Five or six years ago, I attended a lecture on the science of attention. A philosopher who conducts research over in the medical school was talking about attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task, causes us to miss just about everything else
Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hi... - 14 views
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Can you hear me, Larry?
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Is that like selective hearing? You hear what you want? I don't think so. I think attention blindness is concentrating so deeply on one thing that your subconscious blocks out everything else, as oppose to selective hearing, you choose not to hear. What about the subliminal conscience. When we're at the movie theater and without us knowing, there are intermittent shots of coca cola or pop corn ads and you find yourself going to the snack bar to buy it. Why wouldn't the gorilla be the same thing?
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Everyone except me. I'm dyslexic, and the moment I saw that grainy tape with the confusing basketball tossers, I knew I wouldn't be able to keep track of their movements, so I let my mind wander. My curiosity was piqued, though, when about 30 seconds into the tape, a gorilla sauntered in among the players. She (we later learned a female student was in the gorilla suit) stared at the camera, thumped her chest, and then strode away while they continued passing the balls.
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The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor
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While I agree that we have honoured discipline and solitary focus as described here, I disagree with the inference that our brains can do differently. Much research, including Daniel Kahneman's work on Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes the impact of rapid attention switching on performance et al. What I DO agree with, however, is the concept of 'many brains' - or 'distributed minds' - working on multiple tasks simultaneously - as in 'crowdsourcing'. I just think we need not to mix the two things up. Yes, I do believe in the plasticity of the brain and learning new habits and ways of being in the world - rewiring if you like. Hebb said it - "Neurons that fire together - wire together." But, I also firmly believe that there an individual has attentional limits and effort required (wasted) in moving from one complex task to another.
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I think this is a valid point Peter, and one that needs to be emphasized. Not mulitasking, but multibraining.
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I don't think Davidson would disagree with you. I believe what she is saying is that "focusing" our attention is not a natural state of the mind. The mind is designed to pay attention to...everything. We are taught to direct or focus our attention, which we can do for a period of time, but then what are we missing by focusing our attention? Will we miss the Gorilla while counting tossed balls? She does address multitasking in her book, but I've got to run. More later!
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I disagree with that, I think that the human mind is built to focus. When there is nothing to focus on we see many things, but we don't ever see everything. Our brains are just not able to deal with the amount of information that our senses supply. Our brain chooses what to pay attention to at any one time, and filters out the rest. I believe that is why the research on multitasking show that there really is no such thing. If we try to do more than one thing at a time our performance suffers greatly.
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I think it depends on the complexity of the task at hand. Can I talk on the phone to a friend and fold laundry? For sure. Can I teach an online class and fold laundry? One of those will suffer. I do find, recently, that even during my online classes, I am checking my BlackBerry and sometimes responding. I hate this! I want to stop doing this! I want to concentrate on my class! I think a danger of multi-tasking, especially in our society which promotes as much as possible, is that we feel that we are not accomplishing enough if we only focus on one task at a time. Devices such as BlackBerry's and iPhones are also incredibly addictive! I think we need to differentiate not only on the difficulty of the task at hand, but on it's priority. What is an amazing multi-tasker? What defines success in that regard? The person who noticed the gorilla and the amount of balls being passed, or the person who knows when to focus on which task and when to move on and when to begin juggling a few tasks at once and when to stop?
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How HiveMind's Will Wright plans to crowdsource your happiness (interview) | VentureBeat - 0 views
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Will Wright's games from SimCity to The Sims have sold more than 100 million units. That's why people are paying attention to his new startup and game idea, HiveMind. The Berkeley, Calif.-based company is focused on "personal gaming," or a kind of title that can customize itself for the individual player, taking into account aspects of a player's real-life situation as elements of the game.
[STUDY] How Hyperconnectivity Affects Young People - 0 views
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A new study released today by Pew sheds light on the lurking, albeit very real notion that we all not-so-secretly fear: there are actual consequences to the hyperconnected lifestyle that many 21st century millennial Americans live! But calm down, it's not all frowny-face emoticons and Sherry Turkle-esque Alone Together narratives.
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