The Attention Economy

CHAPTER 4

FROM AMOEBAS TO APES

THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF ATTENTION

You cannot train an ape if you insist on pretending it is really a calculator. Likewise, the first step in effective attention management is to stop insisting that people function “logically,” and accept the biological realities that dominate the human brain. We can learn much from simply accepting the animal nature of our attention psychology

In the mid-1990s, a group of business academics gathered to analyze and discuss the phenomenon of attention, which they all agreed was becoming more and more important to corporate success. In virtually every panel discussion, the experts concluded that a full understanding of human attention would necessarily begin with facts about its psychological ...