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In an era of terrifying unpredictability, we race to address
complex crises with neat algorithms, bullet points, or hurried
tweets. How could we find the clarity and vision so urgently needed
today by being unsure? Uncertain is about the unsung triumph of
doing just that. A scientific adventure tale set on the front lines
of a volatile era, this paradigm-shifting book by award-winning
author Maggie Jackson shows us how to skillfully confront the
unexpected and the unknown, and how to harness not-knowing in the
service of wisdom, invention, mutual understanding, and even
resilience. Long neglected as a topic of study, the newly
discovered gifts of uncertainty now fascinate the greatest
cognitive scientists - and offer a remarkable antidote to the
narrow-mindedness of our day. In laboratories, operating rooms,
boardrooms, and on the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence,
Uncertain unlocks the secrets to a state of mind that is critical
to human achievement yet treated as a shameful flaw. Understanding
when to be unsure distinguishes a superior expert from one who is
merely good enough. An ambivalent executive is more resourceful in
a crisis than ultra-decisive leaders we admire. Far from luring us
into inertia, uncertainty is the mindset most essential in times of
flux. Each chapter examines a mode of uncertainty-in-action, from
creative reverie to productive dissent. Step by step, we discover
the art and science of being unsure as a skill set for incisive
thinking and as a state of being that ushers us to the fertile edge
of what we do not understand. An unpredictable world has been with
us all along. Liberating ourselves from the mistaken belief that
life could be otherwise offers a startling new vision of human
progress and of what it means to know.
This visionary book details the steep costs of our deepening crisis
of distraction and reveals remarkable scientific discoveries that
can help us rekindle our powers of focus and sustained attention.
In the first edition of this groundbreaking book, Maggie Jackson
sounded a prescient warning of a looming crisis: the fragmentation
of attention that is eroding our abilities to problem-solve,
innovate, and care for one another. Now in this updated edition
with an incisive new preface, she offers both a renewed wake-up
call and a path forward as we reckon with one of the most pressing
problems of our time. How can we harness the technological marvels
of our age more wisely and turn data into knowledge and distraction
into skillful attention? How can we reset human bonds in a time of
deep disconnection? We must, she argues, curb technological excess
by cultivating the full gamut of our attentional capabilities. We
must look first to the human behind the device. Jackson is our
expert guide in exploring the historic roots of distraction, the
perils we face in melding human and machine, and the cutting-edge
science that reveals the attentional skills most needed in an age
of overload. Timely and unforgettable, Distracted offers a
harrowing yet hopeful account of the fate of our highest human
capacity.
We have vast oceans of information at our disposal, yet
increasingly we seek knowledge with brief glimpses at the Yahoo
headlines while juggling other tasks. We are networked as never
before, but we tend to communicate even with our most intimate
friends and family via instant messaging, email, and fleeting
face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times, then
punctuated when they do occur with pings and beeps and more
multitasking. Welcome to the land of distraction. Despite our
wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a
culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new
world, something is amiss. And that something is - attention.
Journey with Maggie Jackson as she explores the many ways in which
we are eroding our capacity for deep, sustained attention-the
building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. In her
sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its
erosion, she introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers,
educators, wired teens, virtual lovers from the telegraph age, and
roboticists building smart machines to comfort and care for us. She
takes us from the nineteenth-century roots of our mobile, virtual
multitasking ways into a darkening future of snippets, glimpses,
skimming, McThinking, and mistrust. Taking us beyond "Blink and
Faster", Jackson makes it clear that if we continue down this road
of scattered attention spans and widespread societal ADD, we will
be in danger of squandering and devaluing the essence of humanity,
and our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural
decline. But we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of
attention by strengthening our varied powers of focus and
perception, the keys to judgement, memory, morality, and happiness.
She describes some of the exciting new scientific research that
shows how these skills can be nurtured. "Distraction" is unique in
being simultaneously an original expose of the multifaceted nature
of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of
post-modern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating
sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society.
Pull over, hit the pause button, silence the ringer, and prepare to
encounter our land of distraction-this may be your first, and maybe
your last, chance to really fathom it.
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