This efficacy of the insula-cingulate network varies from person to person, in some functioning like a well-oiled switch, and in others like a rusty old gate. But switch it does, and if it is called upon to switch too much or too often, we feel tired and a bit dizzy, as though we were see-sawing too rapidly.

The appearance of writing some 5,000 years ago was not met with unbridled enthusiasm; many saw it as technology gone too far, a demonic invention that would rot the mind and needed to be stopped.

mode of attention, and it is responsible for so many high-level things we do that researchers have named it “the central executive.”

Switching attention comes with a high cost.

A Gibsonian affordance describes an object whose design features tell you something about how to use

If you can attend to one of the things on your list in less than two minutes, do it now (he

Have you ever sat in an airplane or train, just staring out the window with nothing to read, looking at nothing in particular? You might have found that the time passed very pleasantly, with no real memory of what exactly you were looking at, what you were thinking, or for that matter, how much time actually elapsed. You might have had a similar

Yet our brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an ordered structure.

critical point that bears repeating is that attention is a limited-capacity resource—there are definite limits to the number of things we can attend to at once. We see this in everyday activities. If you’re driving, under most circumstances, you can play the radio or carry on a conversation with someone else in the car. But if you’re looking