Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn

When Cathy Davidson and Duke University gave free iPods to every member of the incoming freshman class in 2003, they didn’t expect the uproar that followed. Critics called it a waste: what educational value could a music player have for college kids? Yet by the end of the year, Duke students had found academic uses for the new devices in virtually every discipline. The iPod experiment proved to be a classic example of the power of disruption—a way of refocusing attention to illuminate unseen …