CONCEPT
Attentional Fallow
Citton’s term for the periods of cognitive emptiness—silence from notifications, suggestions, and AI-generated options—that the mind requires for creative renewal and
floating attention to operate, analogous to the agricultural fallow that allows depleted soil to regenerate.
Agricultural wisdom recognized for millennia that the most productive use of a field was sometimes to leave it unworked: fallow ground, resting from cultivation, rebuilt the microbial richness that intensive cropping depleted.
Yves Citton imports this concept into his
ecology of attention to name the cognitive equivalent: periods of emptiness in the stimulus stream—gaps in which no content is offered, no notification arrives, no AI assistant proposes a completion—during which the mind’s most generative processes operate.
Floating attention, the diffuse receptive mode from which creative insight characteristically emerges, requires emptiness as its medium: the shower thought, the dream connection, the idea that arrives unbidden during a walk are the products of an attentional system not under demand. AI systems are, by design, emptiness eliminators: always available, always responsive, always ready with a suggestion before the mind has had time to generate its own. The consequence is not a productivity gain but an ecological substitution: the generative fallow is replaced