The Distracted Mind Quotes

“The brain has allowed us to perform extraordinary feats from discovering general relativity to painting the Sistine Chapel, from building airplanes to composing symphonies. And yet, we still forget to pick up milk on the way home. How can this be?”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“As more of our personal communications move from the real world to the virtual world”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“attentional deficiencies in selectivity are not the consequence of an inability of older adults to focus on their goals”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“people were generally less happy while mind wandering”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“Our brain simply does not have the infinite parallel processing resources needed to simultaneously receive and interpret all the information we are exposed to at every moment.”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“The fact that ignoring is an active process is critical to understanding the Distracted Mind because it emphasizes that it takes resources to filter out what is irrelevant.”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“That is what our prefrontal cortex and its networks offer humans to differentiate us from much less evolved animals: the ability to pause in response to a stimulus and enact complex goals in a nonreflexive way.”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“an even more profound evolutionary modification to the perception-action cycle was the evolution of a mechanism that “broke” the cycle”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“the great tit and the screaming hairy armadillo.”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“In a laboratory study, a researcher from Virginia Commonwealth University observed college students during a three-hour study session using video cameras and eye trackers and found that on average, students spent more than an hour listening to music and showed thirty-five interruptions of six seconds or longer, totaling twenty-six disrupted minutes in just three hours.33”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“Dr. Rosen’s lab showed that, when asked how easy or difficult it was to pair a variety of tasks together, members of younger generations reported that they felt that it was rather easy to pair most tasks, while those of older generations felt that only more well-practiced tasks could be easily combined.”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“Technology has also rapidly invaded our language. Every year the Oxford English Dictionary adds new words that it feels deserve to be part of the English language.”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

“Some consumer experts point to a benchmark that when 50 million people have used a product it is considered to have “penetrated” society.”
― Adam Gazzaley, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World