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p.2 Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain... If we see selectively but we don't all select the same things to see, that also means we don't all miss the same things... Without focus, the world is chaos; there's simply too much to see, hear, and understand, and focus lets us drill down to the input we believe is most useful to us. Because focus means selection, though, it leaves us with blind spots, and we need methods for working around them.
p.3 No one even told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else. It's hard for us to believe we're not seeing all there is to see.
p.4 Attention blindness is key to everything we do as individuals [JLJ - perhaps even machines]
p.5 with practice and the right methods, we can learn to see the way in which attention limits our perspectives.
p.6 In this book, I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that's based on multitasking our attention - not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end.
p.7 Gorillas everywhere!
p.12 We're missing the gorilla in the room.
p.16 How we perceive the world, what we pay attention to, and whether we pay attention with delight or alarm are often a function of the tools that extend our capabilities or intensify our interactions with the world.
p.19 Futurist Alvin Toffler... insists that the key literacy skill of the twenty-first century is the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn... It means becoming a student again
p.20 the brain is designed to learn, unlearn, and relearn
p.24 a typical viewer really pays attention to only 6.5 seconds of any TV ad.
p.26-27 Every aspect of this Cymbalta ad is rooted in the science of attention. [JLJ - from Wikipedia, Cymbalta is Eli Lilly's top selling drug. It brought in just shy of $5 billion in 2012 with $4 billion of that in the U.S., but its patent protection terminated January 1, 2014. Lilly received a six month extension beyond June 30, 2013 after testing for the treatment of depression in adolescents, which may produce $1.5 billion in added sales.]
p.28 This speaks to the power of the images in focusing our attention
p.29 advertisers are seeking out the very fabric of our attention, the patterns and values that we have come to see as so natural that we really don't even see them anymore. We have internalized the... cues... so deeply that we hear the meaning without having to hear the words.
p.30 attention is rooted in cultural values embedded so deeply that we can barely see them. As such, not only is attention learned behavior, but it is shaped by what we value... The absorption of those values into our habitual behavior is also biological.
p.30-31 Why? Why are we prisoners of attention? How did we get this way? Why do we see certain things so naturally and miss others that seem so obvious once others point them out to us? Where do our patterns of attention come from...? To answer those questions, we need to go back, all the way back to the nursery, where our brains were formed and where we learned what is important to pay attention to - and what isn't.
p.31 We need to organize all the stuff of the world around us. We need priorities and categories that make navigating through life easier and more efficient. And that's exactly where we get into trouble.
p.34 Why are these categories important? One reason is that once everything is located in a proper category, the category itself (for better or worse) answers a host of unaskable questions. A category is a shorthand. [JLJ - better, a category allows a certain practical type of guess called a typification substitution to be made, especially when knowledge is absent, and we need to quickly decide how to "go on".]
p.42 Once you have a category, it's hard to see past it without some serious reconsideration. That's the unlearning necessary to break an old habit before we adopt a new one. It's a constant process and a crucial one.
p.42 Because of the categories by which we bundle our world, we can see efficiently. But those categories make us miss everything else... What we are counting makes the things that don't count invisible to us.
p.43 By understanding how we learned our patterns of attention, we can also begin to change them.
p.49 If things are habitual, we do not pay attention to them - until they become a problem. Attention is about difference. We pay attention to things that are not part of our automatic repertoire of responses, reflexes, concepts, preconceptions, behaviors, knowledge, and categories and other patterns both mental and physical
p.50 we need to pay attention in order to learn.
p.55 To live is to be in a constant state of adjustment.
p.55-56 Distraction can help us pinpoint areas where we need to pay more attention, where there is a mismatch between our knee-jerk reactions and what is called for in the situation at hand... we can think of distraction as an early warning signal... distraction is one of the best tools for innovation we have at our disposal - for changing out one pattern of attention and beginning the process of learning new patterns.
p.56 We might think we're simply experiencing all the world there is. We learn our patterns of attention so efficiently that we don't even know they are patterns. We believe they are the world, not a limited pattern representing the part of the world that has been made meaningful to us at a given time. Only when we are disrupted by something different from our expectations do we become aware of the blind spots that we cannot see on our own.
p.58 for most of us, it takes something startling to convince us that we aren't seeing the whole picture. That is how attention works. Until we are distracted into seeing what we are missing, we literally cannot see it.
p.64-65 crowdsourcing means inviting a group to collaborate on a solution to a problem... Crowdsourcing is "outsourcing" to the "crowd," and it works best when you observe three nonhierarchical principles. First, the fundamental principle of all crowdsourcing is that difference and diversity - not expertise and uniformity - solves problems. Second, if you predict the result in any way, if you try to force a solution, you limit the participation and therefore the likelihood of success. And third, the community most served by the solution should be chiefly involved in the process of finding it.
Crowdsourced thinking is very different from... relying on top-down expertise. If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we even conceive to be the problem. let alone the answer. While formal education typically teaches hierarchies of what's worth paying attention to, crowdsourcing works differently, in that it assumes that no one of us individually is smarter than all of us collectively. No matter how expert we are, no matter how brilliant, we can improve, we can learn, by sharing insights and working together collectively.
p.70 difference is what we pay attention to.
p.85 You can count on your ability to learn
p.86 unlearning is a skill as vital as learning.
p.102 We spent a good deal of time thinking about how accident, disruption, distraction, and difference increase the motivation to learn and to solve problems
p.103 while we think we know the world, we really only know the world our body thinks.
p.116 [Frederick J. Kelley, inventor of the multiple choice test] "College is a place to learn how to educate oneself rather than a place in which to be educated."
p.128 We have to unlearn a lot of what we've come to believe about how we should measure.
p.140 you need to pay attention in different ways at different times... no one can ever see the whole picture on his own.
p.142 McGonigal is a game designer and a social evangelist who believes that "reality is broken" and that the best way to fix it is by playing games.
p.170 The science of attention is key to the workplace of the digital future.
p.171 Biologically speaking, there is no off switch for attention in the brain. Rather, our attention is trained in one direction or another... we are always paying attention to something.
p.176 Attention is divided when various important things are happening around us to divide it. That's how attention works.
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