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My father would have been unable to “teach to the test.” He once complained about errors in a sixth-grade math textbook, so he had the class learn math by designing a spaceship. My father would have been spat out by today’s test-driven educational regime.

A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviors start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent. This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic. Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to. And yet it seems we benefit from shining an objectifying digital light to disinfect our funky, lying selves once in a while. It’s heartless to have music chosen by digital algorithms. But at least there are fewer people held hostage to the tastes of bad radio D.J.’s than there once were. The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other.

The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.

rather than making us smarter, mobile devices reduce our cognitive ability in measurable ways

“There’s lots of evidence showing that the information you learn on a digital device, doesn’t get retained very well and isn’t transferred across to the real world,”

“You’re also quickly conditioned to attend to lots of attention-grabbing signals, beeps and buzzes, so you jump from one task to the other and you don’t concentrate.”

Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies

Hitler left an inexhaustible fund of unforgettable images; Riefenstahl’sTriumph of the Will alone is enough to make him a household deity of the TV age.

The Third Reich was the first thoroughly modern totalitarian horror, scripted by Hitler and mass-marketed by Goebbels, a tour de force of media spectacle and opinion management that America’s hidden persuaders—admen, P.R. flacks, political campaign managers—studied assiduously.  A Mad Man in both senses, Hitler sold the German volk on a racially cleansed utopia, a thousand-year empire whose kitschy grandeur was strictly Forest Lawn Parthenon.

The DJ has now replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking, and a record collection containing nearly 2,000 albums with an external hard drive with DJ software and nearly 13,000 MP3s

Mr Klein says the lifestyle can become loathsome because "you never know where you will sleep". And Mr Yurista says he frequently worries he may lose his new digital life to a hard drive crash or downed server. "You have to really make sure you have back-ups of your digital goods everywhere," he said.

like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated. Kelly Chessen, a 36-year-old former suicide hotline counsellor with a soothing voice and reassuring personality, is Drive Savers official "data crisis counsellor". Part-psychiatrist and part-tech enthusiast, Ms Chessen's role is to try to calm people down when they lose their digital possessions to failed drives. Ms Chessen says some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data. "It's usually indirect threats like, 'I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I can't get the data back,' but sometimes it will be a direct threat such as, 'I may just have to end it if I can't get to the information',"

I'm starting to feel like an unwitting test subject in a global experiment conducted by Google, in which it attempts to discover how much raw information it can inject directly into my hippocampus before I crumple to the floor and start fitting uncontrollably.

It's the internet on fast-forward, and it's aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can't even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.

Google may have released him from the physical misery of pressing enter, but it's destroyed his sense of perspective in the process.

it is very easy to predict what Hollywood studios will make of these researches, whatever their initial purpose was. They will use them to optimize trailers and films so that they can generate the ‘optimum’ effect on the brains of the audience. They already do so, but through approximate methods, such as asking a test audience to explain what they experienced when watching a movie (technique used for Harry Potter films). Hollywood studios have always been obsessed in controlling their audience, for economic reasons, or American propaganda. It is very frightening to think of what they will do with this new technique.

The problem lies more in education and the audience’s capacity to remain critical

a delusion is just a delusion, psychosis is psychosis, and the scenery is incidental

Some experts studying conditions like Truman Show delusion and other culture-bound delusions, which are specific to a time or place, are questioning the premise that culture is only incidental to psychosis, even as a growing body of evidence has pointed to brain abnormalities and other biological causes for illnesses like schizophrenia.

Another patient traveled to New York City and showed up at a federal building in downtown Manhattan seeking asylum so he could get off his reality show, Dr. Gold said. The patient reported that he also came to New York to see if the Twin Towers were still standing, because he believed that seeing their destruction on Sept. 11 on television was part of his reality show. If they were still standing, he said, then he would know that the terrorist attack was all part of the script

"neuromarketing"

Currently there are three methodologies covered under the term neuromarketing: functional MRI, measuring skin temperature fluctuations, and utilizing Electroencephalography (EEG), which is the main technology currently used.

there has been little neuromarketing research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and there are too few publicly accessible data sets from controlled studies to demonstrate conclusively that buying behavior can be correlated with specific brain activity. "The major neuromarketing firms say that their client work demonstrates this, but none of this has been published in a way that the scientific community can critique it,"

We also need to distinguish what scientists know about human neurophysiology from our all-too-human discomfort with cultural and social change.  I've been an English professor for over twenty years and have heard how students don't pay attention, can't read a long novel anymore, and are in decline against some unspecified norm of an idealized past quite literally every year that I have been in this profession. In fact, how we educators should address this dire problem was the focus of the very first faculty meeting I ever attended.

Whenever I hear about attentional issues in debased contemporary society, whether blamed on television, VCR's, rock music, or the desktop, I assume that the critic was probably, like me, the one student who actually read Moby Dick and who had little awareness that no one else did.

This is not really a discussion about the biology of attention; it is about the sociology of change.

Thanks to Fahrenheit 451, now required reading for every American middle-schooler, Bradbury is generally thought of as a writer of novels, but his talents—particularly his mastery of the diabolical premise and the brain-exploding revelation—are best suited to the short form.

The best stories have a strange familiarity about them. They're like long-forgotten acquaintances—you know you've met them somewhere before. There is, for instance, the tale of the time traveler who goes back into time and accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby changing irrevocably the course of history ("A Sound of Thunder"). There's the one about the man who buys a robotic husband to live with his wife so that he can be free to travel and pursue adventure—that's "Marionettes, Inc." (Not to be confused with "I Sing the Body Electric!" about the man who buys a robotic grandmother to comfort his children after his wife dies.) Or "The Playground," about the father who changes places with his son so that he can spare his boy the cruelty of childhood—forgetting exactly how cruel childhood can be. The stories are familiar because they've been adapted, and plundered from, by countless other writers—in books, television shows, and films. To the extent that there is a mythology of our age, Bradbury is one of its creators.

"But Bradbury's skill is in evoking exactly how soul-annihilating that world is."    Of course, this also displays one of the key facts of Bradbury's work -- and a trend in science fiction that is often ignored. He's a reactionary of the first order, deeply distrustful of technology and even the notion of progress. Many science fiction writers had begun to rewrite the rules of women in space by the time Bradbury had women in long skirts hauling pots and pans over the Martian landscape. And even he wouldn't disagree. In his famous Playboy interview he responded to a question about predicting the future with, "It's 'prevent the future', that's the way I put it. Not predict it, prevent it."

The great turning points occur when new, more complex energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, fundamentally altering human consciousness in the process. This happened in the late 18th century, when coal and steam power ushered in the industrial age. Print technology was vastly improved and became the medium to organise myriad new activities. It also changed the wiring of the human brain, leading to a great shift from theological to ideological consciousness. Enlightenment philosophers - with some exceptions - peered into the psyche and saw a rational creature obsessed with autonomy and driven by the desire to acquire property and wealth.Today, we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. Over the next 40 years, millions of buildings will be overhauled to collect the surrounding renewable energies. These energies will be stored in the form of hydrogen and any surplus electricity will be shared over continental inter-grids managed by internet technologies. People will generate their own energy, just as they now create their own information and, as with information, share it with millions of others.

the early stages of a transformation from ideological consciousness to biosphere consciousness

This new understanding goes hand-in-hand with discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuro-cognitive science and child development that reveal that human beings are biologically predisposed to be empathic.