brainresearch - Tara McGowan on Diigo

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The Road to the Information Age

really awesome follow-up to Carr's Google Making Us Stupid article- traces back through digital revolutions of the past and intellectuals reactions to them as they came.

Tags: history, Atlantic, brainresearch, brain, study, google, cognition, attention on 2008-07-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Carr wonders whether the modern tendency to consume information online, through a constant stream of headlines, e-mails, and blog posts has eroded our capacity for deep, measured thought.
Bush, who directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII, realized that the rapidly growing body of human knowledge would be of limited value to future generations without more efficient means of accessing it:
He envisioned a system for searching the realm of human knowledge through “selection by association”—a mechanized process that would seek to emulate the way the human mind thinks.
While clearly smitten with his new device, the author also recognized the hazards of relying on it too heavily. For one thing, Fallows warned, “Computers forever distort your sense of time.” When there were occasional delays, “ten minutes was intolerable when everything else happened in a flash.”
oe explained that Wikipedia’s organizational model is particularly well suited to the online world:

Wikipedia’s communal regime permits growth plus organization and improvement. The result of this difference is there for all to see: much of the Internet is a chaotic mess and therefore useless, whereas Wikipedia is well ordered and hence very useful.
The Google worldview “suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.”
By 2000 AD man should have a much better comprehension of himself and his system, not because he will be innately any smarter than he is today, but because he will have learned to use imaginatively the most powerful amplifier of intelligence yet devised.

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Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com

GREAT article on literacy decline due to internet addiction/ reading? really great, comprehensive look

Tags: reading, brainresearch, research, study, literacy, internet on 2008-07-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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ike so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer
She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters.
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.
critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading.
some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.
Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who said they read for fun.

CBC Radio | The Sunday Edition | Latest Show

Maryanne Wolf (Tufts, Google Article) interviewed on CBC about how internet use is changing our reading habits, abilities

Tags: Google, Carr, MaryanneWolf, reading, brainresearch, brain, attention, distraction on 2008-07-22 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks - Times Online

Great article tying Jackson's Distraction to Carr's Google article and making broader conclusions about how we are changing as our attention diminishes.

Tags: attention, brainresearch, brain, google, Carr, MaggieJackson, distraction, youth, socialnetworking, cognition, social on 2008-07-22 and saved by35 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromtechnology.timesonline.co.uk

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995
his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s
speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another.
Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might
one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes
naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define
ourselves.
No human being, he says, can
effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use
language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool
themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output
deteriorates.
One American study found that
interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This,
it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year.
Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just
written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young
Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation
of teens, incapable of sustaining concentration long enough to read a book.
“The next generation will not grieve because they will not know what they have
lost,” says Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist.
Microsoft, Google, IBM, Intel – are trying to do
something about this. They have formed the Information Overload Research
Group, “dedicated to promoting solutions to e-mail overload and
interruptions”. None of this will work, of course, because of the
overwhelming economic forces involved. People make big money out of
distracting us
Tests clearly show that a
switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction
between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a
thousandfold.
90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks.
They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.
They are “living off the thrill of
peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic
inheritance that has made us what we are now”.
All internet
connections are threadbare. They lack the complexity and depth of real-world
interactions. This is concealed by the language.
Teenagers are being groomed to
think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or
some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another
through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come
to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless.
ike all multitaskers, the kids are
deluding themselves into thinking that busy-ness is depth when, in fact,
they are skimming the surface of cyberspace as surely as they are skimming
the surface of life.
what is new is the assiduity
with which companies and institutions are selling us the tools of
distraction. Every new device on the market is, to return to Eliot, “Filled
with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration”.

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Parents Say They’re Getting Control of Their Children’s Exposure to Sex and Violence in the Media – Even Online - Kaiser Family Foundation

Kaiser Family Foundation Report: Concerns of Parents about Children's relationship to media, internet

Tags: parents, study, brainresearch, brain, research, 2007, attention, learning, cognition on 2008-07-15 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.kff.org

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Technology and Drugs are Changing Brain Function - Science - redOrbit

Susan Greenfield on FEARS of how technology is changing brain.

Tags: brainresearch, brain, technology, London on 2008-07-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Atlantic Article

Tags: brainresearch, brain, internet, attention, reading, effects on 2008-07-11 and saved by223 people -All Annotations (117) -About

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more fromwww.theatlantic.com

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» Violent Video Games Leave Impact - Psych Central News

Study at University of Indiana found that violent games actually have affect on brain shape, development

Tags: brainresearch, brain, research, study, gaming, neurological on 2008-07-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic - New York Times

Article looks at numerous different studies being done on how technology has affected people's ability to focus, multitask.

Tags: brainresearch, brain, research, London, Meyer, Study, Multitask, attention on 2008-07-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”
René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.
Recently completed research at the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University suggests the popular perception is open to question. A group of 18- to 21-year-olds and a group of 35- to 39-year-olds were given 90 seconds to translate images into numbers, using a simple code.
In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.
Erik Brynjolfsson of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the paper, along with Sinan Aral of the Stern School of Business at New York University, and Marshall Van Alstyne of Boston University.

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E-Mail Affects Brain More Than Marijuana ( Today’s technology has replaced the smo...)

Hewlett Packard/ University of London Institute of Psychiatry Study founds that constant e-mail use and texting lowers avg. workers IQ by 10 points, 6 points more than pot.

Tags: brainresearch, IQ, brain, research, study, London, email, texting on 2008-07-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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How the Google generation thinks differently - Times Online

London Knowledge Lab Research on internet's impact on pupil's critical and meta-cognitive skills

Tags: brainresearch, internet, brain, london, study on 2008-07-10 and saved by35 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Tara McGowan's Bookmarks tagged brainresearch → View Popular

The Road to the Information Age

Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com

CBC Radio | The Sunday Edition | Latest Show

Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks - Times Online

Parents Say They’re Getting Control of Their Children’s Exposure to Sex and Violence in the Media – Even Online - Kaiser Family Foundation

Technology and Drugs are Changing Brain Function - Science - redOrbit

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

» Violent Video Games Leave Impact - Psych Central News

Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic - New York Times

E-Mail Affects Brain More Than Marijuana ( Today’s technology has replaced the smo...)

How the Google generation thinks differently - Times Online

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