Three qualities perhaps seem to be present in all of them, and the first of these is having a peculiar kind of attention – one might call it active attention. Where most of us see, they look: when most of us hear, they listen. Brilliant naturalists have similar abilities – their eyesight and hearing seem phenomenal but not so, it is in the ways of looking and listening. It’s all in the mind. Ironically, these are the individuals most likely to be called absent-minded by the rest of us because that kind of heightened inner focus comes at a cost to our lives in the workaday world.
