Attention

Professor Barbara Demeneix – a prestigious scientist in France who has won several major awards, including the Légion d’honneur, the country’s highest civilian prize – explained to me: ‘At every stage of your life, different forms of pollution will affect your attention span,’ and she has concluded this is a factor in why ‘we’ve got neurodevelopmen

The other drawback from expectation is that it creates a blind spot. You can only see what you expect to see. The more your system is filled with expectations, the more difficult it is to see something else.

For example, a small study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that ‘technological distraction’ – just getting emails an

The constraints of the medium, then, are the constraints of our embodiment, or at least that is my proposition to you. And these are, in part, the constraints of place and time. I can only be here now, and I can be here now only for so long, which means there are only so many things to which I can meaningfully attend at length and at depth. I may c