Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

As an academic, it is important to bring edge ideas into the classroom to loosen the gears between the ears of students to get them to think critically and, perhaps, learn to color outside of the lines. For the lay community, often caught in intellectual boxes, books such as this can also stimulate ideas, raise issues and, perhaps affect change. As an academic exercise, skipping selectively across fields and ideas in class is permitted. But when that journey is turned into "lessons learned" and promoted outside the classroom, then we tread on dangerous grounds. Here there be dragons.

Many of us have been exposed to our intellectual and cultural myopia by having seen the video of two basketball teams passing balls between them, being asked to count them and then finding out our concentration on the action has us overlook the fact that during the video a person in a gorilla suit walks across the screen. It is a classic used by many in academia who then tailor the significance to the particular class, psychology, cultural anthropology, and courses in creativity, among others. The message of this volume is that there so much information passing past our senses that we need a new way of accessing and effectively using that richness which is the largess of our increasingly digital world, the world of Twitter, Facebook and Google. We need new ways of thinking, including accessing knowledge through the "Wisdom of the Crowds".

It is unfortunate that the publisher seems to have added the subtitle on "Brain Science" which can imply that somehow, our knowledge of this will help us bridge the gap into the wide world of social networking and multi-tasking. This seems more a marketing piece rather than alerting the reader to any serious discussion of neurophysiology or how it can do more than possibly provide a frame for understanding rather than provide us with a vehicle to enhance the ability to more effectively engage in a digitally driven, information rich environment- that is, unless, one might suspect that it suggests a human/machine interface- a cyborg driven world much promoted in the growing science fiction literature and game play in virtual worlds, subjects not in serious evidence in this volume.

One of the key examples in the book which has attracted attention was an experiment where students at Duke were given early access to iPods to see what use could be made of these new devices in class as students involved their colleagues and faculty. What is not cited is the more interesting experiment of Sagata Mitha who stuck computers with internet access in a wall which was in the slums of India where street children with little or no education quickly figured out how to use these devices. How much learning occurs at the individual level and how much is contributed because of crowd synergy is a question that is not clearly explored in this book "on a mission".

The author, while promoting the experiment as an example of crowd sourcing new applications, seems remiss in not reflecting that this example has been repeated since humans, as represented in Kubric's film, 2001, first figured out that a bone might serve as a weapon as well as a myriad of other uses. One also forgets that distributing iPods to education is an Apple favorite starting with the Apple II's. Additionally, when the first Commodore computer was introduced, high school kids were discovering functions in the micro processors that even Commodore programmers and technicians had not discovered. Creative problem solving classes have long given students exercises such as finding 50 uses for a paper clip, a potato or other "found" object. It's the same inventiveness exhibited by teams of school age kids who have to figure out how to drop an egg from 6 feet without breaking or fold paper to bridge a gap which has an "x" kg of weight sitting on it. While there was some collaborative creativity in the Duke experiment, the ultimate value was to Apple and their marketing group which not only had new uses but the opportunity to do viral marketing to a key audience at little cost- clever Apple.

"Now You See It" uses examples from both inside the education establishment and from the world of work to suggest that, perhaps, the current model of education with its lock step, age-defined, cohorts of achieving individuals might not be preparing the next generations for surviving and thriving in the digital age. There are a number of selective examples based on individuals that have crossed her path. Interestingly, it's these persons, as individuals, who have effectively been able to maneuver between the Scylla of "communities" and the Charybdis of the individual as cultural creative. The latter term comes from the 60's and 70's and the "flower power" generation which singled out insightful thought leaders. That trend continues today as evidenced by Davidson using interviews of influential individuals whom she can identify with her metaphor. This is, of course, diametrically opposed to the thinking of publishing guru John Brockman who, with his Edge network, singles out individuals for their insights and contributions across all disciplines. Additionally, significant funding for the work at Duke comes from the MacArthur Foundation which also sponsors genius grants.

Crowd sourcing, smart or flash mobs are like a saturated solution of salt. Drop one seed into the mixture and the crystals fall out in a pile. There is the joke about the person sent to prison only to find the inmates yelling out numbers and the rest laughing. When the new person asks why, he is told that the individual jokes have been memorized and given a number. The new person yells out a number and no one laughs. He is subsequently told that he just doesn't know how to tell a joke. Careful reflection will find that few of these groups are without a catalytic event, intervention, or without a goal. Apple challenges students in exchange for a, then new and novel, digital recorder, company "x' gives out prizes such as Tee Shirts, and drug companies create demands to cure problems that the public doesn't realize that it has.

Davidson describes the experience of Chuck Hamilton at IBM with their model of endeavor-based work is an interesting example. As explained, individuals are responsible for obtaining results, often accessing skills that are not within their formal training as well as collaborating with others. When they have made the appropriate contribution, they move on to work on other problems with other colleagues.

Unfortunately, this becomes another classroom example to raise interest and then to move onward. Amongst the many issues that bear on the work of IBM is the fact that other companies are engaged, have been involved with or have partially initiated similar efforts, such as the retailer, Best Buy with its "competency" based structure as described in Ressler and Thompson's book, "Work Sucks" (1). What is interesting here is that it is the results only aspect of this competency model which basically gives an individual permission to come and go at work as they please which could include taking off at mid-day for golf or other non-work related activity.

Furthermore, the IBM experience described here is part of a much larger effort of IBM in the arena of knowledge management, KM, and its different approaches internally and with clients globally. It has been a practice long used by technology companies such as 3M which encourages such collaboration which, at one time were called "Skunk Works". Cognitive Edge, a spin-off by a former employee of IBM/England's KM group is one of the few with sound epistemological and ontological underpinnings, adding legitimacy to its academic counterparts in the KM area. In fact, KM, long seen by academics as a "practice" and not a serious discipline, points out that in many instances, not just in K-12, education is a lagging indicator.

The book reads like a long power point presentation given over the course of a semester to an interdisciplinary freshman course or a series of public lectures selectively given as keynotes. For example, Davidson cites as fact that student writing on blogs shared by peers shows distinctly better style and structure than papers presented to academics. The rationale is unexamined anecdotal evidence. What is not explored is the depth, sophistication and insights required for peer blogs as opposed to what may be demanded by faculty. Additionally, faculty, not in the English arena, excuse student writing claiming their interest is in content mastery. As a journal editor, it is also clear that word "smithing" is not high on the agenda of faculty who write for scholarly publication in specialty areas. Davidson is an exception with this publication for the lay public rather than peers.

In the opening example of the gorilla and in the discussion on IBM's example of "endeavor-based" work, what is missing is the hard-learned lesson of the creative problem-solving group, Synectics, and more recently, the experience of Wikipedia. A community of peers without selective expertise may be the equivalent of self-medication or being one's own lawyer. While blog posts of students may appear to be more stylistically sophisticated, the level of conversation and knowledge integration often seem to lack the depth needed to challenge intellectually, lending some credence to T.S. Eliot's Prufrock.

It is interesting that Davidson spends a significant time discussing play based on IBM's use of 2nd Life while ignoring that her own institution, Duke, houses the prestigious Fuqua business school which had commissioned from a 3rd party provider its own metaverse, and Duke has underwritten the development of its own metaverse, The Open Croquet Project. Additionally, for example, IBM has created metaverses for various clients.

Again, Davidson's intellectual stone skipping across the entire metaverse or virtual worlds has omitted the entire universe of game play, serious games and their uses outside of academia, not just for the uses by IBM as described in Now You See It, but to cover the range of human wants/needs, from the military, to high technology testing to the study of societies, the bio/physical environment and education of individuals P-to-adult. When books such as this are written, in addition to footnotes, there are usually extensive references and, often an annotated bibliography. If, indeed, this is a set of introductory lectures, this seems reasonable since filling out the holes seemingly of intellectual quicksand, becomes a challenge. But this volume, by Viking, is aimed at the lay public which deserves more than a keynote by an author on a mission.

Book review by Richard L. Weaver II, Ph.D.

Twenty-nine pages of outstanding notes (pp. 301-330), an appendix of 17 "Twenty-first Century Literacies--a Checklist" (pp. 297-298), and an accessible, readable narrative full of interesting, engaging, and appropriate examples/illustrations, made this book, for me, a delight.

Of course some of the information on neurogenesis, language acquisition, multitasking, and memory can be found elsewhere, but I found Davidson's ability to draw together a great deal of divergent research (from the fields of brain science, psychology, education, management science, information technology, and more) into a coherent set of ideas both fascinating and illuminating. You would expect this from a person with an English background as well as backgrounds in both interdisciplinary studies and the information sciences. Her eclecticism is well demonstrated and appreciated throughout the book.

Davidson's discussion of the history of "attention blindness" is interesting, but how she draws conclusions from that discussion to its effect on us in an environment in which blogging, tweeting, and texting is predominant, is instructive and important. Her methods of weaving the idea of "attention blindness" throughout her narrative is useful, effective, relevant, and especially provocative.

When I discussed the topic of listening with my students, I would remind them that "only one thing can be predominant in your attention span at any one moment." Attention to one thing is likely to last a mere 7-10 seconds, so attention is constantly shifting from one predominant thing to another. This, of course, not only affects one's ability to listen to another person, it also affects one's ability to concentrate. With so many distractions available, it is difficult to focus solely on what one is working on at the moment. Even when concentrating, the longest average time a person can focus on a single object without diverting his or her attention is about 30 seconds. Multitasking, then, is more about one's ability to shift the focus of attention (often rapidly) then it is about actually concentrating on several things at the same time -- which is really impossible. That's why texting and driving is so dangerous!

I think her primary question, how can we change our schools and workplace situations so that they not just better accommodate modern technological advances, but make them better at facing future challenges and the ongoing changes that are occurring rapidly, is a proper question to be asking. Changes must take place now, and they need to be more than merely cosmetic, they need to be dramatic.

Davidson is a fine writer, and in this book she communicates directly with readers, and she includes them in her thinking with questions and comments that make them feel part of the process of discovery.

I liked her discussion about "The Map is Not the Territory," from Alford Korzybski's work (although unidentified) in general semantics as well as her views on perception and its limits. I discuss these, as well, in my book on Communicating Effectively, 10/e (McGraw-Hill, 2012), but Davidson's emphasis on how we get stuck in our patterns is especially important and relevant to her information on "attention blindness" -- and how important (especially for a broad public readership) learning is -- as well as the lack of importance (or relevance) of instincts. Great information.

Her material (statistics) on games and gaming should be alarming: "Games are unquestionably the single most important cultural form of the digital age. The average gamer in America now spends about ten thousand hours online by the age of twenty-one--about the same amount of time he might spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation" (p. 146). The use of the male pronoun is important here, for gamers are more likely to be male than female, and the predominance and importance of games is having a direct, negative effect on the development/education of young men who then lack the education, skills, and ability to go on to college, compete satisfactorily for jobs, and obtain the prosperity and riches of the American dream or even a life well lived. When you read Davidson's section on games and gaming, you may come away with a different point of view.

The book is for serious readers, and although, as I mentioned previously, her writing is accessible, the book tends to be full, heavy, and dense at times. This is simply the result of having so much information to share, not that her writing style bogs down at all. (Paragraphs tend to be a bit long, and many words appear on each page.) I think her information, since it is aimed at both schools and the workplace, may be more relevant (of great concern) to school administrators as well as employers, business presidents and CEOs, for they tend to be the movers and shakers in our society and, thus, the ones most likely to be able to make the changes necessary.

One of the things I like about any book that I favor is how effectively it makes you think. Even if you do not agree with some of her conclusions or with some of the research, there is important information here nonetheless. Her emphasis on "we're never too old to learn" is encouraging -- even motivating. The book is a delight, and I recommend it without hesitation or reservation.

The use of the word 'multi-tasking' appears to me to be misleading in this book. The truth is that there are 'compatible' types of things that can be multi-tasked (e.g. driving and talking to a passenger) and others where multi-tasking is highly inefficient (e.g. driving and texting, or driving and being on the phone). This is a key distinction that is not covered and leads to arguments.

This is a very interesting book, but I feel the title is a little misleading. It's not so much that brain science will transform how we do things; it's more that technology will. In a world where the boundaries between work and personal life have been broken down by constant email, texts, and cell phones; where classrooms have been infiltrated by iPods and homework over the internet; where people all over the world are working to produce the largest, constantly changing, encyclopedia; and where many jobs require skill sets that didn't even exist 25 years ago, the way people are educated has to change. That seemed to me to be the main thrust of the book.

This is not the first time that technology has changed the way people learned and thought. The steam powered press and machine made ink and paper put books and magazines into the hands of the middle class for the first time. Everyday people could learn things that they had no direct physical contact with. This was a revolution in education.

The education system we use today was designed near the start of the machine age, an age of factories that created identical things, and wanted workers who behaved in identical ways. That's not the way the world works today. In a lot of jobs, people need the ability to create, not do the same task over and over again- although these are higher paying jobs for the college educated, not the McJobs that so many of us are stuck in; the author is dealing with `thinking' jobs in this book, not service jobs. Davidson believes that the schools must change to make education fun and interesting for the students; children usually feel that `learning' is unpleasant when asked about it, but will happily learn from a video game, and in fact deny that they were learning from it. The author also feels that many of the children diagnosed with ADHD are simply not being taught things that interest them, and are far from hopeless in the classroom- provided the classroom changes to meet their needs. She's not denying the need for learning basic skills- reading, writing, math- but feels these things need to be taught differently. Sadly, in an era where funding for schools is being cut back, I don't see that these changes will take place in the near future.

She also points out that our beliefs changes how we perceive things; the student that we feel has ADHD and should be medicated if we see them in a reading class we might think was a genius if we see them first in an art class; memory lapses are ignored when young people make them but are seen as signs of dementia when someone over 45 has them. We need to become more aware of our preset beliefs to see things as they really are.

I think it's a valuable book for educators and business managers, but a lot of changes- expensive ones in some cases- will have to be made for her ideas to be made real. I think that will be very slow in coming.

For all us nerds that love learning in a real and applicable way with a touch of humor and fun.

I posted a review over at my blog:

[...]

Short version: You need to pick up this book so that we can all understand that we are evolving and that we need to pay attention to those changes. We cannot continue along the same path when it comes to education, employment, and living. This book uses the science of the brain to justify putting away the panic and to start re-thinking, well, everything.

Everything was perfect; easy, reliable, and appeared in my maibox as promised. Book inperfect condition. I love Amazon.com. Thank you. Judy Boullet