Mindamp

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. 

video maker and self-described “philosophical performer” Jason Silva has a much more optimistic (and logically sound) mode of thinking about the future and all the technologically awesome possibilities it has to offer.

As technology has advanced, it acts as a buffer that shrinks the lag time between what we dream about and what we can create and substantiate in the world.”

Techno-optimism is a belief in the power of technology to extend our sphere of possibilities, and ultimately a belief that technology helps us solve and transcend problems, limitations and obstacles.

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.

I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes

Pavel's

a lot of smart people across the region also begin to identify themselves with one of the sides, inevitably getting involved in arguments they don't want to be part of, raising hostility towards each other. 

ake control over our pre-wired responses.

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

how culture drove human evolution

cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.

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.

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.

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.

From this Wynn concludes that infants prefer those "who harm... others" who are unlike them.

We are predisposed to break the world up into different human groups based on the most subtle and seemingly irrelevant cues, and that, to some extent, is the dark side of morality.

Karen Wynn: I think, we are built to, you know, at the drop of a hat, create us and them.

Study after study after study, the results are always consistently babies feeling positively towards helpful individuals in the world. And disapproving, disliking, maybe condemning individuals who are antisocial towards others.

first published their findings about baby morality in the journal "Nature" in 2007, and they've continued to publish follow-up studies in other peer-reviewed journals ever since

babies seem to view the ball thief "as deserving punishment."

It's a question people have asked for as long as there have been people: are human beings inherently good? Are we born with a sense of morality or do we arrive blank slates, waiting for the world to teach us right from wrong? Or could it be worse: do we start out nasty, selfish devils, who need our parents, teachers, and religions to whip us into shape?

The philosopher Rousseau considered babies "perfect idiots...Knowing nothing,"

for most of its history, her field agreed.

To find a good strategy to use in such situations, I invited experts in game theory to submit programs for a computer Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament – much like a computer chess tournament.

the winner was the simplest of all candidates sub- mitted. This was a strategy of simple reciprocity which cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the other player did on the previous move. Using an American colloquial phrase, this strategy was named Tit for Tat.

face of an uncalled-for defection by the other, forgiveness after responding to a provocation, and clarity of behavior so that the other player can recognize and adapt to your pattern of action.

This journey led her to emphasize in all her scientific work two phenomena -- the fusing of distinct beings into a single being: symbiosis; and the interaction of organisms and their environments to create relational "loops" that led to regulation of many Earth systems: Gaia Theory.

Bacteria were here first and are with us still, comprising a major part of the biosphere.  They are unseen with the naked eye, they lack nuclei (for this reason, they are called prokaryotes -- "pro" = before,  "karyon" = nucleus). Their forms were legion and their metabolisms were (and continue to be) strange.

What is known is that the spirochete didn't digest the thermoplasmid and the thermoplasmid did not digest the spirochete.  As Margulis was fond of saying, "1 + 1 = 1."  There was a union of the two, resulting in an entirely new being.  They were inseparable, literally.  The thermoplasmid had a rotor now, and the spirochete had a "head".