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the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.

the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug

if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all.  Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening.  It’s enough to make your brain explode.

boundaries are inserted where the brain experiences what Zacks calls “prediction error” — when things break a pattern of repetition and thus signal to the brain a boundary that is used to construct the temporal model for the event — its typical sequence. 

the response of the audience — comprised mainly of educational experts — and of Zacks himself is that one practical lesson from his research is that creators of narrative content, such as film, should make an effort to provide more obvious segmentation in their products.  Clearly, if this is how the brain works, we should work this way too. I think this is a major fallacy that pervades the reception of brain science research.  People tend to assume that if the brain works a certain way, then so should we.

the lesson is to get good at perceiving and creating event boundaries, which requires not pre-segmented media, but the opposite — hard to grasp art, stuff that violates expectations and rewards the perciever with a different perspective.   In fact, giving students media with well defined boundaries may cause their capacity to construct boundaries to atrophy, much as caffeine causes our adrenal glands to shrink. (I know, it’s a good reason to stop drinking coffee.)