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David McGavock

Shame and honour drive cooperation - 0 views

rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/...rsbl.2011.0367.full

cooperation Jennifer Jacquet shame honor game theory

shared by David McGavock on 25 May 14 - No Cached
  • Shame is a traditional deterrent from asocial behaviour and is employed when offenders are singled out for public scorn.
  • Modern democratic societies have moved away from including the public in the punishment, although in some cases (e.g. drunk driving licence plates) the state still sanctions shame [1].
  • shame as well as honour could become more prevalent as digital technology
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • We designed this public goods experiment to isolate the effects of being shamed or honoured, with no monetary consequences to either experience, and test whether the expectation of negative or positive reputational information enforces social behaviour.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 25 May 14
       
      Point of the study
  • If players know that only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, will they cooperate more as a group?
  • In games that offer players anonymity, uncooperative behaviour is more prevalent [7] while the opposite is true of games in which players know that each of their decisions will be linked to their real identities [8–10]
  • confirming that, even when only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, players cooperate more as a group
  • expected that shame might be more effective than honour
  • n contrast to our expectations, we found no significant differences in group contributions over the first 10 rounds between the shame and honour treatments.
  • We hypothesized that the threat of shame or the prospect of honour would lead to increased public contributions.
  • Our results show that a promise to single out free-riding individuals for public scrutiny can lead to greater cooperation from the whole group, as can singling out the most generous individuals.
  • Group cooperation in the shame treatment significantly declined following round 10 (paired t-test between 10th and 12th round, t = 3.67, p = 0.005), corroborating our finding that the threat of being singled out as a free rider had been driving cooperation.
  • Cues of being watched enhance cooperation [11] and when humans lived in small groups, it was easy to observe individual behaviour.
  • language, replaced direct observation
  • the absence of shaming by the state does not preclude the absence of shame altogether in society, especially as social media increases the frequency, speed and inclusiveness of communication.
  • The Internet increasingly creates a global town square where controls are harder to implement and enforce, gossip travels fast, and where shame as well as honour therefore might experience resurgence.
  • Transparency also enhances cooperation [8–10] but can be costly to provide and its use can be limited. Transparency requires time evaluating and determining a satisfactory performance.
  • difficult in our current era, where human attention, not information, is a scarce resource [15].
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 25 May 14
       
      Interesting distinction; that attention is in shorter supply than information.
  • David McGavock on 25 May 14
     
    Full description of study by Jennifer Jacquet
David McGavock

Astonishing - Sagarika Bhatta - 0 views

sagarika-bhatta.blogspot.com

CBA ITK Sagarika Bhatta peeragogy adaption to climate change Cooperation commons learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 01 Dec 14 - No Cached
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
       
      As Sagarika Bhatta said in the hangout, this is a response to the effects of climate change rather than a response to decrease CO2 emissions. The traditional practices have an important role to play in the protection of agriculture in Nepal. The traditional practices are a protective factor for sustainability.
  • share urgency
  • expose and publicize
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • critical mass who understands the urgency
  • exploration, discussion, documentation and promotion of the knowledge
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
       
      Find out what practices have sustained agriculture in the 3 climates within Nepal. Document it and disseminate it to the people and outside public.
  • Global movement
  • esearch and promotion of Knowledge that helps to combat climate change
  • helps in adaptation to climate change
  • indigenous Knowledge
  • plight of citizen
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
       
      This is another story: how do impacts and inappropriate technologies impact the local people.
  • documentation through research
  • community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
       
      CBA - community based adaptation to climate chage
  • possibilities of rain water harvesting and other means of water storage
  • watershed degradation, urbanization, growing population are the major factor for water crisis here
  • making it part of national development policy
  • Nepal is vulnerable to rising global temperatures and has already been dealing with the impact of erratic rainfall, frequent droughts and floods, which have been affecting food security
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
       
      Problem Statement for Nepal.
  • experiment with a bottom-up approach using Local Adaptation Plans of Action, or LAPAs, in 10 districts across the country in 2010
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
       
      what has been tried.
  • ultimately question the status of food security
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
       
      The bottom line problem is that these impacts - problems above will threaten the security of the people of Nepal - food/shelter/quality of life..
  • promote the Indigenous Traditional knowledge (ITK) as Community Based Adaptation techniques that has been practiced by different indigenous community in Nepal in agriculture
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
       
      This is the goal. Promote traditional knowledge in support of the people of Nepal - their agriculture, livelihood and social welfare.
  • David McGavock on 01 Dec 14
     
    This is a good summary of the goals of the work of Sagarika Bhatta in support of Nepali agriculture. It describe the idea of community based adaptation (CBA) to climate change and the Indigenous traditional knowledge (ITK).
  • kajalagrwal1 on 19 Dec 16
     
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David McGavock

Doug Rushkoff: Program or be Programmed | WEBLOGSKY: Jon Lebkowsky's Blog - 0 views

weblogsky.com/...hkoff-program-or-be-programmed

WEBLOGSKY doug program or be programmed

shared by David McGavock on 04 Jul 11 - Cached
  • how quickly things become polarized in this era, the bad-trip bizarre extremes suggested by the Tea Party and the Palinites.
  • “running obsolete code” socially
  • How much of this is the bias of a binary medium, and how much of it is attributable to the biases of the people who program our technologies
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Initially “anyone can program reality” via written text,
  • invention of the printing press assigns more control to those who control the means of production/replication
  • In the era of mass media, there’s a sense of mainstream knowledge that’s vetted carefully by editors and publishers who share similar biases and assumptions.
  • In the era of computers and the Internet, we’ve seen the evolution of a more decentralized, diverse “social” media
  • How free are we from a the centralized set of biases associated with mass publishing?
  • Rushkoff argues that there are biases in the way things are programmed – programmers have biases or they’re directed according to the biases of others.
  • bias followed by commandment
  • 1) Time: “Thou shalt not be always on.”
  • 2) Distance: “Thou shalt not do from a distance what can be done better in person.”
  • you have to be clear whether you’re using the technology where it’s most effective, or simply conceding to its inherent bias.
  • 3) Scale – the net is biased to scale up. “Exalt the particular.” Not everything should scale. This makes me think of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful.”
  • 4) Discrete: “You may always choose none of the above.”
  • 5) Complexity. “Thou shalt never be completely right.”
  • Real scholarship acknowledges, embraces, and digs into that complexity.
  • 6) Anonymity. “Thou shalt not be anonymous.”
  • By default, we are incomplete in an environment that is mostly textual and binary communication. In this context, it is liberating to adopt a strong sense of identity.
  • 7) Contact. “Remember the humans.” Content is not king in a communications environment – CONTACT is king.
  • 8) Abstraction. “As above, so below.” Text abstracted words from speech. Invention of text led to an abstract god. Also led to treating economy as if it is nature – but it’s not, it’s a game. Don’t make equivalencies between the abstracted model and the real world.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 04 Jul 11
       
      Reminds me of Alan Watts and his description of money in "Does it Matter"
  • 9) Openness. “Thou shalt not steal.”
  • We’re seeing a transitional economy where value and compensation are being redefined, and where especially the value and exchange of social capital is increasingly more relevant.
  • 10) End users. Here the bias is toward making all or most of us end users rather than programmers. “Program or be programmed.”
  • The user and the coder are farther apart. He argues that we should all understand programming, be able to build our own tools or configure tools other have built so that we have more control over the digital environment.
  • David McGavock on 04 Jul 11
     
    10 biases of digital media, and ten commands that go with them.
David McGavock

Create more than you consume  - Medium - 1 views

medium.com/...-than-you-consume-9c1bc89dc71d

Infotention thinking tools learning culture creation consumption Learning pyramid tinker

shared by David McGavock on 24 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The Learning Pyramid states that people retain:90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately.75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration.20% of what they learn from audio-visual.10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading.5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from lecture.
  • One of the studies reviewed by our lab was on meditation and how being in the moment decreases the noise in your brain, leading to improved scores on working memory and intelligence tests.
  • When you tie an emotion to an experience, a hormone is released that greases the wheels at certain chemical locations in the brain where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits:
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • When you consume in a passive way, by skimming and moving to the next thing, you’re at a learning disadvantage.
  • When I was in University, I worked at a psychology research center under the direction of one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 most influential people, Dr. Richie Davidson.
  • Self-taught individuals, also called autodidacts, are masters of retaining information largely because of their ability to reflect and put into action most of what they consume.
  • Instead of just trying to get to the end of your Twitter feed or articles that you saved for later, read each article as if you would need to tell a friend about it after.
  • 1-page summary immediately after every chapter he reads.
  • Nothing will help you absorb more of what you consume than trying to do. It’s through the mistakes made where the real learning happens.
  • David McGavock on 24 Jun 14
     
    Great article on creation, consumption, learning, memory
David McGavock

Do Babies Have a Moral Compass? Debate Heats Up | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/2399-babies-moral-compass.html

babies moral compass debate neuroscience Cooperation

shared by David McGavock on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • In the original study, conducted by Yale researchers in 2007, groups of 6-month-olds and 10-month-olds watched a puppet show with neutral wooden figures, where one figure, the climber, was trying to get up a hill. In one scenario, one of the other figures, called the helper, assisted the climber up the hill. In the other scenario, a third figure, called the hinderer, pushed the climber down. Babies were then presented with the helper and hinderer figures so they could pick which one they preferred, and 14 out of 16 babies in the older group (10 months old) and all 12 of the 6-month-olds picked the helper. The study, which was published in the journal Nature, seemed to imply that infants could be good judges of character. [In Photos: How Babies Learn]
  • discrepancies would seem to make it tricky for infants to know that the climber needed help, and if they did, for them to know that the helper was helping. As such, it's possible the infants in the new study looked to these other variables (collisions and bounces) to make their decisions, Hamlin suggests.
  • Even if flaws did exist in their study, Hamlin and her colleagues point to various independent studies, one of which uses a similar setup without the "bouncing" of the climber, that support the "babies have a moral compass" theory. The researchers go on to note they have replicated their findings, that infants prefer prosocial others, in a range of social scenarios that don't include climbing, colliding or bouncing. Hamlin's other studies have shown babies are good judges of character.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "On the help and hinder trials, the toys collided with one another, an event we thought infants may not like," lead researchers Damian Scarf said in a statement from New Zealand's University of Otago. "Furthermore, only on the help trials, the climber bounced up and down at the top of hill, an event we thought infants may enjoy."
  • David McGavock on 06 May 14
     
    "An experiment five years ago suggested that babies are equipped with an innate moral compass, which drives them to choose good individuals over the bad in a wooden puppet show. But new research casts doubt on those findings, demonstrating that a baby's apparent preference for what's right might just reflect a fondness for bouncy things."
David McGavock

Digital Diva * Ten Commandments for a Digital Age - 1 views

www.digital-diva.co.uk/...ten-commandments-digital-age

ten commandments Cooperation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 19 Jul 11
     
    "1. Thou shall not be always on - Resist the temptation to always being on. Turn your phone off occasionally. 2. Thou shall not do from a distance what can be done in person - Some powerful global brands can become weak at a local level. 3. Exalt the particular - Not everything scales or needs to scale. 4. You may always choose none of the above - Don't tick the gay/straight/married/single boxes. Human beings are more complex than the simple choices 5. Thou shall never be completely right - The internet verses complexities 6. Thou shall not be anonymous - Anonymity has lead to the conversation being well thought out by those who choose to sign in against the hatred spat out by the anonymous 7. Contact is king - Social marketing is an oxymoron. 8. Abstraction - Don't confuse abstract models and the real world. 9. Thou shall not steal - Without a social contract, openness can continue until there is nothing left to give things away. 10. Program or be programmed - We should ask 'What can we make it do?" rather than "What can it do for us?"."
Ted Newcomb

Capturing Internet videos - 0 views

www.eastvalleytribune.com/...bf-11e0-ba30-001cc4c002e0.html

video capture

shared by Ted Newcomb on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Ted Newcomb on 10 Jul 11
     
    Posted: Sunday, July 10, 2011 1:00 pm | Updated: 2:20 pm, Sun Jul 10, 2011. By Ken Colburn, Data Doctors East Valley Tribune | Q: Do you have a favorite video capture software to capture otherwise non-downloadable video running on the Internet?
David McGavock

Tip for Getting More Organized: Don't - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review - 1 views

blogs.hbr.org/...tip-for-getting-more-organized

augmentation affordance thinking tools harvard business tip Infotention

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.
  • IBM researchers observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.
  • The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviors like filing.
  • what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?
  • They’re “organizing” for flexibility, adaptiveness and immediate response. More accurately, their technologies exist to give them greater speed and flexibility. Their personal organizational ethos reflects a Toyota Production System “just-in-time” attitude.
  • nstead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity.
  • They want what I’ve described earlier as “promptware” — a cue and intervention that creates measurable value in the moment, rather than promised efficiencies in the future.
  • We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organize ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 14
     
    Suggests that we use just-in-time features built into our smart devices rather than take time to manually organize files and folders.
David McGavock

Video & Audio | The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama - 0 views

www.dalailama.com/...ii---attention-memory-and-mind

mind and life memory attention Dalai Lama

shared by David McGavock on 02 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The discussions during Mind and Life XVIII primarily focus on the subjective phenomenology, information-processing operations, and neural mechanisms of attention, memory and conscious awareness from both scientific and Buddhist perspectives. Venue: His Holiness's Residence, Dharamsala, India Date: 6-10 April 2009 Duration: 9 sessions (each approx. 2 hours) Languages: English, Tibetan
David McGavock

A New Culture of Learning | Social Media Classroom - 3 views

socialmediaclassroom.com/...a-new-culture-learning

culture learning mistakes WIERD JSB mindamp learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 21 May 11 - No Cached
  • A New Culture of Learning
  • what strikes me is the second part of the title Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.
  • I love seeing a child's imagination being captivated
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • I am challenged by many who see social-media as the next project rather than a shift in the paradigm of existence.
  • I believe that dissatisfaction with the factory model of school, along with the growing number, ubiquity, and accessiblity, of tools (for connection, collaboration and creation) will tip the balance toward new models and cultures of learning.
  • I love to see teachers and student figuring out how to use technology together; asking questions, trying stuff, "messing around" as Brown would say.
  • The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
  • Can I just say that it is amazingly prescient and still relevant even a decade later? I'm interested in comparing it to his more recent book in discussion here.
  • Howard reponds with an idea on assignments (and the power of assignments). I found the questions (or in other courses the assignements) to really good at directing my brain. 1.Read the question 2. go to sleep 3. stare at the ceiling for hours 4. brush teeth 5. eurekaThese methods are also used in action learning and action research
  • I'm reading the book "the myth of management" (which is not related to learning), and I found out that finding "faults" is actually a dirty consultant trick, as it expands the window through which you can sell your solution. I hacked that idea and replaced solution with learning.
  •  The role of the instructor in balancing freedom and structure -- setting enough structure so that the unlimited freedom doesn't become vertiginous and overwhelming -- resonates with my experiences with Rheingold U. so far. Assignments seem to help, but they can't be too onerous.
  •  Very nice article comparing Thomas/JSB ideas to John Dewey's:
  •  http://charlestkerchner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DeweyThomas.pdf
  • Ernst - I am particularly interested in Action Research of the "plan, act, observe,reflect" variety where we never really arrive at conclusions but start again in a new cycle of teaching and learning.
  • that idea of teaching people to fail is very important - I notice that this is acceptable very often in business especially in the contexts of 'start-ups' but unacceptable in most schools. Here in Europe, the work of the Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg gets a lot of attention - one of his motifs is learning to be wrong.
  • Knowing who to listen to in the 'noise' of all the information overload is important - I'm looking forward to our continuing review of how we all re-imagine that new culture of learning.
  • Can You, and if yes, How,  Change a system from within? This is one of the key issues of our time. Learning, PLN, Community support structures, activism, Social media, cooperation.. are all part of that... so it is realIy at the heart of our SMC Alumni topics. 
  • I would suggest, we should be dialoguing in depth about the question, and how to formulate it, before jumping to solutions...
  • The work of social and developmental psychologist, Carol Dweck can inform our discussion about failure,
  • Her book, Mindset, posits that some students have growth mindsets and some have fixed mindsets.
  • Ernst, I adore your description of problem-solving (especially the enumerated part). Downtime is essential for processing information and I agree, even subtle shifts within group dynamics can cause huge internal vistas to open up.
  • The idea of structuring for failure in itself is a whole new take on creative thinking.
  • Schools reward success.  That's our measurement system, our "leaderboard".  Some winners at school go on to run schools. Schools punish failure deeply, systematically.  Remember dunce caps? So taking failure as a good thing is, at the very least, weird and defamiliarizing!
  • Chapter Two of Thomas and Seely-Brown's book  is so short - just five pages - They conclude with the idea ....the point is to embrace what we don't know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. I wonder do the authors want us to reflect repeatedly on the contents of the chapter given its brevity.
  • is it certain type of people who fail, who are subsequently allowed to start again?
  • book's first chapter
  • Two key elements: network ("a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources", sounds like mobile + Web) and environments ("bounded and structural") (19).
  • what do you make of the examples they present?  What do they suggest about the theory they exemplify?
  • ohn Seely Brown is particularly interested in the idea of tinkering. He suggests one of the best 'tinkering' models is the architectural studio -- the place where students work together trying to solve each others' problems, and a mentor or master can also take part in open criticism. Find out why this is a model for us all.  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2011/3147776.htm
  • The first chapter is a pretty rosy, and might I say westernized, view of the power of Internet access + play in learning.* It manages to enlighten and engage using a few choice narratives (I imagine we will get to the power of those at some point in the book, too) and sets us up for the rationale to come.
  • * I'm looking for some reaction with regards to that comment
  • based on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) concepts. (An aside, here's a truly wonderful post unpacking of the idea of WEIRD in social science research.)
  • I can only talk for myself but there are contradictions between what I think is best to do with the students I teach and what I actually do. This "living contradiction" is something I consider in my own studies - I noticed a Tweet last night from Howard: Online and blended learning is NOT about automating delivery of knowledge, but about encouraging peer learning, inquiry, discourse.
  • The sentence I liked most from Chapter One reads "One of the metaphors we adopt to describe this process is cultivation. A farmer for example takes the nearly unlimited resources of sunlight, wind, water, earth, and biology and consolidates them into the bounded and structured environment of garden or farm. We see a new culture of learning as a similar kind of process - but cultivating minds instead of plants"
  • Everyone - you may have seen the piece below - if not please take 12 minutes to view it - it fits nicely with our current discussion
  • David McGavock on 21 May 11
     
    This is the first capture of the conversation from the thread "A New Culture of Learning". We'll see how this goes
  • Howard Rheingold on 21 May 11
     
    I read the book almost cover to cover. It led me to think more about pushing what I've been doing closer to pure p2p. One of the co-learners in the latest Mindamp told me about "paragogy." That one is worth bookmarking.
Alex Grech

Will · "My Teacher is an App" - 5 views

willrichardson.com/...my-teacher-is-an-app

Infotention

shared by Alex Grech on 12 Nov 11 - No Cached
Ted Newcomb liked it
  • The author would like us to believe that education is being “radically rethought” by the online and “blended” options that are available to students. But let’s be clear; the only things being rethought here are the delivery models of a traditional education and, most importantly, the financial models to sustain it and make lots of money for outside businesses who see technology and access as a way to not only line their pockets with taxpayer money but also bust the unions that stand in their way. 
  • To be honest, I think we’ve all got to stop cranking out blog posts and Tweets that tout new tools and the “10 Best Ways…” and instead begin to make the case in our blogs and in person that technology or not, this is about what is best for our kids. That in this moment, 20th Century rules will not work for 21st Century schools. That direct instruction and standardization will make us less competitive, not more. That those strategies will make our kids less able to create a living for themselves in the worlds they will live in. That as difficult as it may be for some to come to terms with, this moment requires a whole scale “radical rethink” in much different terms from the one J
  • “My Teacher is an App.” Really? If that’s fine with you, stay silent. If not, I don’t think it’s ever been clearer where the lines are being drawn. You are the lead learner in your community. Not Jeb Bush. Not Rupert Murdoch. Not Pearson. You.  Lead.
  • Ted Newcomb on 12 Nov 11
     
    Think you are absolutely right Alex. Teachers should be modeling how all these tools work in a classroom setting, so that other teachers can learn, rather than be threatened by them. David Preston is doing a phenomenal job with this for his school district.
  • Alex Grech on 12 Nov 11
     
    I did a TEDx talk yesterday and referred to the Infotention Network, and David's work, as it happens - I included a screen grab from the Blackboard session from last week. Will eventually make its way online on TED.com
David McGavock

The dreams of readers | ROUGH TYPE - 1 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=4120

reading neuroscience mirror regions meditation

shared by David McGavock on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation.
  • “aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator:
  • We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.” Making sense of what transpires in a book’s imagined reality appears to depend on “making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.”
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside people’s heads as they read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”
  • When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation.
  • More than mere replication is going on.
  • we really do enter, so far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its emotional force.
  • ” A work of literature, particularly narrative literature, takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways.
  • there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates
  • A 2009 experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities.
  • Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question.
  • when we open a book, our expectations and attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 21 Jan 14
       
      Theory of mind 
  • The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.
  • reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others.
  • can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
  • That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work.
  • Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog. Claiming that printed pages “create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader,” he concluded that, in the internet era, “the book is an outdated means of communicating information.” He declared that “print is where words go to die.”
  • Society is growing ever more skeptical of the value of solitude. The status quo treats with suspicion  even the briefest of withdrawals into inactivity and apparent purposelessness. We see it in the redefinition of receptive states of mind as passive states of mind.
  • the arts of production and consumption, of getting stuff done, to which most of us devote most of our waking hours.
  • In a 2003 lecture, Andrew Louth, a theology professor at the University of Durham in England, drew a distinction between “the free arts” and “the servile arts.” The servile arts, he said, are those “to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.”
  • free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by “the search for knowledge for its own sake.”
  • We open ourselves to aesthetic and spiritual possibilities.
  • It may be that readers have to enter a state of languid pleasure, a dream, before they can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose signals the most profound kind of inner activity, the kind that goes unregistered by society’s sensors.
  • David McGavock on 21 Jan 14
     
    "The free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by "the search for knowledge for its own sake." "
David McGavock

JOURNAL: Is Scanning and Situational Awareness a cure for Multitasking Drift? - Global ... - 0 views

globalguerrillas.typepad.com/...re-for-multitasking-drift.html

scanning awareness multitasking drift thinking tools Personal learning network

shared by David McGavock on 12 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • If you are like me, you interact with a flood of information, online networks, and people everyday.  To handle it all, we multitask.  Unfortunately, it's easy to get off track or drift off course while multi-tasking.  
  • the act of multi-tasking -- responding to an e-mail/tweet/phone call, adding a new post/picture, etc. -- becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.
  • How do you build a scan for online multitasking?  Build a checklist. List the online tasks you want/need to keep up with.    Organize the list from the most important task to the least.  Repeat important tasks in the list if the intervening tasks take you away too long from that important task. After you go through enough scans to clear the deck, take a break to work on items that require long term thinking. 
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  • Some people even drive their careers, businesses and lives off a cliff interacting with it.  They think they are getting things done, but they aren't getting anything done at all. The way to fight this is situational awareness. The little part of your brain that is ALWAYS asking you the questions: Where am I and what am I doing? Am I progressing towards my goal? Am I in any danger or is there a way to get to the goal faster?
  • A set of overarching goals that guide your behavior.  To apply this to online multi-tasking you need to train a part of your brain to ask these questions.
  • You can simulate that with: Asking a friend to lambast you every 10-30 minutes with these questions until you nail it every time.   Setting a random alarm that forces you to lift yourself out of your multi-tasking stupor to ask yourself these questions. Or, and this is the most difficult way, do your entire scan with intentional, conscious thought.  Justifying each and every step until it becomes second nature.
  • David McGavock on 12 Jul 11
     
    "JOURNAL: Is Scanning and Situational Awareness a cure for Multitasking Drift?"
David McGavock

Babies help unlock the origins of morality - Page 4 - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...4

babies origins morality neuroscience cbs Cooperation

shared by David McGavock on 04 May 14 - No Cached
  • The youngest kids in the study will routinely choose to get fewer prizes for themselves just to get more than the other kid
  • Around age 8, they start choosing the equal, fair option more and more. And by 9 or 10, we saw kids doing something really crazy --
  • -- deliberately giving the other kid more.
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  • Paul Bloom: When we have these findings with the kids, the kids who choose this and not this, the kids in the baby studies who favor the one who is similar to them, the same taste and everything-- none of this goes away. I think as adults we can always see these and kind of nod.
  • And so it seems we're left where we all began: with a mix of altruism, selfishness, justice, bigotry, kindness. A lot more than any of us expected to discover in a blob.
  • David McGavock on 04 May 14
     
    Page 4
David McGavock

Are Babies Born Good? | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...are-babies-born-good-165443013

babies moral compass debate neuroscience Cooperation Smithsonian

shared by David McGavock on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there.
  • “When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,” Charles Darwin wrote in “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” his classic study of his own son.
  • Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.
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  • “People who’ve spent their whole careers studying perception are now turning toward social life, because that’s where the bio-behavioral rubber meets the evolutionary road,” Konner says. “Natural selection has operated as much or more on social behavior as on more basic things like perception. In our evolution, survival and reproduction depended more and more on social competence as you went from basic mammals to primates to human ancestors to humans.”
  • The lab’s initial study along these lines, published in 2007 in the journal Nature, startled the scientific world by showing that in a series of simple morality plays, 6- and 10-month-olds overwhelmingly preferred “good guys” to “bad guys.” “This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action,” the authors wrote. It “may form an essential basis for...more abstract concepts of right and wrong.”
  • spate of related studies hinting that, far from being born a “perfect idiot,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, or a selfish brute, as Thomas Hobbes feared, a child arrives in the world provisioned with rich, broadly pro-social tendencies and seems predisposed to care about other people.
  • No seasoned parent can believe that nurture doesn’t make a difference, or that nature trumps all. The question is where the balance lies.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 06 May 14
       
      Key thought - where is the balance?
  • Wynn and her husband, the psychologist Paul Bloom, collaborated on much of Hamlin’s research, and Wynn remembers being a bit more optimistic: “Do babies have attitudes, render judgments? I just found that to be a very intuitively gripping question,” she says.
  • Infant morality studies are so new that the field’s grand dame is 29-year-old J. Kiley Hamlin, who was a graduate student at the Yale lab in the mid-2000s.
  • she stumbled on animated presentations that one of her predecessors had made, in which a “climber” (say, a red circle with goggle eyes) attempted to mount a hill, and a “helper” (a triangle in some trials) assisted him, or a “hinderer” (a square) knocked him down.
  • When I visited, Tasimi was recreating versions of Hamlin’s puppet shows as background work for a new project.
  • The child shot her a woebegone look before dutifully hauling himself out of the ball pit, picking up the pen and returning it to the researcher.
  • When babies at the Yale lab turn 2, their parents are tactfully invited to return to the university after the child’s third birthday.
  • The next lab I visited was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it has made this age group something of a specialty, through work on toddler altruism (a phrase that, admittedly, rings rather hollow in parental ears).
  • One advantage of testing slightly older babies and children is that they are able to perform relatively complicated tasks. In the Laboratory for Developmental  Studies, the toddlers don’t watch puppets help: They themselves are asked to help.
  • Warneken was initially interested in how little children read the intentions of others, and the question of whether toddlers would assist others in reaching their goals. He wanted to sound out these behaviors in novel helping experiments—“accidentally” dropping a hat, for instance, and seeing if the kids would return it.
  • prominent psychologists had previously argued that children are selfish until they are socialized; they acquire altruistic behaviors only as childhood progresses and they are rewarded for following civilization’s rules, or punished for breaking them.
  • One day he and a toddler were bouncing a ball together. Truly by accident, the ball rolled away—“the moment of serendipity,” as Warneken now calls it. His first impulse was to retrieve the toy and carry on, but he stopped himself.
  • The little boy watched him struggle, then after a moment heaved himself up, waddled over to the toy and—defying the scientific community’s uncharitable expectations—stretched out his own chubby little arm to hand the ball to his gigantic playmate.
  • In the following months, Warneken designed experiments for 18-month-olds, in which a hapless adult (often played by him) attempted to perform a variety of tasks, to no avail, as the toddlers looked on. The toddlers gallantly rescued Warneken’s dropped teaspoons and clothespins, stacked his books and pried open stubborn cabinet doors so he could reach inside.
  • videotaped experiment of a toddler wallowing in a wading pool full of plastic balls.
  • But the elements that underpin morality—altruism, sympathy for others, the understanding of other people’s goals—are in place much earlier than we thought, and clearly in place before children turn 2.”
  • Because they were manifested in 18-month-olds, Warneken believed that the helping behaviors might be innate, not taught or imitated. To test his assumption, he turned to one of our two nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
  • The first chimps Warneken studied, nursery-raised in a German zoo
  • as the caretaker dropped the first object: As if on cue, the chimp bounded over and breezily handed it back.
  • Warneken wondered if perhaps human-reared chimps had been conditioned to be helpful to their food providers
  • They would consistently help when the person was reaching for the object,” even in the absence of any payoff.
  • The final step was to see if chimps would assist each other. So Warneken rigged apparatuses where one caged chimp could help a neighbor reach an inaccessible banana or piece of watermelon. There was no hope of getting a bite for themselves, yet the empowered chimps fed their fellow apes regardless.
  • But under what circumstances are toddlers altruistic?
  • Some recent chimp studies suggest that chimps won’t help others unless they witness the dismay of the creature in need. Are human children likewise “reactive” helpers, or can they come to another’s assistance without social cues?
  • “You can see the birth of this proactive helping behavior from around 1.5 to 2.5 years of age,” Warneken explains. “The children don’t need solicitation for helping. They do it voluntarily.” Proactive helping may be a uniquely human skill.
  • Criticisms of the “nice baby” research are varied, and the work with the youngest kids is perhaps the most controversial.
  • such method­o­­­logical worries are never far from baby researchers’ minds.
  • Other critics, meanwhile, fault the developmental philosophy behind the experiments.
  • these researchers argue, but actually they start from scratch with only senses and reflexes, and, largely through interaction with their mothers, learn about the social world in an astonishingly short period of time.
  • And still other scientists think the baby studies underestimate the power of regional culture.
  • Ideas of the public good and appropriate punishment, for instance, are not fixed across societies: Among the Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon, where Henrich works, helping rarely occurs outside of the immediate household, if only because members of the tribe tend to live with relatives.
  • Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children’s nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue.
  • Babies, in addition, are big fans of punishment. Hamlin likes to show a video of a young vigilante who doesn’t just choose between the good and bad puppets; he whacks the bad guy over the head.
  • Perhaps babies are not really trying to help in a particular moment, per se, as much as they are expressing their obliging nature to the powerful adults who control their worlds—behaving less like Mother Teresa, in a sense, than a Renaissance courtier. Maybe parents really would invest more in a helpful child, who as an adult might contribute to the family’s welfare, than they would in a selfish loafer—or so the evolutionary logic goes.
  • A different interpretation, Warneken says, is that in a simpler world maybe toddlers really could help, pitching in to the productivity of a hunter-gatherer group in proportion to their relatively meager calorie intake.
  • For many researchers, these complexities and contradictions make baby studies all the more worthwhile.
  • “I’m trying to think of a lesser-of-two evils study,” he says. “Yes, we have our categories of good and bad, but those categories involve many different things—stealing $20 versus raping versus killing. Clearly I can’t use those sorts of cases with, you know, 13-month-olds. But you can come up with morality plays along a continuum to see...whether they form preferences about whether they like the guy who wasn’t as bad as the other bad guy.”
  • David McGavock on 06 May 14
     
    "The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn't there."
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