Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity - Simone Weil
As you go about your life, don?t give 100% of your attention to the external world and to your mind. Keep some within - Eckhart Tolle
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention - Carl Shapiro (b. 1955) U.S. academic and author. Information Rules (co written with Hal L Varian; 1999)
David McCandless helps people overcome information overload by encouraging us to use our eyes more in order to visualise and design the patterns that matter.
As such, David is continuing in a long tradition of using diagrams to describe things that transcend the written word. A single image can convey the simple underlying pattern hidden by words or equations: draw the right picture and you can literally transform the way we see the world.
What are we lacking - attention, compassion - or both, when we ignore WW2-scale conflicts happening right now?
Clay Shirky, in Edge and at Demos talk about our surplus, unused brainpower, and what we might be able to do with it if we turn off our TVs.
It is claimed that processing around 100,000 words a day changes our brains and ruins our concentration.