All Learning Reimagined, August 21, 2026

All Learning Reimagined with Teresa Songbird
Episode 2 of series on The Economy of Distraction
Attention Creates Reality
What Are You Teaching Yourself to Notice? How Attention Shapes Learning and Life
Summary
Attention as a Filter
Teresa introduces the second episode in her Art of Paying Attention series by asking what people are teaching themselves to notice. She presents the idea that attention helps shape lived reality by determining what enters awareness and what gets filtered out. A simple exercise asks listeners to look for blue objects and then notice how many red objects they remember seeing. Her point is that the red objects were present all along, but a focus on blue made them less likely to enter conscious awareness. She applies this filtering idea to learning, relationships, personal challenges, and everyday experience. Throughout the episode, she invites listeners to treat the idea as something to explore rather than as a belief she is imposing on them.
Questions Change What We Look For
A central theme is that the questions people repeatedly ask can guide their attention. Teresa contrasts asking "What's wrong?" with asking "What's possible here?" and argues that each question encourages the mind to search for a different kind of evidence. She extends this to difficult experiences, acknowledging that pain, injustice, health problems, and relationship issues may require immediate attention. Her concern is becoming stuck in a repeated story that keeps attention fixed on the same experience. In learning, she gives the example of a student who repeatedly says, "I'm not good at maths," and then notices every mistake as confirmation. She proposes language such as "What haven't I learnt yet?" as a way to direct attention toward possibility and further learning.
Different Lenses, Different Experiences
Teresa recounts traveling through Scandinavia and Russia and spending time near Oslo in what she describes as Viking country. After returning to Australia, she and her traveling companion told their family very different versions of the same experience. The difference was striking enough that she remembers wondering whether they had even experienced the same reality. She now interprets that memory through the idea of selective attention: previous experiences, expectations, beliefs, and emotional states can influence what people notice and what they filter out. She connects that idea to bias in education, noting that students and adults can read the same material or live through the same event and assign very different meanings to it. This leads her to emphasize the importance of noticing the lens through which a person is interpreting experience.
Language, the Body, and What We Water
The episode moves from external perception to the way attention may affect internal experience. Teresa suggests noticing the breath, jaw, shoulders, belly, or chest, then shifting attention toward a person, animal, place, or experience that feels beautiful, peaceful, or nourishing. She says that changing the focus of attention can be mirrored in the body's internal state. She also describes changing the language she uses about health, preferring to think in terms of balance rather than defining herself through sickness or healing. Using the metaphor of two garden beds, she asks which one will grow if only one is watered. She applies the metaphor to thoughts, skills, relationships, fear, curiosity, gratitude, and identity, arguing that what receives sustained attention tends to become more prominent in lived experience.
The Words Adults Give Children
Teresa emphasizes that adults help shape the stories children tell about themselves. She recalls a grade-three music lesson in which a music teacher and classroom teacher discussed her singing voice while she was standing nearby. Teresa cannot remember their exact words, but she remembers the feeling they created: she came away thinking that she could sing and that she liked music. She says that one comment influenced how she saw herself and helped her embrace singing and music throughout her life. From that memory, she urges parents, grandparents, teachers, teacher aides, neighbors, and others around children to be mindful of what they say. Her broader argument is that words can direct a child's attention toward a particular identity, ability, or limitation and can therefore have a lasting effect on learning.
Curiosity, Science, and the Future Learner
Near the end, Teresa brings up the double-slit experiment as a topic she finds fascinating while clearly stating that she is not an expert in the science. She uses it to open questions about observation, measurement, consciousness, and whether attention influences what people experience. She also recalls another experiment involving biological samples but repeatedly says that she cannot remember the details and needs to find the source again. These examples lead into a broader call for curiosity, imagination, questioning, and discernment rather than accepting ideas simply because they come from someone labeled an expert. Teresa criticizes forms of schooling that tell children what to think instead of helping them learn how to choose, question, and participate in creating their learning. She closes by asking listeners to notice where their attention is being captured and whether that is where they consciously choose to place it.