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Mary Fahey Colbert

Amazon.com: The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memor... - 0 views

  • As the pace of technological change accelerates, we are increasingly experiencing a state of information overload. Statistics show that we are interrupted every three minutes during the course of the work day. Multitasking between email, cell-phone, text messages, and four or five websites while listening to an iPod forces the brain to process more and more informaton at greater and greater speeds. And yet the human brain has hardly changed in the last 40,000 years. Are all these high-tech advances overtaxing our Stone Age brains or is the constant flood of information good for us, giving our brains the daily exercise they seem to crave? In The Overflowing Brain, cognitive scientist Torkel Klingberg takes us on a journey into the limits and possibilities of the brain. He suggests that we should acknowledge and embrace our desire for information and mental challenges, but try to find a balance between demand and capacity. Klingberg explores the cognitive demands, or "complexity," of everyday life and how the brain tries to meet them. He identifies different types of attention, such as stimulus-driven and controlled attention, but focuses chiefly on "working memory," our capacity to keep information in mind for short periods of time. Dr Klingberg asserts that working memory capacity, long thought to be static and hardwired in the brain, can be improved by training, and that the increasing demands on working memory may actually have a constructive effect: as demands on the human brain increase, so does its capacity. The book ends with a discussion of the future of brain development and how we can best handle information overload in our everyday lives. Klingberg suggests how we might find a balance between demand and capacity and move from feeling overwhelmed to deeply engaged. Show More Show Less
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    As the pace of technological change accelerates, we are increasingly experiencing a state of information overload. Statistics show that we are interrupted every three minutes during the course of the work day. Multitasking between email, cell-phone, text messages, and four or five websites while listening to an iPod forces the brain to process more and more informaton at greater and greater speeds. And yet the human brain has hardly changed in the last 40,000 years. Are all these high-tech advances overtaxing our Stone Age brains or is the constant flood of information good for us, giving our brains the daily exercise they seem to crave? In The Overflowing Brain, cognitive scientist Torkel Klingberg takes us on a journey into the limits and possibilities of the brain. He suggests that we should acknowledge and embrace our desire for information and mental challenges, but try to find a balance between demand and capacity. Klingberg explores the cognitive demands, or "complexity," of everyday life and how the brain tries to meet them. He identifies different types of attention, such as stimulus-driven and controlled attention, but focuses chiefly on "working memory," our capacity to keep information in mind for short periods of time. Dr Klingberg asserts that working memory capacity, long thought to be static and hardwired in the brain, can be improved by training, and that the increasing demands on working memory may actually have a constructive effect: as demands on the human brain increase, so does its capacity. The book ends with a discussion of the future of brain development and how we can best handle information overload in our everyday lives. Klingberg suggests how we might find a balance between demand and capacity and move from feeling overwhelmed to deeply engaged.  
Mary Fahey Colbert

Being Wired Or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope With Information Overload | Ariadne: Web Ma... - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This is the first time I've seen this term used and defined.  It is very much what I see in students in my classroom.  Look further into this while researching.
  • A sustained negative neurological effect of information overload has been identified by psychiatrist E.M. Hallowell. He has called this effect Attention Deficit Trait, or ADT. 'It isn't an illness; it's purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live....When a manager is desperately trying to deal with more input than he possibly can, the brain and body get locked into a reverberating circuit while the brain's frontal lobes lose their sophistication, as if vinegar were added to wine. The result is black-and-white thinking; perspective and shades of gray disappear. People with ADT have difficulty staying organised, setting priorities, and managing time, and they feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.' [5]
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  • University of London researcher Glenn Wilson showed in a 2005 study that people taking an IQ test while being interrupted by emails and phone calls performed an average of 10 points lower than the baseline group without those interruptions. A frightening footnote to this study is that another test group had been tested after smoking marijuana, and they only performed an average of 4 points lower than the baseline group – from which one might reasonably conclude that persistent interruptions have a two-and-a-half times more detrimental effect on the brain than smoking marijuana [4].
  • The overall idea is to take control of the information instead of letting it control you.
  • There are many books about information overload and dealing with information generally. Here are some of my recommendations: Information Anxiety [8] and Information Anxiety 2 [9] by Richard Saul Wurman, Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organised and Stay Organised by Sally McGhee [10], Techno Stress: The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution by Craig Brod [11], and TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @ Work @ Home @ Play [12].
  • Today, the most-used interruptive technologies are instant messaging, text messaging, paging, and most recently the micro-blogging technology of Twitter. Why is the interruptive technology a problem? Interruptions make us less effective. But they can also interfere with our attention spans. A Basex survey showed that over 50% of knowledge workers surveyed write emails or IM messages during conference calls [4]. We are participating in these conversations all the time, regardless of other things competing for our primary attention. Controlling our use of these technologies is one of the keys to dealing with information overload.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Students and the stress of Multitasking - HOME - Edgalaxy: Where Education an... - 0 views

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    Good resource for me for ideas and lesson plans as well as another source for my paper.  The pictorial flow chart about what happens to the brain while multitasking and how information overload occurs is simple and clear.  It will be another good source to share with students.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Digital Nation - Life On The Virtual Frontier | FRONTLINE | PBS - 0 views

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    A TV/Web report on the digital revolution and how it's changing our lives, with video stories, interviews, and user-generated video on relationships, information overload, education, the military, parenting, brain development, and more. Be a part of Digital Nation and tell us your story. Airs winter 2010.
Mary Fahey Colbert

collision detection: "Attention Deficit Trait" - 0 views

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    "Attention Deficit Trait" Dr. Edward Hallowell has studied Attention Deficit Disorder for a decade, and now he thinks he's diagnosed a related sydrome: Attention Deficit Trait. It has basically the symptoms as ADD - such as an inability to concentrate on one task at at time - except it's context dependent.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Your Brain on Computers - Attached to Technology and Paying a Price - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Interesting in that it talks about the effects on short-term memory, and they cite their son Conner as having issues in school with homework.
Mary Fahey Colbert

http://www.myatp.org/Synergy_1/Syn_16.pdf - 0 views

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    The article I need to read later, and I will also want to  check out some of the cited sources at the end for my own research.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Learning & the Brain - Connecting Educators to Neuroscientists and Researchers - 0 views

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    Larry D. Rosen, PhD, Research Psychologist; Professor, Department of Psychology, California State University, Dominguez Hills; Author, REWIRED: Understanding the iGeneration and How They Learn (2010)
Mary Fahey Colbert

'Internal Chatter' Limits Multitasking As People Age : NPR - 0 views

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    This is a good one for an overview of why we are bettter at multitasking at different ages, because of our ages.  Interesting.
Mary Fahey Colbert

The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation -- New York Magazine - 0 views

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    This was an article referenced by Carr in his book, The Shallows, and I looked it up as a counterargument to some of Carr's assertions.  This is perfect for my research.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Nicholas Carr - The Colbert Report - 2010-30-06 - Video Clip | Comedy Central - 0 views

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    This interview is specifically about his book, The Shallows.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Nicholas Carr - The Colbert Report - 2008-25-09 - Video Clip | Comedy Central - 0 views

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    I found this and one other video of Nicholas Carr being interviewed on the The Colbert Report.  Both will be good additions to my bibliography as they speak directly, from the horse's mouth, to my source, The Shallows:  What the Internet is doing to Our Brains.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Joanne Cantor: Multitasking exercises - YouTube - 0 views

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    Another clip to watch later that might be helpful for impressing kids with the reason not to multitask while trying to learn.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Joanne Cantor: The Bad News about Multitasking - YouTube - 0 views

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    Watch this later.  It might be a good video to show students about the downsides of multitasking.  Joanne Cantor has other ones with actual "exercises" for addressing multitasking.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Magazine - Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
  • We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
  • James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
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  • It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
  • The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
  • Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
  • The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
  • The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
  • As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
  • That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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    And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Mary Fahey Colbert

DOAJ -- Directory of Open Access Journals - 0 views

  • his experimental study suggests that students who IM while reading will perform as well but take longer to complete the task than those who do not IM while reading or those students who IM before reading.
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    Another research finding that suggests multitasking while doing school work takes students longer to accomplish.  Add this research to that argument.
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