Genius is often described as the ability to reconcile disparate elements. But in 1899 the philosopher William James (brother to writer Henry James) published his insight on attention in his book Talks to Teachers on Psychology. In it, he quoted a well-known adage of his time, that “genius is nothing but a power of sustained attention,” and maybe that's an even better description.
The phrase “pay attention” implies that when we attend to something, we are spending our own energy and time. Attention is a limited resource, bound to similar constraints on the time any one individual has to spend. So it can be hard to pay attention. James observed that “voluntary attention cannot be continuously sustained... it comes in beats.” And people, he noticed, give their syncopated attention to pieces of information they're passionate about.
The internet has built an attention economy, and attention is a resource we're successfully mining here on Steemit. But we're about to make strides in promoting and rewarding attention like never before in human history.
And this is ironic in today's attention-deficit culture. But science has already given us some insight on how to foster cerebral attention: give the brain a hit of dopamine each time it's successfully attentive.
Dopamine is the fix gamers get when achieving levels and rewards. Focusing attention is a task, and when human beings complete tasks, they get a small hit of dopamine reward. It's this expectation of a dopamine reward that can make video games so addictive. But the blockchain has found an even better incentive than dopamine (and one that might even pair up with the dopamine reward system): smart media tokens (SMT).
When these tokens launch in 2018, people are going to be paid to pay attention. The act of attentiveness will become a transaction: I pay attention to you, you pay a token to me. Brains everywhere will be flexing the attention muscle like never before.
Imagine the information that will be shared and learned in this improved attention economy. Maybe some of the info will be sub-standard, that's possible. But markets have a way of sorting the bad from the good. That's what markets do: they sort. And a market for knowledge is absolutely the best way to allocate information.
So what might this mean? It could very well mean that as we start paying people to pay attention, people will get smarter. Not just better informed, but mini Lucy's, flexing their attention muscles and exploiting the neuroplasticity of their own brains. Instead of using 10% of our brains, in a few years, those of us paid to pay attention may be increasing our brain usage percentages either linearly or exponentially.
If the quote James offered a century ago was right and genius is really just the power of sustained attention, imagine the genius thinking this rewarding attention economy of SMT will spawn.