"Scientists, artists, and scholars have cast us as analytical thinkers and passionate romantics, pragmatic toolmakers and spiritual souls, aggressive competitors and cooperative altruists. None of these views is complete, yet each has illuminated human beings in a helpful way. Now our fast-paced world invites us to see ourselves in yet another light — this time as nature's virtuosos of change, who are biologically as well as psychologically primed to engage with novelty.

"Our genius for responding to the new and different distinguishes us from all other creatures, saved us from extinction 80,000 years ago, and has fueled our progress from the long epoch of the hunter-gatherers through the agricultural and industrial eras into the information age. Suddenly, however, we're confronting many, many more new objects and subjects, from products to ideas to chunks of data, than have ever existed before, and they're coming at us faster and faster. We sometimes feel taxed if not overwhelmed, but New argues that our rewards will far outweigh our frustrations if we stay true to the evolutionary purpose of our neophilia, or affinity for novelty: to help us adapt to, learn about, or create the new things that matter, while dismissing the rest as distractions. . . .

"At this point in our warp-speed information age, our wellbeing demands that we understand and control our neophilia lest it control us. We already crunch four times more data — e-mail, tweets, searches, music, video, and traditional media — than we did just thirty years ago, and this deluge shows no signs of slackening. To thrive amid unprecedented amounts of novelty, we must shift from being mere seekers of the new to being connoisseurs of it.

"The digital revolution's tremendous benefits include access to nearly all the world's knowledge, greater efficiency, more freedom from boundaries such as home and office or artist and spectator, new ways to bond, and a riotous explosion of popular culture. In what might be a massive experiment designed by a fiendish psychologist, however, the combination of our innate interest in novelty and the huge increase in it can also generate a mental version of the perfect storm. Both as individuals and as a society, we can become so distracted by trivial yet instantly gratifying new things that we lose sight of neophilia's grand purpose of selectively focusing us on the important ones that help us to learn, create, and adapt to a changing world.

"To understand and make proper use of our neophilia, we need to look beyond secondary issues, such as out-of-control consumerism, attention problems, and electronics addiction, to see it as a metaphenomenon that underlies much of our behavior. This big-picture perspective on our special affinity for novelty has long been missing from our conversation. New is an effort to start that discussion, sparked by provocative insights from neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, media theorists, marketers, and others who closely monitor the fast-changing culture's pulse.

"The skillful management of our neophilia is essential if we're to turn the twenty-first century's challenges into opportunities. Our history shows that we have the potential to succeed in such an ambitious undertaking. After all, we had evolved the necessary neurological hardware for speech more than a millennium before we invented language. The first step is to understand ourselves as Homo novus — nature's scientists and artists of the new."