Although there are spikes of emotion and feeling, spikes of thought are needed to direct attention. Not thought in the verbal sense, but thought in the sense that it is under your control and feels more similar to thoughts. Thought occurs as basically a bunch of spikes, and since people think all the time and about everything, life occurs in those spikes. They don’t feel intense because it is just thought. But basically whenever something new comes into your vision or your attention there is an initial sharp spike of interest. And if you are going to be doing the same thing for a long period of time, then it is going to take additional sharp spikes every couple of seconds or every minute to keep your attention. It is easy to test that, try and read something with the same bland expression as when you start reading it (but after your initial interest at the beginning when you notice the piece) and you just can’t do it. To maintain attention your mind needs to snap back to what it is paying attention to. Feelings and emotions are going to follow the thought, however (that is emotions and feelings are imbedded in thoughts). That is why people need to think all the time, to maintain a healthy level of mental activity, it is a part of life. Emotions and feelings can also be described as thoughts, however, so those spikes continue even after you stop thinking, just in the form of emotion-feeling-thoughts (they are still more similar to thoughts however since they are short and spiky). [So a "thought" is required to direct attention. That is because to direct attention you need to pay sharp attention, and any thought is something which you are paying attention to. Something could grab your attention unconsciously, and it could be more like an unconscious thought that pulls you in. That shows that there is going to be degrees of consciousness to which your attention is grabbed, sometimes you do it deliberately, and sometimes you spike your attention without thinking about it at all.]
Basically your attention needs to be initially “grabbed” for anything that you are going to pay attention to. That grabbing is the initial period of paying attention to it. During that first period of paying attention to something is where the spike is because you are processing the item/object. You need a spike to grab your mind and attention, otherwise you wouldn’t be paying attention to anything. You can still process most of life without the spikes, but that is only because spikes had brought you back to reality in the first place in order for that attention to be grabbed. Furthermore it is going to be easier to process new things based on what the spike was about, that is, it is going to be easier to process similar things more related to the spike then to other things in the area. If you focus on a school bus, then you are going to be more attentive to the other school buses you see for the next few seconds or minutes because you were just paying attention to one school bus, and your mind is wired to notice school buses. [That is because you are probably going to have a higher emotional interest in the school bus, making you more aware of it. Even if the thing you saw generated a negative emotion, you still would pay more attention to it (unconsciously) because you are alerted to it. It is in your mind, so when you see it you can process it better.] A study shows that prior experience of a semantically associated word such as "doctor" speeds up naming to a subsequent related probe word such as "nurse" (Meyer&Schavaneveldt. 1972).