Attention as an object of knowledge, intervention and valorisation: exploring data-driven neurotechnologies and imaginaries of intensified learning

Innovations in mobile neuromonitoring and brain–computer interfaces are increasingly used to inform understandings of human brains and behaviours while also catalysing imaginaries of neuroscientifically measured and enhanced economic productivity. In this paper, we focus on neurotechnologies that claim to capture, monitor, measure and train learners’ attention. We analyse a corpus of relevant scientific, governance, and commercial texts to explore how they reconfigure learners’ attention as an object of knowledge, intervention, and valorisation. We demonstrate that outcomes-driven neuroscience research and technological development tends to split attention into optimal and undesirable forms: externally versus internally oriented, and synchronised versus unsynchronised with others, which become the variables of intervention to optimise attention. Commercial wearables, in turn, envelop desirable forms of attention under logics of brain control, social discipline, and valorisation. This process is enacted within an international context of speculation on neurotechnology investments and their anticipated outcome of enhancing future human productivity. Circumscribing desirable forms of learner attention and subjectivity, these technologies provide expanded means to mould and monitor learners’ attention towards performativity regimes of economised education governance while enabling profit-making based on learners’ activity.