Q&A: Cathy Davidson on the Brain Science of Attention and Transforming Schools and Workplaces in the Digital Age
By Barbara Ray
10.13.11 | In Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,” Cathy Davidson has offered an antidote to the anxieties about the effects of digital media on kids—and on all of us.
Drawing on neuroscience, a deep research base, and interviews with everyone from insurance adjusters to carpenters, Davidson, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and co-founder at HASTAC, explains why we feel so anxious at this moment when the internet is ushering in new ways of organizing our lives and our relationships, and yet our major institutions still cling to old models.
Our newly interconnected worlds and the web of information at our fingertips, for example, are undermining familiar top-down hierarchies and order, ranging from where we get our news to how we work and how we learn. It’s all unnerving to say the least, no more so than in the classroom.
I sat down with her in Chicago, a stop on her book tour.