Attention blindness, Now you see it!

Attention blindness are the things we see and the things we do not see, the Gorilla experiment is interesting because one person saw the gorilla and the others were too busy counting how many times the ball was passed between the people with white shirts and the people with black shirts. It is the things that we focus on that give us attention blindness; it is also useful in the digital age. “ It uses research in brain science, education, and the workplace psychology to find the best ways to learn and change in challenging times.” (6).

“Setting a clear goals is key. But having clear goals means that we’ve constantly missing the gorilla’s.” (6). In other words, we have to unlearn how we have learned so that we do not keep missing important things in education, society and the workplace because our focus is about one thing all of the time. There are different ways we can achieve this even in a collective environment, “not by seeing it all alone but distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end.” (6).

We must become interconnected in the digital world we live in now because not everyone sees the same thing at the same time especially on the internet where everything is literally connected all of the time, everything from videos to music and documents are interconnected. “ Instead of reinforcing an idea of sustained attention the way, by comparison, television programming might, with the Internet we have no schedule to keep us on track from the beginning to the ending of a sixty minute show.” (7).

Now more than ever there is too much to see, hear and read because of the digital age and our attention blindness will only get worse if we do not work not only on our own but also collectively . This is a challenge that we can learn to overcome by working around the limits that present themselves. “ It may require rearranging our twentieth-century training habits; it certainly will require lining up the right tools and the right partners.” (8).

The effect is great, when polled, “84 percent of those polled said they could not accomplish their day’s work if the computers were down in their office.” (10). But in the digital age almost everyone and every company rely of computers for personal, educational and work related ways to communicate. We have all changed because of   the digital age whether we wanted to or not, it is forced upon us to interconnect with the rest of the world.  Our brains have also gone through some changes as well, “ Even our brain seems to have changed because of new computational capacities, and those capacities have also supplied a nifty new set of metaphors to help us comprehend the complicated neural circuitry stirring between our ear.” (14).

We have learn to unlearn in order to compete in the digital age is the point but we have to also be able to do this in groups . The success is having our brains catch up and changing the attention blindness that affects us.