"Today I work because it's fun. In that sense, I guess you could say that I approach business as a kind of problem-solving challenge. That doesn't mean I don't take business seriously, because I do. But life's a lot more fun if you treat its challenges in creative ways." –Bill Gates

"..if every business will always have problems, what is the difference between a good business and a bad one? A good business has interesting problems, a bad business has boring ones. Good management is the art of making the problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them."

"My intelligence does not stop at my skin," writes Howard Gardner, the influential Harvard theorist. Rather, he points out, it encompasses his tools, such as his computer and its databases, and, just as important, "my network of associates, office mates, professional colleagues, others whom I can phone or to whom I can dispatch electronic messages."

However, the authors discovered that when one object in the scene was given prominence in the visual field, the attention given to that object counteracted the suppressive influence of nearby stimuli. Directing attention to a visual stimulus cancels out the suppressive influence of nearby stimuli, thereby enhancing information processing.

Ever noticed how much you seem to learn while in the process of looking up something else? Having that "something else" gives you a context which serves as a basis for selecting objects to focus on in a crowded visual field. In a sense, reading involves the same process. Ever read a book a second time and notice things you didn't notice the first time around? That's because reading is 90% mental, and only 10% eye movement. The context you bring to each moment determines which ideas in the book you will notice, and which items get added to your memory banks via peripheral learning. In his book, The Einstein Factor, Win Winger suggests asking for an image to help you understand something you are about to read. Seems like this technique is based on the same brain chemistry phenomenon.

How to apply this? I'm beginning to learn about Windows NT 5.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, but I'm doing so without a specific application to drive my mental filters. To compensate, I created one by planning to do a series of audiotapes for my team at work that will provide overviews of these products. While most people would simply watch the video tapes and read the books, both my experience and the experiments described in this Science Magazine article suggest that much of their learning will be "canceled out" if they don't give themselves a specific reason to learn them.