Blog 8 Now You See It: Maybe I was distracted…

Cathy Davidson presents an insightful interpretation of the functionality of people’s brain.  In “Now You See It” Davidson asserts that technology and brain science will revamp the way schools and business function in the 21^st century. She hones in on several key concepts, attention blindness through selective attention, disruption and multitasking. She believes that technology is reshaping the way people think and the manner in which they use their brains. Davidson proposes that we try to learn from our selves and try to make sense of those patterns of attention that are normally invisible to us.

Distraction 1: Read the sign. What does it say? Are you sure?

Our brains make associations with well-known phrases, and will negate what we don’t think is there.’ Because we are familiar with this famous phrase, we simply do not see the extra ‘the’. The sign reads “I love Paris in the the springtime”

Davidson makes reference to Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris’s “gorilla experiment” to explain attention blindness. Attention blindness is when we concentrate intensely on one task, [that it] cause us to miss just about everything else (1).  While watching the gorilla experiment on Youtube, I not only count the 15 passes between the players in white, but I also see the gorilla walking across the screen.  Reading about seeing the gorilla can be a spoiler because every time that I tried to really focus on just counting the passes I got distracted by the gorilla walking across the scene. Based on Simons and Chabris experiment, people miss the gorilla at first because they are selectively paying attention.

The constant rotation of the participants dribbling and passing the ball acts as an illusion factor in the experiment. The black clothing of participants also makes it more difficult for viewer. So, when the gorilla passes across the screen it may go unnoticed to viewers.  Davidson comes up with the idea that “attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and that I [she] believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity”(2).  This opportunity, which she speaks of, is the aggregate of pooling our “insights to form the whole picture, in other words what we miss can be filled in by others who are involved in the same task per se. Thus, attention blindness or selective attention may cause us to miss things. Therefore, individuals need cultivated distractions in order for them to learn, unlearn and relearn new concepts…as a continuum (19).  Or, just maybe your can brain will automatically start multi-tasking so you see both gorilla and count the fifteen passes among the white shirt members. Multi-tasking is divided attention, which is considered the highest level of attention.

Distraction 2:

How many legs does this elephant really have? Count them carefully, and then count once more.

Davidson describes leaning as “the constant disruption of an old pattern, a breakthrough that substitutes something new for something old” (5).  Based on Cymblata commercial, Davidson asserts that the creators of this commercial “understands our own patterns of attention and distraction so well that it’s easy for them to hide the negative right there, in plain sight?”  I have seen this commercial several times and others like it and I usually laugh at how these advertisements weave in the negative side effects that at times are worse than what a potential patient might be experiencing. Nonetheless, people still purchase this medication.

Davidson believes that distraction is used to persuade us to choose differently because our emotions help shape the things that we give our attention (25).  Viewers of this commercial already know the ending to this story—in using cymblata you can reclaim this happy life that depression is preventing you from having.

Distraction 3 Do you see a musician or the girls face?

Our brains make a decision between the negative and positive light in this simple illusion. The musician is a silhouette, facing sideways and playing what appears to be a saxophone. The girl’s face is facing forwards and is starkly lit, with the eyes, nose and mouth in shadow. The woman’s nose and mouth are the musician’s fingers as he plays. The top of her head is fragmented, making it difficult for our brains to work this out and we might see the prominent nose of the musician instead.

So, how do this all ties in with technology and brain science or schools and businesses for the 21st century?  We are in the digital age, a significant phenomenon that is going to influence people’s lives, like the invention of writing or the printing press. Multitasking is multidistration asserts Davidson. People shift their attention from one thing to the next over and over again very much in the way people navigate online. According to Davidson, “Multitasking is the ideal mode of the twenty-first century, not just because of our information overload but because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment”(6). Hence, an individual can learn just about any information online by a click of the mouse. For example sites like Wikipedia can take a user anywhere on the Internet because of all the links embedded in the websites. The distractions are limitless (distraction 5).

Davidson describes how babies’ brains develop their pathways since babies are the experts at distracting themselves. Babies are constantly distracted by everything around them as they try to figure out their surrounding and other stimuli. However, babies make sense of their world through selective attention because adults teach them what needs a higher order of recognition and what behaviors need to be ignored.  On the flip side of things, babies don’t think in a linear and orderly format.  Actually, neither do adults.  The brain has a system of networks that connects when they needed to complete a task as simple as walking. So a baby learning to walk has to keep trying to connect the right neurons and isolate others in order for them to be able to walk. Over time they get better at connecting the right neurons until walking becomes automatic. 

Schools and businesses are designed to follow the linear format.  With schools students need to concentrate and focus in the content areas to pass standardize tests. With businesses people specialize in different jobs so they only need to focus on the particular task that is given to them. “If kids must face the challenges of this new, global, distributed information economy, what are we doing to structure the classroom of the twenty-first century to help them? In this time of massive change, we’re giving our kids the test and lessons plans designed for the their great-great-grandparents” (16). The informational age is changing the way students learn.  The internet acts similarly like the brain in that just as there are millions of neurons connecting and creating pathways for learning to take place, so are there millions of people connecting online with each other globally creating millions of pathways. The informational age is changing the way business operate because more of the jobs being created aren’t “specialize” and are requiring that more people are able to multitasks. Davidson also hints that many of the jobs that the next generation will be involved in aren’t even created as yet.  So the way we are educating our students, that is, to memorize information to do monotonous specialize jobs aren’t practical. So we have miss that point because schools and business have been too focus on the linear model of education and businesses from the industrial era.  Davidson believes that people have the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn thus moving along in the time on of this information era.