her ACT story - she got a low score, she didn't finish... because she spent her time addressing, on the back of her answer sheet, the ambiguous questions, and the questions with no right answers. the graders wanted her principal to let her know that all of her responses on the back were spot on.
because of attention blindness, we often arrive at a standstill when it comes to tackling important issues, not because the other side is wrong but because both sides are precisely right in what they see but neither can see what the other does. each side becomes more an dmore urgent in one direction, oblivious to what is causing such consternation in another. in normal conditions, neither knows the other perspective exists.
if we can learn how to share our perspectives, we can see the whole picture. that may sound easy, but as a practical matter, it involves figuring a way out of our own minds, which as the gorilla experiment so perfectly demos, is a pretty powerful thing to have standing in the way. yet with practice and the right methods, we can learn to see the way in which attention limits your perspectives.
if you are a successful entrepreneur in the us, you are three ties more likely than the general population to have been diagnosed with a learning or attention disorder.
by one estimate, 65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet.
unlearning is required when the world or your circumstances in that world have change so completely that your old habits ow hold you back. you can't just resolve to change. you need to break a pattern, to free yourself from old ways before you can adopt the new.
we think we listen to what people are saying, but it turns out we're a little like dogs in that we sometimes hear the tone of voice and don't even pay attention to what that voice is actually saying.
what makes the difference between the forgettable and the important is what i call learning.
infants are not born paying attention. ... they learn what they should be paying attention to, what counts, what is rewarded and how to categorize all that does count into language, the single best organizer of what does or doesn't count in a society. each language sorts and categorizes the world in a unique way...
more to come as i continue to read.
for peter:
adults looking at infants are in awe of how quickly kids learn language, but, when you realize that every contact they make reinforces language in the most positive and powerful ways possible, with affection and reward being the fulfillment of the baby's basic needs, it becomes clear that language learning doesn't actually happen quickly at all.
at four months, he's already aware that people pay more attentio to him when he cries abou some things than about others.
late 1990's - new audio technologies confirmed that babies can hear from the sixth month of gestation, ....
in 2009 - a study revealed that newborns cry in the language patterns they hear in utero. french newborns cry with an upward inflection, german babies cry with a falling inflection, mimicking the speech patterns of their parents.
his american parents interact with him with a lot of talking, looking, and smiling - more than parents would in most other countries, in fact. ... american parents rank almost at the bottom on the international scale of parent-infant physical affection, meaning that we just don't touch and hold our babies as much as people do in most other cultures. some people believe that is why american babies are more verbally boisterous, crying, babbling, claiming attention by making noise, using their voices to claim some of the touch they crave.
americans love to name things...we're noun obsessed.
japanese use far more verbs
this is how babies learn their world. they are not simply learning difference. they chart by those they mirror.....
by six months of age babies notice the difference between faces of their own race and those of other races and ethnicities.
he's learning how to pay attention to these, and he's learning the values so thoroughly that they will be close to automatic by the time he starts school, and then formal education will complete the process. he won't know why certain things go with other things, be he will act as if there's not other way for this to be - because that's how he's built.
andrew doesn't understand this in anything like a rational or systematic way, but he is certainly getting the message that he's getting a message.
he's already wondering what everyone is trying to tell hi, what it could possibly mean, and why some things are repeated over and over in so many ways, as if people are afraid he's not going to understand them.