Director's Message: On Amygdalas, Algorithms and What OLLI Is For

Attention, Learners

There's an old idea, easy to forget: attention is a resource. Not infinite, not free, and — like most resources worth having — increasingly the object of other people's ambitions and exploitations.

You've felt this. The apps built to find the exact frequency that keeps your thumb moving, tuned to the oldest, twitchiest part of the brain rather than the newest.

The news cycle that doesn't inform so much as inundate — a strategy with a name now, "flood the zone," designed less to persuade you than to exhaust you into incoherence.

Making Room to Think

But the deeper loss isn't just architectural. It's civic. A citizenry trained to react instead of reflect stops being a citizenry in any meaningful sense — it becomes an audience, managed rather than governed.

What we're watching, in the discourse of the present moment, is what happens when that management becomes governance: an electorate steered by grievance instead of argument, a politics that runs on flooding rather than persuading. Underneath the noise is something more human and more frightening — a fear, not always spoken, that we are losing the capacities that make us recognizable to each other as people who reason, weigh, and choose.

A Place to Pay Attention

This is not a lament. It's the reason OLLI exists.

What we offer that the feed doesn't: time to think before reacting, company in the thinking, and a shared commitment to distillation over noise — analysis instead of outrage, synthesis instead of slogans. No conspiracy theories. No baiting by race or gender or grievance. Just the harder, better work of understanding, practiced in common.

What Deserves Your Attention?

So here is our fall invitation, as much a question as a curriculum: What deserves your attention this term — as a citizen, a parent, a neighbor, a mind still hungry to learn, still willing to be persuaded by evidence rather than volume? Bring that question with you. We'll build the answer together, one course, one conversation, one reclaimed hour at a time.

Welcome back to a new year of learning and discovery. Direct your attention wisely — there's a great deal at stake in how we do.

Susan Hoffman

Director, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI)

Assistant Dean, Lifelong Learning, Extended Education