Free A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention by Matt Richtel Page A

his drive comes from a passion for science that had him, as a kid, taking the bus two hours a day to and from a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York—the son of blue-collar parents (mom was a bookkeeper, dad worked for the transit authority)—to the world-class Bronx High School of Science. Despite excelling there, and getting high SAT scores, he didn’t get his first college choices. It intensified his drive, made him want to prove himself, but, he says, it also freed him to approach problems in his own way. “The system failed me, so I decided I didn’t need the system.”
    He feels a buzz from his phone. He extracts it from his black jeans and reads. “Oh, look at this!” He holds up the phone and shows the text: I’m coming. Look out!
    It’s from Philip Rosedale. “He created Second Life,” Dr. Gazzaley says. It’s one of the biggest virtual worlds ever created.
    Dr. Gazzaley walks to the kitchen counter to show the text to a handful of people who have come early to eat prosciutto and soy chicken from Whole Foods. “It’s going to get crazy,” Dr. Gazzaley says. In addition to Rosedale, he’s expecting a bunch of hipsters, rockers, and entrepreneurs: the guitarist from Counting Crows and the lead musician from Thievery Corporation; the guy who created Digg (an Internet service that hundreds of millions of people use to rank whether or not they “like” something on the Internet); owners of some of the swanky nearby restaurants; and a gorgeous woman from the Caribbean named Rio, who professes to “be in love with Dr. Gazzaley’s brain.”
    BEFORE THE PLACE EXPLODES , Dr. Gazzaley says there is time to explain the “cocktail party problem.” It is among the most fundamental precepts in attention science. As he talks, he makes a show of shifting his eyes to one of the handful of pre-party attendees, a pregnant woman named Kat who oversees HR for Burning Man.
    He explains that he’s illustrating the cocktail party effect.
    “I can look at Kat and still be listening to whoever I’m talking to,” Dr. Gazzaley says, then shifts his eyes back to me. “Or I can look at whoever I’m talking to but shift my attention so that I’m listening to Kat.
    “It’s an exercise in selective attention.”
    What he means is that people have a powerful, even extraordinary, ability to direct their attention to control it. At the same time, he says, the cocktail party effect shows the limitations of attention; after all, you can’t pay attention to two conversations at once. In fact, it’s so limited that if you’re really listening to the person in front of you, there are generally only two things you can pick up in a different conversation: the gender of the person speaking or, in some cases, the sound of your name.
    “There’s an illusion that you have a whole field of attention,” Dr. Gazzaley says. The reality is that you can focus your attention on one very specific thing, not everything in your field of vision. Dr. Gazzaley says the meaning of this principle is actually open to interpretation. On one hand, it shows you can control and focus your attention. But seen another way, the exercise shows how hard it is to spread your attention. It is more like a laser than an overhead light.
    Is that good or bad? “It depends on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist,” Dr. Gazzaley says.
    In short, attention is extremely powerful and extremely limited. That idea, as embodied by the cocktail party effect, is fundamental to modern attention science, and it seems so obvious. But it was quite revelatory in the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to that point, there was a general belief that the brain was “infinite” in its power to take in and process the world.
    IF YOU TOUCH YOUR foot, you feel it. Immediately. Right?
    Until the middle of the nineteenth century that thinking symbolized the prevailing scientific thought about the human neural network. In a nutshell: Scientists believed that a