Business Librarian
Attention / April 2025
Have you noticed your attention span getting worse? You aren't alone. The Center for Attention Studies at King's College London surveyed 2000 adults in 2023 and found 47% of survey respondents agreed that "deep thinking was a thing of the past" (The Times, 2025). For April 2025, here are 12 books from JMU’s print and electronic collections that examine attention.
Find more materials about this topic by searching attention spans or focus in Library Search.
The Sirens' Call
From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society
Attention: selection and control in human information processing
This text presents a comprehensive and accessible overview of the science of attention, conveying its central findings and applications to real-world issues, including its relationship with technology, learning, and memory.
Scenes of Attention
This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying--and often failing--to attend.
Pay Attention! How to Get, Keep, and Use Attention to Grow Your Business.
Marketing veterans Cassandra Bailey and Dana Schmidt have developed a simple model that any business or nonprofit can use to identify which types of attention they need and create plans to go get them. In a step-by-step process, the authors outline the five types of attention, six potential audiences, three parts of messaging, five kinds of content, four bridges to move people, and a surround sound approach to pull it all together.
Attention and Its Crisis in Digital Society
In the context of debates surrounding the effects of new technologies on our mental faculties, particularly the attention span, this volume addresses the notion of a deterioration of attention, and the related ideas of cognitive overload, an inability to concentrate, and attention deficit disorder.
Stolen Focus: why you can't pay attention -- and how to think deeply again
Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back.
Your stone-age brain in the screen age : coping with digital distraction and sensory overload
The human brain hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age, let alone in the mere 30 years of the Screen Age. That’s why, according to neurologist Richard Cytowic, our brains are so poorly equipped to resist the incursions of Big Tech.
Human Capacity in the Attention Economy
This book examines the impact of ubiquitous information technology, with discussions about what makes these technologies so addictive, and their effect on emotional well-being, memory, learning, driving, and cognitive reserves.
Do I have your attention? Understanding memory constraints and maximizing learning
Do I Have Your Attention? explores memory processing, how students learn, and offers practical guidance to help teachers tailor their instruction to be the most efficient and effective for learning.
Movements of the Mind: a theory of attention, intention and action
Movements of the Mind is about what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, it integrates multiple approaches, from philosophical analysis of the metaphysics of agency to the activity of neurons in the brain.
Unapologetically ADHD
Written by Nikki Kinzer and Pete D. Wright, Unapologetically ADHD helps readers plan for long term goals, projects, and tasks that need to get done, providing a step-by-step outline for success that still allows for plenty of individual flexibility.
Numb: how the information age dulls our senses and how we can get them back
Discover how to manage this noisy world without it managing you. In Numb, distinguished author Dr. Charles R. Chaffin delivers a fun and evidence-based exploration of how you can devote more attention on what you believe is important while ignoring the distractions that increasingly permeate your life.