Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn [Hardcover]

Cathy N. Davidson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 18, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0670022829 | ISBN-13: 978-0670022823 | Edition: 1

A digital innovator shows how we can thrive in the new technological age.

When Cathy Davidson and Duke University gave free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics said they were wasting their money. Yet when students in practically every discipline invented academic uses for their music players, suddenly the idea could be seen in a new light-as an innovative way to turn learning on its head.

This radical experiment is at the heart of Davidson's inspiring new book. Using cutting-edge research on the brain, she shows how "attention blindness" has produced one of our society's greatest challenges: while we've all acknowledged the great changes of the digital age, most of us still toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century. Davidson introduces us to visionaries whose groundbreaking ideas-from schools with curriculums built around video games to companies that train workers using virtual environments-will open the doors to new ways of working and learning. A lively hybrid of Thomas Friedman and Norman Doidge, Now You See It is a refreshingly optimistic argument for a bold embrace of our connected, collaborative future.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In her galvanic new book, Ms. Davidson, one of the nation’s great digital minds, has written an immensely enjoyable omni-manifesto. Rooted in . . . rigorous history, philosophy and science, this book . . . doubles as an optimistic, even thrilling, summer read.”

(Virginia Hefferman, New York Times )

"A remarkable new book Now You See It offers a fresh and reassuring perspective on how to manage anxieties about the bewildering pace of technological change. . . . Her work is the most powerful yet to insist that we can … manage the impact of these changes.”

(Anya Kamenetz, Fast Company )

"The author takes us on a journey through contemporary classrooms and offices to describe how they are changing—or, according to her, should change. . . .Now You See It is filled with instructive anecdotes and genuine insights." 

(Mark Changizi, Wall Street Journal )

"Her book 'Now You See It' celebrates the brain as a lean, mean, adaptive multitasking machine that — with proper care and feeding — can do much more than our hidebound institutions demand of it. . . Davidson is such a good storyteller, and her characters are well drawn."

 

(Christopher Chabris, New York Times )

 “Davidson has produced an exceptional and critically important book, one that is all-but-impossible to put down and likely to shape discussions for years to come.”   [Top 10 Science Book, Fall 2011]

(Publishers Weekly )

“Humorous, poignant, entertaining, endearing, touching and challenging. It is a book I would happily recommend to anyone engaged in teaching at any level … It is devised to convince readers that the human mind is ready for the next quantum advance into our collective future.”

(Steve Wheeler, Book of the Week, Times Higher Education )

 “Practice Collaboration by Difference: This idea is stolen directly from Cathy N. Davidson's marvelous book, Now You See It. . . .If innovation is our goal then we must pay careful attention to the diversity of the people around our project tables.”

(Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed )

 “A preview of the future from an educational innovator... it is becoming clear that our minds are capable of multitasking to a degree far beyond what the 20th-century assembly-line worker or middle manager was trained to do...[Davidson's] points are worth pondering.”

(Kirkus )

 “There is an emerging consensus that higher education has to change significantly, and Davidson makes a compelling case for the ways in which digital technology, allied with neuroscience, will play a leading role in that change.”

(William Pannapacker, Chronicle of Higher Education )

 “[Davidson] makes a provocative case for radical educational and business reforms. . . . Davidson's call to experiment with digital schemes that turn students and workers into motivated problem solvers rings as clear as a bell atop a little red schoolhouse."

(Bruce Bower, Science News )

 “The book's purpose and strength are in detailing the important lessons we can glean from the online world.  If Davidson is right, 21st-century society will move away from categorizing people based on standardized tests, which are crude measures of intelligence at best. Instead we will define new metrics, ones that are better aligned with the skills needed to succeed in the shifting global marketplace. And those who cannot embrace this multidisciplinary world will simply be left behind.”

(Brian Mossop, Scientific American )

“Davidson's claim that mono-tasking (the idea that a person can focus on one single task at hand) is an unrealistic model of how the brain works, seems strikingly persuasive. Davidson also calls for a reform in education . . . [that] helps kids become multitasking, problem-solving thinkers."

(Sophie Duvernoy, LA Weekly )

 “The technological changes around us are of unprecedented proportions... In this book Cathy Davidson integrates findings from psychology, attention, neuroscience, and learning theory to help us get a glimpse of the future and more importantly a better understanding of our own individual potential."

(Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational )

 “Now You See It is simply fantastic. Only Cathy Davidson could pull off such a sweeping book.  It is about so much more than just education or even learning.  It is about a way of being. Her book and stories are incredibly important for the true arc of life learning and for constantly becoming!"

(John Seely Brown, author of A New Culture of Learning )

 “Cathy Davidson has one of the most interesting and wide ranging minds in contemporary scholarship, a mind that ranges comfortably over literary arts, literacy, psychology, and brain science... Her ambitious and timely book is certain to attract a lot of attention and to catalyze many discussions.”

(Howard Gardner, Harvard University )

 "One cutting edge of educational practice is participatory learning…and one frontier of brain research is what is happening to our attention in the always-on era. Cathy Davidson is a natural to bring together these neuroscientific and educational themes."

(Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs and Net Smart )

 “Now You See It starts where Malcolm Gladwell leaves off, showing how digital information will change our brains.  Think Alvin Toffler meets Ray Kurzweil on Francis Crick's front porch. We need this book.”

(Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Cathy N. Davidson served as the first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University from 1998 until 2006 where she helped create the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She currently co-directs the annual HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning competitions. She has published more than a dozen books including Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory and The Future of Thinking. --This text refers to the MP3 CD edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1 edition (August 18, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670022829
• ISBN-13: 978-0670022823
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #192,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cathy Davidson teaches at Duke and writes for the Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Inside Higher Ed, and has been featured in Fast Company, the New York Times, and on blogs and in tweets the world over! She is the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and has published over twenty books on technology, education, and the history of reading,writing, and printing. She is currently on a 50-stop international author tour for Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking Press), which Publishers Weekly has named "one of the top ten science books" of the Fall 2011 season. With the team at a nonprofit she cofounded called HASTAC ("haystack"), she administers the annual $2 million MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions. You can find out more at www.cathydavidson.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 57 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A over-long magazine article October 30, 2011

By Thad McIlroy

Format:Hardcover

Though well-intentioned and coherent, this is one of the lesser entries in the slew of recent "brain science" books.

I finished Torkel Klingberg's "The Overflowing Brain" just before this. It's a far better book, from a working scientist. I'd also recommend How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker or The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar. Now You See It is a rambling rehash, and unless it's your first book about the recent insights into how the brain works, I take a pass on this one.

48 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I Do See It August 21, 2011

By frwspencer

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The author believes that our schools and work places have not changed to take into account the changes brought about by computers and the internet. She thinks that we need to be more collaborative, problem solving oriented, creative, appreciative of learning differences, and relevant in our teaching, learning and work. She has certainly been in the middle of some of the changes which have recently taken place, such as the ipod initiative at Duke University and HASTAC. She has a lot of personal experience on which to base her observations. Other issues that she touches upon, along the way, are expansion of creative thinking, changes in testing and evaluation, benefits of game playing, unlearning old patterns and learning new ones, and crowdsourcing. A company that supports workers with ASD in software testing jobs, and Wikipedia are also covered.

There are many useful ideas in this book. It can give teachers and workers some great ideas that should help them to be more productive. The attention blindness comparison may have been used a bit often. Some of the issues explained by it may also be explained by glitches in other executive functions like monitoring, task initiation, and organization. Perceptual and emotional factors may also cause a person to miss important information in the environment, or interpret it in a manner which is not useful to him or her. I'm also not sure that I'm as confident as the author that our kids are "all right." In any event, I got a lot out of this book. I recommend that you read it.

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars In the land of the attention blind, collaborators are king... October 17, 2011

By Sanda Balaban

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

There's an old aphorism that "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king." Cathy Davidson might well revamp that phrase to be "In the land of the attention blind, collaborators are king." And indeed, all of us ARE attention blind, as Davidson demonstrates in multiple ways throughout the book, since we pay attention to some things at the expense of others, often without even recognizing it. But while that insight itself isn't necessarily novel, Davidson's way of engaging with it often is. Rather than excoriate technology or youth culture or "reality TV" for compromising our attention, Davidson underscores the attention blindness is an inherent part of existence, positing it within a historic context stemming back to Socrates and positioning it as an opportunity to redefine the realities of our modern world, individually and collectively, to better reflect what we value and aspire to.

From infancy on, we are socialized about what matters, in ways that are often invisible to us, as Davidson incisively and accessibly depicts through a "case study" of infant Andy. Attention blindness can not be avoided--no one's cognitive capacity can encompass everything--but we can be more conscious about what we choose to attend to, and Davidson provides many helpful tips and tools for so doing. Davidson wants learning to be a verb when it is too often a noun. And she advocates for the importance of unlearning, which may in fact be harder than learning yet is necessary to prepare us for future possibilities.

While one of the frequent concerns about the digital world is that it isolates us behind screens-- scrolling through the Facebook postings of "friends" rather than spending face-to-face time with friends, and leading to increased isolation and egocentrism. Davidson underscores the degree to which technology can unite us and, by making possible unprecedented access to others, can enable us to collaborate in ways that overcome individual oversights through collectivity.

She aptly notes that "multi-tasking" has become a prominent verb in modern life, and an equally prominent complaint, leading to a perpetual state of partial attention that many fear is at the expense of deep thought. Davidson reframes multitasking as being about distribution rather than distraction. Rather than think of continuous partial attention as a bane, we can consider it a boon in equipping us for flourishing in an increasingly digital world, and as an essential, adaptive mode for the twenty-first century in which everything links to everything else in an interconnected network of networks, providing access that is empowering and can lead to greater efficiencies, especially if we partner with others who compensate for what we miss in our partiality.

Furthermore, she debunks the idea of mono-tasking as being a myth--our brains are inherently inquisitive. They crave activity and engagement, and in fact internal distractions supercede external during any given hour at work. An astonishing 80 percent of our neural energy is taken up not by external distractions at all but by the mind talking to itself. Even when we're engaged in reading a long book, our minds drift about 25% of time. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Davidson references a researcher who has found that more of the areas of the brain light up when a person is daydreaming than when the same person is engaged in a concentrated task. Remote parts of the brain "talk" to one another in those down times, and it's about twenty times more active than when it's being stimulated from outside, which is pretty positive. And, perhaps counterintuitively, she reveals that the brain uses far less energy when it's multitasking than if it's in a deep, meditative state.

Overall Davidson neither valorizes nor vilifies the implications of the internet on attention but rather reminds us that the Internet is still in its adolescence--which explains its awkwardness!--and that most of us haven't figured out the best ways to engage in the digital world. She encourages us to consider new digital ways of thinking not as multitasking but multi-inspiring, as eliciting potentially creative disruption of usual thought patterns that can lead to new insights. Rather than resist or resent digital realities, she encourages us to relish them, providing a chance to re-envision school practices to equip young people for very different labor realities of the 21st century AND to re-envision work practices to increase effectiveness and satisfaction of workers while increasing productivity.

The disconnect between our digital lives and our daily lives as they play out in school or work tends to be too stark, and perhaps at the root of increasing rates of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and the attention "deficits" most of us suffer from in some capacity and yet which Davidson astutely insinuates may be more about institutional rather than individual inadequacies.

Promoting interdisciplinariness and cross-fertilizations of all kinds can help. Deepening and differentiating instruction and assessment beyond the standardized practices of yore can help. Being mindful of attention and distraction (a cue to consciousness!) and managing your time with intentionality (digital holidays!) can help. The Internet provides an unprecedented opportunity to think and work in a more networked way; the question is whether our institutions, and the entrenched thinking that can is willing to evolve in response to such opportunities.

Davidson denaturalizes schooling by depicting how we came to have the schools we have, and how reflective they were of the values and needs of the Industrial Age in which they were created. Yet they have not evolved to reflect the Information Age in which we currently live or, better yet, the Age that lies ahead of us. Far from needing to preserve the status quo, there is all but uniform agreement that our schools need to evolve, and yet an enormous inability to do so systemically.

Is another world possible? One of the things that has been most effective about the current Occupy Wall Street movement is the degree to which it's shaken the public--and The Establishment --from our relative attention blindness and tacit acceptance of the vast, unacceptable inequalities. Making Now You See It required reading for leaders and educators from kindergarten through college would be a great way to agitate against inertia in education, and might just inspire an Occupy Education movement....

Some thoughts and questions on my mind after reading Now You See It.
*How can we capitalize on what works about, say, game design and incorporate effective such as instant and continuing feedback and progressive challenges into spheres of formal learning?
*Much as George Bush infamously noted that he wouldn't want to hire anyone for his administration who didn't cross-train (if only he'd been unwilling to hire anyone who didn't have a brain, or a heart), Davidson urges that we would do well to embrace cognitive cross-training--interconnected neural training activities that help minimize attention blindness, assist in multitasking, and promote collaboration by difference.
*Encouraging, rather than discouraging, mind-wandering might turn out to be exactly what we need to encourage more of in order to accomplish the best work in a global, multimedia digital age.
*Despite well-known recommendations of repetition being the key to learning (which is certainly an important element), Davidson underscores that "what surprises the brain is what allows for learning. Incongruity, disruption, and disorientation may well turn out to be the most inspiring, creative, and productive forces one can add to the workplace." Figuring out how to tap into these productively within classrooms is challenging, but worth exploring further.

I recommend Now You See It to anyone concerned about the future of learning--and the future overall!