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This is Your Brain on a Test - NurtureShock Blog - Newsweek.com
"It measured activity in the brain’s attention systems – just how vigilantly were the students paying attention when they found out of their answer was correct or not? And were the students bothering to pay attention a moment later, when they saw the correct answer? Fundamentally, this study separated students who just wanted to do well on the test from students who really wanted to learn new material.
Before the testing, the students had filled out a questionnaire to assess their motivation personality. Based on their responses, Dweck and Mangels split them into two groups. One group was concerned, primarily, with being better than others. They agreed with statements like, “You have a certain amount of intelligence and you can’t do much to change it,” or “It’s important to me to be smarter than other students.” The other group disagreed with those statements, and instead agreed to comments like, “It’s very important to me that my coursework offer real challenges.” This latter group wasn’t into comparing themselves. Let’s call these two groups the Grade-Hungry and the Knowledge-Hungry.
These attitudes had a significant impact on the EEG readings – the students’ motivation personality was visible in the brain waves, on a millisecond to millisecond graph.
The Grade-Hungry students paid extremely close attention to the moment of green light/red light – they really were obsessed with whether they got the answer right or wrong. But immediately after, their attention systems took a break. They checked out, and they weren’t really paying much attention when the correct answer flashed by.
Respectively, the Knowledge-Hungry paid attention (but not quite as obsessively) to whether they were right or wrong, and they paid significantly more attention to the correct answers. They took advantage of the chance to learn. This contrast was most dramatic when each group got an answer wrong."
New Neurological Evidence That the Internet Makes People Smarter | Popular Science
"This is your brain on the Internet. Any questions? UCLA
Your grandma might think that the Internet is rotting your brain, but it's possible if she did a little face-time with Google that she could stay sharper in the noggin herself. In a new study, Internet novices who were instructed to search the web showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with making decisions and memory in just two weeks, according to a poster presented today at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference.
The work comes from a UCLA research team including Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry, and builds off of a previous study we covered in the June issue of Popular Science. He had previously shown that people who already are using the Internet more have more activity in areas of the brain related to complex reasoning, but that study couldn't define what was cause and effect (maybe people with better complex reasoning skills are more drawn to the Internet).
The new study shows that having people use the Internet can actually change their brain function. The experiment involved 24 adults, between 55 and 78 years old. Half had scant experience on the 'net. The other, web-savvy half served as a control group. Participants underwent fMRI scans of their brains while searching the Internet, before and after a two-week Internet training period, when the participants searched the Internet for an hour a day for seven days total. When the naive group was scanned again while using the web, areas of the brain involved in decision making and working memory (things you quickly hold in your head, like a new telephone number you're about to dial) showed more activity.
"The Internet may be a form of brain exercise,” Small told Popsci.com. "Whether [the brain changes] translate to other aspects of life, we don’t know yet, but it’s certainly a poss"
Backchannel Research Paper Jennifer Maddrell
The effect of backchannel interactions on cognitive load
How our brains build social worlds - opinion - 02 December 2009 - New Scientist
"In the past decade, the neuroscience of social behaviour has blossomed. A major catalyst for this has been the discovery of what seems to be a physiological mechanism for social interaction, located in the brain's "mirror neurons". These have been seen to fire not only as a monkey, say, grabs a peanut, but also when the monkey sees an experimenter do the same thing. Imaging experiments in humans have similarly revealed parts of our brains becoming active when we see someone moving, or even when watching a walker hidden among moving dots. It seems we are not just observers of the social scene but that we automatically share the experiences and emotions of the people we are observing.
This is only half the story, though, as interaction between people extends far beyond this. When I see you in pain, I feel your pain and my face automatically expresses this pain. What's more, you can see by my expression that I share your pain, and you are comforted by the knowledge someone else shares your pain. You are responding to my response to you.
Such interactions are a feature of many aspects of everyday life. They come to the fore when people play music, so in one of our experiments we got two people to tap a simple beat together. You might expect a leader and a follower to emerge, with the leader trying to maintain the beat, while the follower synchronises with the leader. Our twist was to also study what happened when each person could only hear the other, but not him or herself. No leader emerged: both players became followers, continually and mutually adjusting their taps to each other.
How can such behaviour be explained in terms of neuroscience? We think that two people performing together in this way are best described as a single, complex system rather than as two systems interacting. We also believe the same kinds of description should be applied generally to the brain activity that occurs when two people interact, because their brains also become a single complex system."
"Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media"
"Consider what it means to be "in flow" in an information landscape defined by networked media and you will see where Web2.0 is taking us. The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant and valuable, entertaining or insightful. Living with, in, and around information. Most of that information is social information, but some of it is entertainment information or news information or productive information. Being in flow with information is different than Csikszentmihalyi's sense, as it's not about perfect attention, but it is about a sense of alignment, of being aligned with information.
As of late, we've been talking a lot about content streams, streams of information. This metaphor is powerful. The idea is that you're living inside the stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it. The stream metaphor is about reaching flow. It's also about restructuring the ways in which information flows in modern society.
Those who are most enamored with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in-tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate. This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools.
For the longest time, we have focused on sites of information as a destination, of accessing information as a process, of producing information as a task. What happens when all of this changes? While things are certainly clunky at best, this is the promise land of the technologies we're creating. This is all happening because of how our information society is changing. But before we talk more about flow, we need to step back and talks about shifts in the media landscape."
Secrets of How Meditation Works: Scientific American
"# Regular deep meditation changes the brain in positive ways. This type of meditation seems to be associated with gamma waves, the electromagnetic rhythm of neurons firing very rapidly in harmony.
# Neuroscientists have pinpointed the cells responsible for producing these gamma rhythms and demonstrated a technology that can induce the brain-wave pattern in mice.
# In the future it might be possible to use this technology to reproduce some of the beneficial effects of meditation."
PopTech: blog
"We keep hearing that multitasking is bad, he points out — that our brains can’t do it, that society is going to change for the worse. A book recently cam out arguing that it’s going to put us back into the Dark Ages. But our brains multitask all the time. “Right now I’m breathing, I’m thinking about my next slide and my last slide, I’m wondering why I didn’t go to the bathroom earlier.” But there are limitations. We can’t read two books at once.
Brodmann’s Area 10 is an area in the brain, the border between the two different things one can’t do simultaneously. “With the next generation, a lot of scientists believe that this area is going to start working faster and faster” — it allows us to oscillate between two things at once. Bilton mentions technochondria, fear of new technology. When the railroad first came into being, people believed that you could asphyxiate and die if you went 20 miles an hour, and if you went 40 miles an hour your bones would explode. “We make these dumb assumptions all the time!”
We are multitasking, Bilton says. “I want to look at why we’re doing it.” One reason is the interfaces we’ve built. When you get a text, your phone vibrates, or beeps, or a window pops up. “It works too well; it’s jarring.” Another reason is that we have a tremendous amount of media to consume. So we simultaneously consume it.
To explain how we got here, go back to before the printing press. No one read. People stood around in bars or on soapboxes. The largest library in Europe had 122 books. “Along comes the printing press.” Which didn’t change everything; it changed a little bit, slowly. Gutenberg’s Bible was 2 volumes of 50 pounds each. “It’s like computers 50 years ago. You couldn’t carry it around, lay in the park and enjoy it.” Aldus Manutis in 1502 said, “why don’t we make these things smaller, so we can put them in our pockets? That’s how we got the mobile book, equivalent of the mobile phone. That’s when people started to read.”
And then along came the radio. “We put our books down, put our newspap
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We keep hearing that multitasking is bad, he points out — that our brains can’t do it, that society is going to change for the worse. A book recently cam out arguing that it’s going to put us back into the Dark Ages. But our brains multitask all the time. “Right now I’m breathing, I’m thinking about my next slide and my last slide, I’m wondering why I didn’t go to the bathroom earlier.” But there are limitations. We can’t read two books at once.
Brodmann’s Area 10 is an area in the brain, the border between the two different things one can’t do simultaneously. “With the next generation, a lot of scientists believe that this area is going to start working faster and faster” — it allows us to oscillate between two things at once. Bilton mentions technochondria, fear of new technology. When the railroad first came into being, people believed that you could asphyxiate and die if you went 20 miles an hour, and if you went 40 miles an hour your bones would explode. “We make these dumb assumptions all the time!”
We are multitasking, Bilton says. “I want to look at why we’re doing it.” One reason is the interfaces we’ve built. When you get a text, your phone vibrates, or beeps, or a window pops up. “It works too well; it’s jarring.” Another reason is that we have a tremendous amount of media to consume. So we simultaneously consume it.
To explain how we got here, go back to before the printing press. No one read. People stood around in bars or on soapboxes. The largest library in Europe had 122 books. “Along comes the printing press.” Which didn’t change everything; it changed a little bit, slowly. Gutenberg’s Bible was 2 volumes of 50 pounds each. “It’s like computers 50 years ago. You couldn’t carry it around, lay in the park and enjoy it.” Aldus Manutis in 1502 said, “why don’t we make these things smaller, so we can put them in our pockets? That’s how we got the mobile book, equivalent of the mobile phone. That’s when people started to read.”
And then along came the radio. “We put our books down, put our newspapers down, and would sit in the living room.” And radio became successful, and we start to see the first signs of multitasking; we don’t have enough time in the day to listen to shows and to read books and newspapers, so we do them at the same time. Same thing happens with television — and then the radio moves into the car, and we’re multitasking even there. Now we’re liable to be on our laptops, writing email, texting, tweeting, watching tv, and playing Nintento at the same time!
Our brains are adapting. “This is not evolution,” he assures us. Evolution doesn’t happen this fast. Maryanne Wolf has written, “After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read.” And yet we do. There’s a study that came out in Nature in 2009; a gentleman wanted to understand why people read and what happens in our brains when we do. They found a group of people in South America who are literate, and found new parts of their brain that grew and existed after they had done reading. “So our brains are still learning.”
Another study shows net naive people and net savvy people, reading a book and surfing the web, and the net savvy people’s brains light up twice as much as do the net naive people’s when they’re surfing the web. There’s a new kind of comprehension at work. Yet another study shows that playing Tetris increases attention, hand-eye coordination, working memory, visual and spatial problem solving. “Internet and games are a new form of narrative we’re learning how to do.”
Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Cyburbia: How search engines are changing us
"Is it possible that this rapid information loop between sending out messages into Google and the responding feedback, is changing the way that we want to process and respond to information?"
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Is it possible that this rapid information loop between sending out messages into Google and the responding feedback, is changing the way that we want to process and respond to information?
Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans - life - 12 November 2009 - New Scientist
"A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes.
It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals.
"It's very exciting work," says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. "The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new." Gaillard has previously shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness ."
Brain Games & Brain Training - Lumosity
"# Shown to improve memory and attention
# Detailed feedback and improvement tracking
# Fun and easy: full workout in less than 10 minutes/day
# Start your training today"
Attention Age - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Attention Age is an idea that the current period of time, which overlaps and builds off of the Information Age, will be characterized by the increasing commoditization of attention as it relates to the increasing abundance of information available, particularly on the internet. The Attention Age is marked by the ability of individuals to create and consume disinformation instantly and freely as well as share it on the internet using social media. The period is believed to have begun with the emergence of social media in the first years of the 21st century."
Nebul.us: Visualizing (and Sharing) your Online Activity - information aesthetics
"Nebul.us is a new startup focusing on revealing the online activities of users through the interactive visualization of Internet usage patterns in real-time. It aims to become a social site for sharing content with friends (or to the public at large), or a productivity enhancing site for figuring out how one is spending time online.
After installing a browser plugin, the service will start monitoring the browsing history. Typical Web2.0 profiles like Facebook, Twitter, last.fm or YouTube can be added as well to complete the view of online activities (note that the initial setting is set to 'private', and information about visits to individual sites can also be shared with 'friends' or blocked). "
Edge In Frankfurt: THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE— A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher
"We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.
As we know, information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know — this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus — when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations. And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker."
YouTube - Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price
Video of Class Nass, Eyal Ophir, explaining research: "Think you can watch videos, make cell phone calls and send e-mails all at once? Stanford experts say even trying can impair your cognitive control. Communication professor Cliff Nass and researcher Eyal Ophir explain why."
Larva Labs - Breathpacer
"BreathPacer is a powerful breathing guide that can help you reduce stress and experience deep relaxation. Andrew Weil, a leader in the integrative health field, states, "If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly."
Research has shown that practicing therapeutic breathing creates profound mental and physiological changes in the body. It is an extremely effective treatment or adjunctive treatment for numerous disorders. Use BreathPacer for 10-20 minutes a day and see what happens. For the price of a good cup of coffee, you can reduce stress and stress related illness while achieving a deeply relaxed state."
The Way We Live Now - Going Offline in Search of Freedom - NYTimes.com
"Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the genesis of the term “self-binding.” So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom. "
Goldhaber
If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.
Linda Stone: Just Breathe: Building the case for Email Apnea
"s the email spills onto my screen, as my mind races with thoughts of what I'll answer first, what can wait, who I should call, what should have been done two days ago; I've stopped the steady breathing I was doing only moments earlier in a morning meditation and now, I'm holding my breath.
And here's the deal. You're probably holding your breath, too.
I wanted to know - how widespread is "email apnea*?" I observed others on computers and Blackberries: in their offices, their homes, at cafes -- the vast majority of people held their breath, or breathed very shallowly, especially when responding to email. I watched people on cell phones, talking and walking, and noticed that most were mouth-breathing and hyperventilating. Consider also, that for many, posture while seated at a computer can contribute to restricted breathing.
Does it matter? How was holding my breath affecting me?
I called Dr. Margaret Chesney, at the National Institute of Health (NIH). Research conducted by Chesney and NIH research scientist, Dr. David Anderson, demonstrated that breath holding contributes significantly to stress-related diseases. The body becomes acidic, the kidneys begin to re-absorb sodium, and as the oxygen (O2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and nitric oxide (NO) balance is undermined, our biochemistry is thrown off. "
Linda Stone: Why Email Can Be Habit-Forming
"How does screen time contribute to chronic stress? In February 2008, I wrote about email apnea. It's the term I coined for the temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing humans tend to do while at ANY screen: computer, mobile device, video game or television. Our screen posture is generally compromised, making it challenging to get a diaphragmatic breath. The emotion of anticipation, accompanied by an inhale, is a natural response to a flood of email or a tense moment in a video game.
We forget to exhale. It's the exhale that contributes to the reduction of the stress response and the heightening of the relaxation response. More breathing, less chronic stress and less compulsive consuming."
Sentient Developments: Cognitive liberty and right to one's mind
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Cognitive liberty is not just about the right to modify one's mind, emotional balance and psychological framework (for example, through anti-depressants, cognitive enhancers, psychotropic substances, etc.), it's also very much about the right to not have one's mind altered against their will. In this sense, cognitive liberty is very closely tied to freedom of speech. A strong argument can be made that we have an equal right to freedom of thought and the sustained integrity of our subjective experiences.
Our society has a rather poor track record when it comes to respecting the validity of certain 'mind-types'. We once tried to "cure" homosexuality with conversion therapy. Today there's an effort to cure autism and Asperger's syndrome -- a development the autistic rights people have railed against. And in the future we may consider curing criminals of their anti-social or deviant behaviour -- a potentially thorny issue to be sure.
There are many shades of gray when it comes to this important issue. It's going to requiring considerable awareness and debate if we hope to get it right. Your very mind may be at stake.
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