When I drive to the post office everyday for my office mail-run, I listen to NPR; I'm usually driving when Fresh Air is on. Today Terry Gross was interviewing Martha Weinman Lear, the author of Where Did I Leave My Glasses, which is about normal memory problems that come with middle age. She recounted how she went to a neurologist because she was afraid her memory loss was an early sign of Alzheimer's. The doctor said it was a normal type of memory loss, that of episodic memory (based on events in one's life) rather than semantic memory (established facts about the world learned in youth). When she asked how to improve her memory, the doctor said that the biggest hindrance to remembering things is not paying attention in the first place. You aren't going to remember the name of a person you're introduced to, or the title of a movie, if you weren't paying enough attention when it was mentioned to you.

This is my predicament nearly all the time, with just about everything. I find that I am almost always attending to nothing in particular. My mind is usually focused inward, but I generally feel unsatisfied with my thoughts; they're more like the drifting that happens just before falling asleep than anything else. I'm not solving problems, or composing stories, or thinking poetically or intellectually. Instead I'm going over the few things from the recent past that I happened to be paying attention to, or (if I'm at work) thinking of how I'd rather be at home reading. I might re-imagine my part in a recent conversation, and while I'm doing it I'll picture myself talking face-to-face with a person who I was actually talking to on the phone or in email. Or maybe I'll call to mind a distant friend who I haven't contacted in a while. Sometimes my thoughts are based on things in my view, like bumper stickers or the fact that the weather predicted snow yesterday but instead it's sunny; so I must notice some things, but I don't know why it is that I notice these things and not others.

Invariably, when it occurs to me to judge my thoughts, they seem banal and uninteresting. In their place I'd probably like most of all to think of stories that I could write, but that doesn't happen naturally and I generally can't when I try. It seems to me that this is probably related to my inattentiveness, since writers very often talk about how they retain details. But then again, some writers are also described as seeming disconnected and fanciful. I tell myself there are simply different sorts of fiction writers, and that maybe I just wouldn't be the type who has an eye for detail.

Because of my inattentiveness, I'm constantly seeing things in my daily drives which I know I've seen before, but wouldn't have recalled if someone had tried to remind me of them. Things like the placement of trees, or the locations of stores; a broken trash can, a bus stop advertisement, the shape of a building. I don't notice big things, too; for example, every time I went to Fell's Point in Baltimore I would not notice the fact that there was a visible body of water unless Anne would point it out to me. If I were to make a model of the scene from memory, the harbor wouldn't be part of it; all of the buildings would be homogeneous, without distinguishing details and likely in the wrong places or just not there. The same is true of the street on which I live, and really every place I've encountered. I'm afraid that it also extends to things I read, conversations I have, pictures or movies I've seen. I have very poor recall for almost everything I've done in my life, because I just don't pay attention.

There have been many times in the past where I've lamented the fact that my attention to my immediate surroundings is so low. I often try to keep my mind focused on noticing things, but I never do it very well and whatever progress I make fades quickly, simply because I forget to try. I find it extremely difficult to keep my mind directed outward, even though when I succeed, I feel more energy from the endeavor rather than less.

The whole thing makes me wonder how other people attend to the world, since it seems like most other people have a higher level of attention than mine. I am always curious about the workings of other people's minds, although I have no idea if I'm any good at imagining them. I'm interested in how other people process the world, what thoughts they have, how their perspectives affect their intelligence, and how to imagine different levels of intelligence. I wish I could have an internal account of why people say or do certain things, one that would describe from their own perspective what the reasoning process was, or their emotional state, and even the mental structures they carry around with them which indicate what certain words or actions mean. I think my interest in these things improves my chances of someday habitually writing stories.

I wonder what capacity I, or anyone else, has for changing these basic elements of personality. More than will I ever be attentive, I wonder, can I ever be attentive?