Abstract

Increasingly it is recognized that selection is not the only function of attention; rather, ‘attention _gates_ what comes to be encoded into short-term memory, helps _maintain_ information in short-term memory, and dynamically _modulates_ the information being maintained’ (Nobre and Kastner 2014: 1215; my italics). Recent empirical literature affirms the existence of early and late selective attention as distinct attentional phenomena but points to a dissociation between selective attention of either sort and maintenance of information in working memory. This chapter will demonstrate that the Buddhist concept of _javana_ ‘running’ is a concept of working memory and that all the processes in Buddhaghosa’s pathway to consciousness are associated with functional roles that are actually realized by recognized entities in psychology and neuroscience.