Aldous Huxley Quotes

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

In the modern desktop environment, with multitasking and alerts and constant activity, there are always more distractions. When you're at a computer, your hands are always on the controls.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

I often think of it this way: The 21st century is going to be a war on the attention of humanity. Where civilization focuses its attention, I mean, that's what defines what the civilization cares about.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: the attention of its recipients.

[…] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Every morning as I begin my work day, my computer presents me with the usual array of garbage: email, Twitter, updates on the state of the nation, updates on the state of the sneakers I just ordered.

In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can enver focus enough to learn.

Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

In this day and age, there's just so much that can hyperstimulate us, and curiously, it is not satisfying us.

It's amazing how much information is coming at us most of the time through technology, the media and the busyness of the world around us. I've decided that the world probably isn't going to change, so I have to change. I'm learning how to keep my mind on what I'm doing, rather than thinking about several things at once or what I want to do next.

There is always more information than attention

Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.

Mass attention is almost unattainable and it's not clear that you want it.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

Nobody reads anymore in America. Reading has become the least effective delivery system for narrative. That's sad because prose is the means by which you can deliver very complicated, nuanced explanations of problems and possible solutions.

Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it.

Just remember that those things that get attention flourish.

You are responsible for what you give your attention to.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

If you see distraction externally, you end up creating an internally distracted state.

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.