My friend Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, uses mushroom-hunting as a metaphor to explain how pattern recognition—what he also calls peripheral vision—works. It requires immersion without absorption—a broad awareness of the environment, while resisting the pull to fixate on any one thing. When you go mushroom-hunting, if you focus too deliberately, you won’t find any mushrooms. With your task-oriented mind switched on, you’ll filter out the weak signals, the visual hints of delectable fungi that are nearly, but not quite, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the forest underbrush; however,
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