My head just turns by itself. My shoulders keep moving forward, but my gaze slips off to the side — a bright jacket, a flash of color, something moving at the edge of my sight. No decision inside me. Not even a hint of intention. Just this weird feeling — I looked where I didn’t mean to.

It’s like a dream. Everything’s real: the smell of wet asphalt, footsteps ahead. But the events happen without you taking part. You’re inside this body — but also watching a movie through the main character’s eyes. That’s not how waking life is supposed to work, right? An adult chooses where to look… But every few minutes, things flip. A loud voice, a sudden move, something out of rhythm — and attention jumps before you even notice it.

I try to catch the start of that movement. No luck. The thought only shows up after it’s done: the signal passed, the image settled in memory. Someone inside presses the “important” button, and I just find out what happened by the traces left behind.

Turns out it’s a separate channel of attention. Automatic. Exogenous — it reacts to outside stuff faster than any thinking. Someone’s name off to the side pulls you out of a conversation; a door slamming cuts off your train of thought; a blinking red notification stabs your mind in one jerk. Not effort — pure reflex.

I remember the cocktail party effect. Used to think it was a funny little thing — until I realized it’s about the same kind of attention control without me. You walk through a buzz of voices, sure you hear only your talk partner… Then someone says your name across the room — and suddenly you’re there with your attention in a split second. So the brain listens to everything at once? The filtering happens before I even get what’s going on?

The invisible gorilla experiment suddenly feels really close to these street observations. People count passes and miss the obvious right in the middle of the scene — because the brain decided, “this is irrelevant.” Even if the thing is absurd or huge, like a person in a gorilla suit… It can vanish from consciousness completely.

The surprise here isn’t the speed of the reaction — it’s how totally these processes run without me feeling like the one who chose. By the time the “I decided to look” feeling shows up, almost everything’s already done without me.

The brain filters hundreds of stimuli every second. Some shout louder and climb to the top of the task stack; the rest vanish without a trace, like they never existed in the world or in experience.

A strange worry creeps in: if even bright things can drop out of perception just because the inner editor marked them “not important”… how much slips by every day? What part of life is really open to our eyes if priorities are set in advance?

Then a new fear pops up: where does my choice end? If even eye movement is run by someone inside my head? If social media algorithms press exactly these buttons on purpose? The red dot breaks any focus as easily as a shout behind your back or a sudden gesture from a passerby.

Consciousness starts to feel like a notification service at a brain factory: it gets ready-made reports on what happened and signs them with its name for internal records.

And that feeling of “I chose to look” always comes a bit after the real choice.

So does free will even exist? Or is the only chance to grab control once in a while — to catch the moment attention is taken and try to say “no”? But to notice that, you have to know the trap beforehand… And what if the very act of noticing is run by the same editor?

Suddenly I get it — the question was wrong from the start.
All these tries to track down the source of the choice are like chasing your own reflection.
If attention is always faster than awareness,
can it be any other way?