As a kid, I loved superhero movies. I think we all did. There was nothing more exciting than seeing a superhero receive some outworldly powers and beat up some bad guys. However, the superheroes who fascinated me the most as a kid, and still do today, were never the ones with extraordinary powers. They were always the ones with ordinary powers. Iron Man for example. He isn’t from another planet full of superhumans, he wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider, neither was he struck by thunder in a chemistry lab.

He was simply smart. He had the brains to become rich and the guts and innovative thinking to build the first iron man suit in that cave in Afghanistan out of a box of scraps. And, maybe most importantly, he had the focus and concentration to stick to all of his work, which ultimately led him to become a superhero without actually having any real superpowers.

I know, it’s a fictive piece of work we’re talking about.

However, I still believe that there are several parallels that we can draw here to real life.

In real life, as mundane and unspectacular it is in comparison to superhero movies, we all also have a special ability, which, if used to its full potential, is as strong as a superpower.

No, I’m not talking about self-belief or simply the capacities of the human brain.

It’s much simpler than that and you may have guessed it already based on my build-up:

The Superpower of the 21st century is:

Focus.

In a time when humanity is increasingly losing its ability to focus on a specific task for more than a few minutes, focus has become a literal superpower.

Today, we live in the “attention economy,” a world where infinite information competes for our vulnurable, limited human attention. Youtube videos generate revenue through clicks, influencers hunt likes and followers. Every second, every milisecond, even, has become a precious commodity.

This leads to the numbing feel after a long session of “doomscrolling.” We are overloaded with information in such great amounts that our brain simply cannot keep up. We fail to do basic tasks, to remember what we wanted to do today, or, sometimes, even who whe are and what we really value.

But how does our brain actually react to such overstimulation? How does our attention even work in the first place?

The neuroscientist Micheal Posner has researched attention in the 90s and has come up with a model for three different attentional systems in the brain, each a set of different brain structures working to fulfill a specific role in how we process our perceptions of the world and direct our focus to.