by Serena Golden, Inside Higher Ed
The major technological changes of the past decade and a half present an array of “exciting opportunities,” Davidson argues — opportunities to promote efficiency, satisfaction and success at every stage from kindergarten through career. If we are inclined to side with the Better-Nevers, worrying that our brains never evolved for shifts of such magnitude — if kids attend to text messages and video games with alacrity, but fall behind in school, while adults feel swamped by information overload and spread too thin by multitasking — the trouble, in Davidson’s view, is not with all our new technologies, but rather with our failure thus far to adapt and restructure ourselves and our institutions. In Now You See It, Davidson gathers data and anecdotes on a wide array of topics — attention, learning, the American school system and its history, the modern workplace and how it came about — to argue that the human brain is perfectly well-suited to the digital world, if only we are willing to rethink the classroom, the workplace, and how we measure success.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/24/new_book_on_the_brain_science_of_attention
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