You know, we interact with this world around us, our environment, even our internal environment,

two ways. The first is through bottom-up attention, and that's the more primitive ancient type of

attention that evolved really for our survival. So things in the environment that are very salient,

you know, very novel, demand our attention independent of our goals, and that's what allowed our

ancient, even our primordial ancestors, even single-celled organisms of which we, you know, evolved from

to sense the environment, toxins and nutrients, is where we started and, you know, it has allowed

us to survive. But we have another type of attention, called top-down attention, where we direct

our limited resources of our minds to aspects of the world that we make the decision to engage with.

And this doesn't have to be the most important or the most novel elements, right? So we can reject

those bottom-up more ancient influences on our attention and impose our own goals upon it.

And so this ability to have top-down control over how we process the world around us is what

allowed humans to create technology and society and language and, you know, art, music,

everything is this ability to sort of break the bonds, I would say, that enslave us

when slave other animals to the environment, where they just reflexively respond to it.

I'm Srini Rao, and this is the unmistakable creative podcast where you get a window into the

stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds, started movements,

built-driving businesses, written best-selling books, and created an insanely interesting art.

For more, check out our 500 episode archive at unmistakablecreative.com.

Adam, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Thank you, glad to be here.

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So as I was saying before we hit record here,

I kept coming across your name in virtually every book that I had read on the subject of attention

...