The Architecture of Attention

There is a room in the old quarter of Amsterdam — narrow, high-ceilinged, its windows looking out onto a canal that hasn’t changed course in four hundred years — where a small team of neuroscientists is trying to measure something that resists measurement. They are studying attention. Not the crude, binary kind that marketers talk about when they say they’ve “captured” it, but the deeper, more elusive variety: the sustained, directed focus that allows a human being to hold a single complex thought in mind long enough to transform it into understanding.

The lab’s director, a soft-spoken Dutch ...