A lone, but much noticed, voice of disagreement belongs to Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke who published the book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. She acknowledges the problem of attention blindness, our human inability to pay close attention to multiple events or activities; we can miss something important – even totally,right-in-our-face, obvious events. That same weakness means that humans could learn in an entirely new way. If we admit our inability to devote full attention to any single task, then Davidson suggests we’d be better off to work in groups where each person can apply a smaller amount of attention to just a chunk of a project. That may strike some educators as giving students a free pass to spend more time on their social networking or pointless YouTube videos, but Davidson might be on something.

—Library Journal, “Attention is the New Currency”