In her excellent book, "Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do," author Jennifer L. Eberhardt, PhD, has a section on how our brains categorize things that are familiar as they pertain to race.
There was a passage with a broader implication that stopped me in my tracks: "The brain begins to disengage when confronted with stimuli that are not novel."
It's a phenomenon neuroscientists call "repetition suppression." Presented more simply, it means to me that we stop paying attention — or needing to pay attention — to things when they don't change.
That was an eye-opener in the context of the COVID pandemic, which caused our lives to shrink and become repetitive in many ways.
And in a roundabout way, it led me down a path thinking about Major League Baseball and the problems facing the game that go far beyond the possibility of missing games if a labor deal is not reached by Monday — a subject I talked about on Thursday's Daily Delivery podcast.
Baseball's larger problem is a decline in interest. That has been charted in many different ways, but try this one: a recent poll of 1,570 adults showed that more than half have no interest in MLB.
I've been tempted in the past to blame that decline on our diminished attention spans combined with the pace of play and the length of games.
I now think those play a role, but they're more symptoms than cause.