Now You See It (Cathy Davidson book)

Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn is a book by CUNY Graduate Center professor Cathy Davidson published by Viking Press on August 19, 2011.

In Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, Cathy Davidson suggests that breakthroughs in cognitive science should recalibrate our sense of what it means to learn. According to Davidson, those of us in higher education are paradoxically obsessed with the implications of living in the "digital age," even though we have “yet to rethink how we need to be organizing our institutions—our schools, our offices—to maximize the opportunities of our digital era” (12). We tend to uphold models of teaching and assessments that no longer serve a generation of students who face a myriad of new challenges, as they attempt to learn to think critically in an era of information overload. Technology in all its forms is playing an increasingly important role in the lives of students. Colleges and universities, therefore, need to pay attention to the impact that the appropriate uses of digital tools can have on extending, enhancing, and enriching the student learning experience, both on and off campus. Moreover, and more importantly, Davidson argues that sustained exposure to such a range of digital media demands a different kind of attention than we previously required.

In Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn Cathy Davidson examines the phenomenon of attention blindness: humans perceive only a fraction of everything going on around us, particularly when we're focusing intently on one specific task, and that this attention blindness does not properly prepare us for the multi-task oriented digital age. According to Davidson, attention blindness is a basic neurological feature of the human brain. In the introduction of Now You See It, Davidson describes attending a lecture on attention blindness which addressed the tendency of the human brain to concentrate intensely on one task at the expense of missing almost everything else. To demonstrate this tendency, the lecturer showed a video of six people passing basketballs back and forth, and instructed viewers to count the number of tosses only between those wearing white shirts. Many people correctly counted fifteen tosses, yet nearly everyone failed to see someone in a full gorilla suit stride in among those tossing basketballs, then walk away. Davidson, who is dyslexic, didn’t even try to keep count, but instead decided to relax as she watched the tape, and thus, she noticed the gorilla.

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