The information that surrounds us has many layers.

Overlapping like so many translucent angels projected onto the screen of 3 dimensions, they give the part of our brains that actually notice these kinds of things subtle clues, urgent or whispering compulsions, maps, even. Our lives are spent dancing through the eddies of these projections.

We are continually softened like river rocks.

In waves of comprehension, forgetting, dismissal, and remembering again all those little bytes, all the factors that we grapple with, the way the curtains were hung in the backroom, the color of the paint on the wall, the way his eyebrows moved when he said that.

The art of life is reductionist.

We cutout large swaths of what our eyes see in order that our awareness can make some sense of it. I might choose, for example, to notice the Fibonacci-based pattern on the instructors polyester blouse and the fly buzzing under my desk instead of the last three sentences my instructor said, or what Oscar is doing in the corner of the room with those matches, or what the the weather is like outside.

We selectively destroy information to create knowledge.

That's what Ray Kurzweil says, and he would know. It means that when we choose to focus on anything in particular, we loose focus of the bigger picture: we collapse the wave function of all of those precious projected angelic layers by training our attention on any singular one.