Creativity Quote by David Rose

Rose’s line reads like a love letter to selective attention, but it’s also a quiet admission of vulnerability: the world is too loud, too fast, too overproduced to take in whole. Framed as “our system,” it smuggles in a kind of authority - not the swagger of a manifesto, but the confidence of someone who’s spent a lifetime inside complex sound. A musician knows that listening isn’t passive. It’s triage. You choose the melody over the room noise, the drummer’s micro-shift over the crowd’s roar, the harmonic change that tells you where the song is headed. “Important to you” is the tell: meaning isn’t delivered; it’s curated by the listener.

The phrase “streams of information in parallel” borrows the cool clarity of engineering language, but the intent is deeply human. Rose is pointing at a skill we rarely name: the ability to hold multiple threads at once without collapsing into distraction. In musical terms, it’s polyphony; in social terms, it’s navigating a conversation while reading the mood; in modern life, it’s surviving the constant demand to monitor everything everywhere.

The subtext pushes against a common fantasy - that more information automatically equals better understanding. Rose suggests the opposite: the real power is responsiveness, an ongoing, lived editing process. Attunement is not hoarding inputs; it’s training perception so you can catch what matters when it arrives, and let the rest stay background.