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

When Cathy Davidson and Duke University gave free iPods to every member of the incoming freshman class in 2003, they didn’t expect the uproar that followed. Critics called it a waste: what educational value could a music player have for college kids? Yet by the end of the year, Duke students had found academic uses for the new devices in virtually every discipline. The iPod experiment proved to be a classic example of the power of disruption—a way of refocusing attention to illuminate unseen possibilities.

Using cutting-edge research on the brain, Davidson shows how the phenomenon of “attention blindness” shapes our lives, and how it has led to one of the greatest problems of our historical moment: although we blog, tweet, and text as if by instinct, far too many of us still toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century, not the one we live in. To change this, we must ask ourselves critical questions: How can we redesign our schools to prepare our kids for the challenges they’ll face as adults? What will the workers and workplaces of the future look like? And how can we learn to adapt to life changes that seem almost too revolutionary to contemplate?

Davidson takes us on a tour of the future of work and education, introducing us to visionaries whose groundbreaking ideas will soon affect us all. Now You See It opens a window onto the possibilities of a world in which the rigid ideas of the twentieth century have been wiped away and replaced with the flowing, collaborative spirit built into the very design of the Internet.