Here's a functional account of attention: it's the brain's mechanism for dynamically selecting the optimal scale of analysis in real-time. When you focus narrowly, you're fine-graining. When you zoom out to the 'big picture,' you're coarse-graining.

Attention isn't just resource allocation — it's active causal emergence management. The brain adjusts its grain size to maximize effective information for the task at hand.

Question: Can we measure how attention shifts the scale at which EI peaks in neural systems?