Dogs And Squirrels

The attentional filter is one of evolution’s greatest achievements.

In nonhumans, it ensures that they don’t get distracted by irrelevancies.

• Squirrels are interested in nuts and predators, and not much else.
• Dogs, whose olfactory sense is one million times more sensitive than ours, use smell to gather information about the world more than they use sound, and their attentional filter has evolved to make that so.

If you’ve ever tried to call your dog while he is smelling something interesting, you know that it is very difficult to grab his attention with sound— smell trumps sound.