban cultures. Fine detail and subtlety largely slip past our attention without making any ripples.

A few years back I attended a talk by Matthew Crawford (author of the very interesting book Shop Class as Soulcraft) in the course of which he discussed how our limited fund of attention is getting too thinly spread out. At question time I asked whether he had considered the quality rather than just the quantity of attention, but my question remained essentially unanswered. This highly intelligent writer and researcher who had obviously put vast effort into studying the problem of attention had not apparently registered that it has two attributes. But it has.

The first attribute of attention (that we all recognise) is the one we spread when, for example, multi-tasking or getting distracted. There's only so much of it to go around, but while the fund isn't exhausted we can cope with attending at some level to several things at once. Once it's exhausted we stop paying attention to some of the threads – forgetting information or even blanking threads out entirely. By its nature, this attribute of attention is innate – the brain can only handle so many disparate ideas at one time.

The second attribute of attention is its quality while the fund is not exhausted – the level of subtle detail we perceive (or not) while ostensibly paying attention to a single specific experience. Although it probably has an innate upper limit (exhaustion of the fund), up to that point its effective limit is not innate, but learned from infancy by exposure to more (or less) subtle sensory stimuli. Its effective capacity settles down to a level conversant with the complexity of the majority of stimuli impinging on us as our minds develop through infancy (critically), childhood and adolescence, so it's essentially cultural.

Our big problem in Western-style urban environments is that most of the subtlety needed to develop sensitive perception has for a long time either gone missing or been buried in noise. We mostly live in ecologically impoverished surroundings and have been acclimatised to a very crude sensory environment filled to a great extent with this noise. It's not solely, or even primarily, auditory, but consists of any overlay of meaningless or irrelevant stimuli – the background rumble of road traffic, the smell of exhaust fumes and next door's barbecue, a constant stream of petty distractions, the glare of artificial light against the night sky, bursts of piped news or muzak and, not least, the everyday clatterings and mutterings of strangers in the excessive proximity typical of our crowded towns. But we take it for granted which means that, to avoid being swamped, our threshold of perception has been adjusted upward to tune it out. Inevitably, that adjustment also suppresses recognition of potentially useful subtle stimuli that could impart information.

As if this were not enough, for around the last sixty or so years we've contributed to raising the initial threshold of perception (apparently intentionally) by feeding the very young primarily with specially manufactured crude stimuli. For now, let's look just at visual perception. Before the '60s, children's' books were generally illustrated either with photographs of the real world or with artists' renditions in realistic and often fine detail. At best, Bilibin, Pogány and Teniel come to mind among others. And even the illustrations in an early '50s low-price Biggles story book,1 although posterised, are realistic and accurate as to technical detail. But in this more recent period, illustration of books for young children has degenerated, first by negligence (for example in a 1964 illustration to John Buchan's 'The 39 Steps' of a scene where the hero Hannay hides from an overflying – expressly – monoplane aircraft, it's shown as a biplane) 2 and latterly into crude, flat colour, detail-free and deeply unrealistic cartoons.3 These now dominate on-screen entertainment for 'under 7s' kids as well – at the very point in their mental development when perceptual capacity is being most actively built.

Particularly in the case of online material, due to the vast amount of time spent viewing it, the paucity (indeed in most cases, complete absence) of detail prevents subtle perception from operating in the developing mind. But left to itself, exposure in early years sets the benchmark for the future, so we have echelons of folk with perfectly good brains unwittingly deprived of the capacity for detailed perception. We're generally so inattentive we don't even realise we're being inattentive. Because that's the norm it goes completely under the cultural radar, leading, among other misfortunes, to contented creation of unimaginative and unsubtle art.

So what (if anything) are we to do about this? It has to be a personal solution for each of us individually, as we can't at the drop of a hat change the way commerce and statutory education operate. But there is a way for individuals to recover or improve perception. It's grounded in exercising voluntary control over the normally automatic way the brain records experiences.

In summary, while exposed to an apparently new experience, we automatically build a template or mental model representing the key (most salient) attributes of it. Repeated exposure to the same experience may improve the template by adding detail, but only up to a point. As soon as the template is sufficiently developed for swift minimal recognition of the experience when it recurs, the process of extending it generally stops.4 Thereafter, this necessarily incomplete template largely serves as a mental surrogate for the actual experience when it's encountered again. It functions in this way by virtue of the internal dialogue, which, in the face of a new experience first decides when to stop observing (i.e. when the template under construction is to be considered 'complete' enough), and thereafter, when a comparable experience is repeated, seeks out the closest matching template among those already existing. (Which incidentally may go a long way to explaining prejudice). Templates do get adjusted in the face of (usually) radically changed experiences, but, unless steps are taken to override the automatic process, the general level of detail they hold is largely conditioned by the level of early years exposure to detail in the environment.

The way I speak of for extending perception essentially consists of temporarily switching off the internal dialogue, inhibiting voluntary (narrowly focused) attention, allowing a maximally detailed template to be built from the mass of incoming sensory stimuli without it getting 'filtered'. As the 'technique' is exercised 5 repeatedly on differing experiences, templates containing increased detail proliferate. This allows the internal dialogue, when operating under normal circumstances, to choose among a wider range of templates that represent subtle differences between apparently similar experiences.

Obviously, switching off the filter can be overdone. The story Funes the Memorious 6 by Borges describes a protagonist who had taken this to extremes, remembering separately and in infinite detail everything he'd ever witnessed, and creating a unique identity to encapsulate every one of the infinite range of integer numbers individually (eschewing our conventional place-notation entirely). But used with discretion it can nevertheless be extremely helpful in unlocking the subtleties of experience.

Not incidentally, this objective has been traced back to a state recognised in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, termed mindfulness. But this mindfulness is not the multi-billion-dollar self-preoccupation 'meditation for wellbeing' circus 7 you'll find on the web under that name. It's a rigorous discipline with a finite intended aim – to serve as a corrective for poorly developed attention. It's beautifully explained in the book Mindfulness in Plain English by the Reverend Henepola Gunaratana: 8

'When you first become aware of something, there is a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it. That is a stage of Mindfulness. Ordinarily, this stage is very short. It is that flashing split second just as you focus your eyes on the thing, just as you focus your mind on the thing, just before you objectify it, clamp down on it mentally and segregate it from the rest of existence. [...] You experience a softly flowing moment of pure experience that is interlocked with the rest of reality, not separate from it. [...] In the process of ordinary perception, the Mindfulness step is so fleeting as to be unobservable. [...] It is the purpose of the above mentioned Vipassana (or insight) meditation to train us to prolong that moment of awareness.' (My edits & emphasis).

Gunaratana's 'fleeting instant' is most likely the time it takes for the internal dialogue to search through the archive of templates before it finds the closest match to the experience. Which is why it's so fleeting that it goes unnoticed. If no template exists for the current experience, it probably lasts a little longer while the template is being built, but normally still not long enough to build more than minimal models of reality. But our need as poets is to go beyond the obvious – to find the hidden depths of experience. So we must stop the internal dialogue operating for much longer than normal – indeed long enough to extract the maximum possible detail from that moment of pure experience before categorising it in a template for future reference. Importantly though, in the mindful state every experience is a new experience because no search for an existing template is taking place.

I've found that the required state can at least initially be cultivated by practising blanking the mind – just stopping thinking – while not exposed to any powerful external stimulus. But stopping thinking includes stopping thinking about stopping thinking, so it takes persistence and practice to achieve. Nevertheless, once the mind can be blanked at will, it can be taken out to experience the external world, and the effect of observing with a blanked mind will develop gradually into effective mindfulness with repeated practice. Only short periods in the mindful state are needed, as the subtle appreciation of detail that results seems to be simultaneous (right brain?). And spending too much time in the mindful state is a trap (as in the case of Borges' Funes), so it's absolutely not a 'meditation' technique. Nor should it be confused with inspiration or 'enlightenment'. Exercising mindfulness won't immediately leave you aware anything has happened – all you'll have done is enhance your repertoire of subtle experience for the future.

What I've (admittedly somewhat vaguely) proposed here is, of course, only one possible approach to polishing one's perception. Achieving the goal is what ultimately matters, regardless of the technique used to get there – provided it actually works. Unfortunately it's very easy to deceive oneself about one's capacities (take a look at the research of Dunning and Kruger and their successors). In the case of the poet, the only valid test is whether their readers detect increased subtlety of imagery or expression in their output. It will inevitably show, provided of course that the poems address subjects of sufficient subtlety anyway.

 [1] Capt. W. E. Johns, Biggles — Air Detective, Marks and Spencer 1952(?).

 [2] illustration by Edward Ardizzone (1964), reproduced on the front cover of John Buchan, The Thirty-nine Steps, Everyman's Library Children's Classics 1999.

 [3] I've received for some years two independent monthly catalogues of discounted books. Each issue of both may contain several pages of books for children. Those for 'age 3-6' are exclusively illustrated with crude cartoons. Books for ages '7 onward' may be illustrated by photographs, but any graphics remain as crude as for the younger age group. And worryingly, one of these catalogues refers to such crudely illustrated books as 'early learning'.

 [4] This early termination of template building is probably evolutionary. In our predominantly plains or forest hunter gatherer existence rapid recognition of potential threats in general terms would have taken priority for survival over deep perception of details. Nevertheless, within narrow domains born of necessity, detailed perception is crucial to survival in such environments, as, for example, acquired and maintained by experienced hunters and trackers.

 [5] The word 'technique' is a compromise here in aid of simple summarisation, as it's not a really a technique but a state, entered into via a variety of alternative techniques. So the phrase 'technique is exercised' might more precisely if less overtly informatively be replaced by 'state is entered'.

 [6] J. L. Borges, Ficciones, Everyman's Library 1993

 [7] circus acts range from chargeable 'mindfulness services' such as concentrating on the hairs on one's hand in a hired whited-out room for so many dollars an hour to guidance on observing every movement you make while washing the dishes after dinner. These circus acts entirely miss the point, substituting perpetual repetition of elementary training exercises for the talent they're meant to work towards. So they're a path down a blind alley to nowhere.
A more rational alternative can be found in #What is Mindfulness by neuroscientist Tamara Russell (Watkins 2017), but this suffers from precisely the fact that it is rational, emphasising the cerebral mechanics of control over an attention network. Both the circuses and the neuroscientific approach seemingly fail to register that left brain (rational) intervention prevents the holistic perception that underpins the purpose and usefulness of mindfulness. They all assume the exercise of volition over what is to be observed. This primes current perception with guidance on what to expect from the experience, contaminating it with 'blasts from the past'. The mindfulness discussed here is quite different, in that it fundamentally depends on shutting down the left brain rational supervision and control. Consequently, while in the mindful state, every experience is perceived as entirely new and unexpected.

 [8] Reverend Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English, chapter 13 paragraph 4 (available widely on the web)