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Javier E

Why It's So Hard To Pay Attention, Explained By Science - Fast Company - 0 views

  • Today, each of us individually generates more information than ever before in human history. Our world is now awash in an unprecedented volume of data. The trouble is, our brains haven’t evolved to be able to process it all.
  • information “tumbles faster and faster through bigger and bigger computers down to everybody’s fingertips, which are holding devices with more processing power than the Apollo mission control.”
  • Information scientists have quantified all this: In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986—the equivalent of 174 newspapers.
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  • During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes, or 100,000 words, every day
  • The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of five hours of television daily, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images
  • That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour.
  • We’ve created a world with 300 exabytes (300,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces) of human-made information. If each of those pieces of information were written on a 3-by-5-inch index card and then spread out side by side, just one person’s share—your share of this information—would cover every square inch of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.
  • Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive, and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds,
  • The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated (by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and, independently, by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky) at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time.
  • While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this has an impact on how we feel and what our life is going to be like, in order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you need to have paid conscious attention to it.
  • What does this bandwidth restriction—this information speed limit—mean in terms of our interactions with others? In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time
  • We’re surrounded on this planet by billions of other humans, but we can understand only two at a time at the most! It’s no wonder that the world is filled with so much misunderstanding.
  • With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life. Part of the reason is that our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history
  • Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on.
  • These neurons are collectively the “attentional filter.” They work largely in the background, outside of our conscious awareness. This is why most of the perceptual detritus of our daily lives doesn’t registe
  • The attentional filter is one of evolution’s greatest achievements. In nonhumans, it ensures that they don’t get distracted by irrelevant things
  • When our protohuman ancestors left the cover of the trees to seek new sources of food, they simultaneously opened up a vast range of new possibilities for nourishment and exposed themselves to a wide range of new predators. Being alert and vigilant to threatening sounds and visual cues is what allowed them to survive; this meant allowing an increasing amount of information through the attentional filter.
  • Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; we now account for 98%
  • Humans are, by most biological measures, the most successful species our planet has seen. We have managed to survive in nearly every climate our planet has offered (so far), and the rate of our population expansion exceeds that of any other known organism
  • Our success owes in large part to our cognitive capacity, the ability of our brains to flexibly handle information. But our brains evolved in a much simpler world with far less information coming at us. Today, our attentional filters easily become overwhelmed.
  • Successful people—or those who can afford it—employ layers of other people whose job it is to narrow their own attentional filters.
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    This article is adapted from The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin (Plume/Penguin Random House, 2014).
Javier E

Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Happiness: Our Nature-Deficit Disorder - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • In my experience, the more people have, the less likely they are to be contented. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that depression is a “disease of affluence,” a disorder of modern life in the industrialized world. People who live in poorer countries have a lower risk of depression than those in industrialized nations. In general, countries with lifestyles that are furthest removed from modern standards have the lowest rates of depression.
  • there seems to be something about modern life that creates fertile soil for depression.”
  • Behaviors strongly associated with depression—reduced physical activity and human contact, overconsumption of processed food, seeking endless distraction—are the very behaviors that more and more people now can do, are even forced to do by the nature of their sedentary, indoor jobs.
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  • More and more of us are sedentary, spending most of our time indoors. We eat industrial food much altered from its natural sources, and there is reason for concern about how our changed eating habits are affecting our brain activity and our moods. We are deluged by an unprecedented overload of information and stimulation in this age of the Internet, email, mobile phones, and multimedia, all of which favor social isolation and certainly affect our emotional (and physical) health.
  • e we are gathering scientific evidence for the benefits of living close to nature, not simply for enjoying its beauty or getting spiritual sustenance but for keeping our brains and nervous systems in good working order.
  • It may seem baffling, but the explanation is simple: the human body was never designed for the modern postindustrial environment.”
  • I believ
  • Human beings evolved to thrive in natural environments and in bonded social groups. Few of us today can enjoy such a life and the emotional equilibrium it engenders, but our genetic predisposition for it has not changed.
  • Possibly, the deterioration of emotional well-being characteristic of contemporary urban life represents a cumulative effect of lifestyle changes that have been occurring over many years, an effect that is now suddenly obvious.
  • Not only do we suffer from nature deficit, we are experiencing information surfeit. Many people today spend much of their waking time surfing the Internet, texting and talking on mobile phones, attending to email, watching television, and being stimulated by other new media—experiences never available until now.
  • The allure of synthetic entertainment—television, the Internet—is eerily reminiscent of the false promise of industrial food. It seems like a distillation of the good aspects of a social life, always entertaining yet easy to abandon when it becomes tedious or challenging. But, like junk food, it is ultimately unsatisfying and potentially harmful. Our brains, genetically adapted to help us negotiate a successful course through complex, changing, and often hazardous natural environments, are suddenly confronted with an overload of information and stimulation independent of physical reality.
demetriar

How Technology Is Warping Your Memory - 0 views

  • Take a moment to think about the last time you memorized someone's phone number.
  • a growing body of research has suggested that it may have profound effects on our memories (particularly the short-term, or working, memory), altering and in some cases impairing its function.
  • "The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system," Nicholas Carr
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  • new research has found that taking photos -- an increasingly ubiquitous practice in our smartphone-obsessed culture -- actually hinders our ability to remember that which we're capturing on camera.
  • most of us aren't able to effectively manage the overload of information we're constantly bombarded with.When the working memory is experiencing digital overload, it's like a glass of water overflowing.
  • when we know a digital device or tool will remember a piece of information for us, we're less likely to remember it ourselves.
  • He explained that an over-reliance on technology has a tendency to encourage us to isolate pieces of information without fitting them into a broader cognitive schema.
  • A 2013 Trending Machine national poll found that millennials (aged 18-34) are more likely than those over the age of 55 to forget what day it is (15 percent vs. 7 percent) and where they put their keys (14 percent vs. 8 percent).
Javier E

Addicted to Distraction - The New York Times - 0 views

  • ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus.
  • All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table, staring at me in silent rebuke.
  • Instead of reading them, I was spending too many hours online,
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  • “The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.”
  • Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life
  • Denial is any addict’s first defense. No obstacle to recovery is greater than the infinite capacity to rationalize our compulsive behaviors
  • According to one recent survey, the average white-collar worker spends about six hours a day on email.
  • The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.
  • Endless access to new information also easily overloads our working memory. When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to long-term memory significantly deteriorates.
  • By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet. It has arguably replaced work itself as our most socially sanctioned addictio
  • t we humans have a very limited reservoir of will and discipline. We’re far more likely to succeed by trying to change one behavior at a time, ideally at the same time each day, so that it becomes a habit, requiring less and less energy to sustain.
  • Now it was time to detox. I interpreted the traditional second step — belief that a higher power could help restore my sanity — in a more secular way. The higher power became my 30-year-old daughter, who disconnected my phone and laptop from both my email and the Web.
  • During those first few days, I did suffer withdrawal pangs, most of all the hunger to call up Google and search for an answer to some question that arose. But with each passing day offline, I felt more relaxed, less anxious, more able to focus and less hungry for the next shot of instant but short-lived stimulation. What happened to my brain is exactly what I hoped would happen: It began to quiet down.
  • I had brought more than a dozen books of varying difficulty and length on my vacation. I started with short nonfiction, and then moved to longer nonfiction as I began to feel calmer and my focus got stronger. I eventually worked my way up to “The Emperor of All Maladies
  • I am back at work now, and of course I am back online. The Internet isn’t going away, and it will continue to consume a lot of my attention. My aim now is to find the best possible balance between time online and time off
  • I also make it my business now to take on more fully absorbing activities as part of my days. Above all, I’ve kept up reading books, not just because I love them, but also as a continuing attention-building practice.
  • I’ve retained my longtime ritual of deciding the night before on the most important thing I can accomplish the next morning. That’s my first work activity most days, for 60 to 90 minutes without interruption. Afterward, I take a 10- to 15-minute break to quiet my mind and renew my energy.
  • If I have other work during the day that requires sustained focus, I go completely offline for designated periods, repeating my morning ritual. In the evening, when I go up to my bedroom, I nearly always leave my digital devices downstairs.
ilanaprincilus06

Why the modern world is bad for your brain | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.
  • Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.
  • But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.
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  • When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.”
  • Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
  • Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.
  • The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted.
  • Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
  • His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.
  • Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.
  • If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.
  • All this activity gives us a sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.
  • This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t answer right now?
  • A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar;
  • But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
Javier E

Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense.
  • hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal
  • The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle.
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  • There are different types of attention, and they use different parts of the brain.
  • Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes
  • This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.
  • But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.
  • Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.
  • we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to new music when jogging rather than familiar tunes. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: he is trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice — not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics.
  • “You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning. The richness of life doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations that you can discern if you simply pay attention.
Javier E

A Million First Dates - Dan Slater - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • . In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, the psychologist Barry Schwartz indicts a society that “sanctifies freedom of choice so profoundly that the benefits of infinite options seem self-evident.” On the contrary, he argues, “a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.”
  • Psychologists who study relationships say that three ingredients generally determine the strength of commitment: overall satisfaction with the relationship; the investment one has put into it (time and effort, shared experiences and emotions, etc.); and the quality of perceived alternatives. Two of the three—satisfaction and quality of alternatives—could be directly affected by the larger mating pool that the Internet offers.
  • as the range of options grows larger, mate-seekers are liable to become “cognitively overwhelmed,” and deal with the overload by adopting lazy comparison strategies and examining fewer cues. As a result, they are more likely to make careless decisions than they would be if they had fewer options,
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  • research elsewhere has found that people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: in one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30.
  • evidence shows that the perception that one has appealing alternatives to a current romantic partner is a strong predictor of low commitment to that partner.
  • people who are in marriages that are either bad or average might be at increased risk of divorce, because of increased access to new partners. Third, it’s unknown whether that’s good or bad for society. On one hand, it’s good if fewer people feel like they’re stuck in relationships. On the other, evidence is pretty solid that having a stable romantic partner means all kinds of health and wellness benefits.” And that’s even before one takes into account the ancillary effects of such a decrease in commitment—on children, for example, or even society more broadly.
  • he phenomenon extends beyond dating sites to the Internet more generally. “I’ve seen a dramatic increase in cases where something on the computer triggered the breakup,” he says. “People are more likely to leave relationships, because they’re emboldened by the knowledge that it’s no longer as hard as it was to meet new people. But whether it’s dating sites, social media, e‑mail—it’s all related to the fact that the Internet has made it possible for people to communicate and connect, anywhere in the world, in ways that have never before been seen.”
  • eople seeking commitment—particularly women—have developed strategies to detect deception and guard against it. A woman might withhold sex so she can assess a man’s intentions. Theoretically, her withholding sends a message: I’m not just going to sleep with any guy that comes along. Theoretically, his willingness to wait sends a message back: I’m interested in more than sex.
  • But the pace of technology is upending these rules and assumptions. Relationships that begin online, Jacob finds, move quickly. He chalks this up to a few things. First, familiarity is established during the messaging process, which also often involves a phone call. By the time two people meet face-to-face, they already have a level of intimacy. Second, if the woman is on a dating site, there’s a good chance she’s eager to connect. But for Jacob, the most crucial difference between online dating and meeting people in the “real” world is the sense of urgency. Occasionally, he has an acquaintance in common with a woman he meets online, but by and large she comes from a different social pool. “It’s not like we’re just going to run into each other again,” he says. “So you can’t afford to be too casual. It’s either ‘Let’s explore this’ or ‘See you later.’ ”
  • As online dating becomes increasingly pervasive, the old costs of a short-term mating strategy will give way to new ones. Jacob, for instance, notices he’s seeing his friends less often. Their wives get tired of befriending his latest girlfriend only to see her go when he moves on to someone else. Also, Jacob has noticed that, over time, he feels less excitement before each new date. “Is that about getting older,” he muses, “or about dating online?” How much of the enchantment associated with romantic love has to do with scarcity (this person is exclusively for me), and how will that enchantment hold up in a marketplace of abundance (this person could be exclusively for me, but so could the other two people I’m meeting this week)?
Javier E

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't: Nate Silver: 978... - 0 views

  • Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters.
  • Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
  • the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
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  • Baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, economics, and polling: In all of these areas, Silver finds predictions gone bad thanks to biases, vested interests, and overconfidence. But he also shows where sophisticated forecasters have gotten it right (and occasionally been ignored to boot)
  • This is the best general-readership book on applied statistics that I've read. Short review: if you're interested in science, economics, or prediction: read it. It's full of interesting cases, builds intuition, and is a readable example of Bayesian thinking.
  • The core concept is this: prediction is a vital part of science, of business, of politics, of pretty much everything we do. But we're not very good at it, and fall prey to cognitive biases and other systemic problems such as information overload that make things worse. However, we are simultaneously learning more about how such things occur and that knowledge can be used to make predictions better -- and to improve our models in science, politics, business, medicine, and so many other areas.
Blair Peterson

Cognitive bias cheat sheet - 2 views

  • Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
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  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
Javier E

Life as Instant Replay, Over and Over Again - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • although I think about the Web as a real-time organism, most of the time the organism is obsessing about what happened earlier that day, or week.
  • The replay Web coexists with the real-time Web, the phrase often used to describe sites and services, like Twitter, that let people consume information as soon as it is published.
  • The rise of the replay Web is more than just a coping mechanism that helps us deal with information overload. It is shaping the way we consume, process and share information, and could potentially influence the businesses that are built on it.
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  • “Our consumption of content isn’t synchronous,” he said. “Things are interesting to a small group, a cluster of friends or on Reddit — then they die.” He continued: “Then they pick up and go massive. There are these little ripple effects all around the Web, little waves that converge in a pool and make big waves.”
  • THERE are other signs to indicate a replay aesthetic is coming to the Web. For example, the latest version of the iPhone’s mobile software will include the ability to capture video in slow motion.
  • The way we use technology could be reshaping our sense of time and urgency. Douglas Rushkoff, the author of “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” describes present shock as the stupefaction that overtakes people as they try to keep up with the never-ending onslaught of status updates, photo feeds and looping videos constantly refreshing before their eyes.
  • present shock keeps us suspended in a state of constant disarray, and causes us to prioritize the recent over the relevant and the new instead of the most important.
  • the medium of the loop — either in a GIF, a short clip posted to Vine, or Instagram photo- and video-sharing applications — has become a crucial framework for transmitting information. It mimics the way we remember — by repetition — and future tools could make use of that to understand not only how we transmit information but also how we retain it.
  • Perhaps the replay Web, by allowing us to constantly revisit and reconsider the recent past, can help us find new meaning in it.
maddieireland334

Is this the secret to living longer? - 0 views

  •  
    Time for a digital detox? Fight information overload The man who leads with no limbs Is this the cure for work stress? Ten surprising paths to success Where has the weekend gone? For that matter, what happened to last month?
Javier E

How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big social revolution that we live with
  • The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.
  • Robert K. Logan’s “The Sixth Language,” begins with the claim that cognition is not a little processing program that takes place inside your head, Robby the Robot style. It is a constant flow of information, memory, plans, and physical movements, in which as much thinking goes on out there as in here. If television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche: everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single planetary brain. Contraptions don’t change consciousness; contraptions are part of consciousness.
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  • In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.
  • “The medium does matter,” Carr has written. “As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite. It is designed to scatter our attention. . . . Knowing that the depth of our thought is tied directly to the intensity of our attentiveness, it’s hard not to conclude that as we adapt to the intellectual environment of the Net our thinking becomes shallower.”
  • when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix.
  • The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965.
  • If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.
  • What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.
  • Anyway, the crucial revolution was not of print but of paper: “During the later Middle Ages a staggering growth in the production of manuscripts, facilitated by the use of paper, accompanied a great expansion of readers outside the monastic and scholastic contexts.” For that matter, our minds were altered less by books than by index slips. Activities that seem quite twenty-first century, she shows, began when people cut and pasted from one manuscript to another; made aggregated news in compendiums; passed around précis. “Early modern finding devices” were forced into existence: lists of authorities, lists of headings.
  • The book index was the search engine of its era, and needed to be explained at length to puzzled researchers—as, for that matter, did the Hermione-like idea of “looking things up.” That uniquely evil and necessary thing the comprehensive review of many different books on a related subject, with the necessary oversimplification of their ideas that it demanded, was already around in 1500, and already being accused of missing all the points.
  • at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.
  • Blair argues that the sense of “information overload” was not the consequence of Gutenberg but already in place before printing began.
  • A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them.
  • And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.
  • Now television is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user.
  • the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”—the “seeing stone” that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.
Javier E

We Are Just Not Digging The Whole Anymore : NPR - 1 views

  • We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. Long-form reading, listening and viewing habits are giving way to browse-and-choose consumption. With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span. - Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at George Mason University We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society.
  • One Duke University student was famously quoted in a 2006 Time magazine essay telling his history professor, "We don't read whole books anymore."
  • Now there are lots of websites that present whole books and concepts in nano form
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  • nearly half of all adults — 47 percent — get some of their local news and information on mobile computing devices. We are receiving our news in kibbles and bits, sacrificing context and quality for quickness and quantity.
  • Here is the ultra-condensation of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Mr. Darcy: Nothing is good enough for me. Ms. Elizabeth Bennet: I could never marry that proud man. (They change their minds.) THE END
  • Fewer and fewer gamers are following gaming storylines all the way to completion, according to a recent blog post on the IGN Entertainment video game website.
  • "With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span." He ticks off a long list of bandied-about terms. Here's a shortened version: cognitive overload; information paralysis; techno stress; and data asphyxiation.
  • Rockmore believes that the way many people learn — or try to learn — these days is via this transporter technique. "The truth is," he says, "that modern pedagogy probably needs to address this in the sense that there is so much information out there, for free, so that obtaining it — even in bits and pieces — is not the challenge, rather integrating it into a coherent whole is. That's a new paradigm."
kushnerha

BBC - Capital - Busy: A badge of honour or a big lie? - 0 views

  • idea of the “busy trap” to the overwhelming feeling many professionals have at the end of each day and week, overload is a real issue.
  • But what if we’re looking at the issue in the wrong way? What if you could reframe your thinking, feel less busy and perhaps get more done?
  • somewhere along the way we were convinced that being ‘busy’ was good for us
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  • “We’re not busy … we’re productive,” he wrote. “And yes, there’s a difference.”
  • “Busy paints a picture of people who are either keeping themselves occupied or who don’t have the time to do other things,” Spurlock explained. “Productive describes an environment rich with goals, personal and professional achievements and wrapped in success, a place where you're actually creating something vs just doing something.”
  • “Personal productivity… is the most important one, as it centres around the time that I make to spend with my family, my friends and doing things that fulfil me as a living person,”
  • Financial productivity is an important one, as these are the projects that create consistent revenue
  • “Being busy has somehow become a badge of honor. The prevailing notion is that if you aren’t super busy, you aren’t important or hard working,”
  • busyness makes you less productive
  • “When we think of a super busy person, we think of a ringing phone, a flood of emails and a schedule that’s bursting at the seams with major projects and side-projects hitting simultaneously,” he wrote. “Such a situation inevitably leads to multi-tasking and interruptions, which are both deadly to productivity.”
  • As Socrates said: Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
  • switching what you’re doing mid-task increases the time it takes you to finish both tasks by 25%
  • people an average of 15 minutes to return to their important projects… every time they were interrupted by e-mails, phone calls, or other messages
  • “We’re so enamored with multitasking that we think we’re getting more done, even though our brains aren’t physically capable of this,”
  • most productive when we manage our schedules enough to ensure that we can focus effectively on the task at hand
  • people use busyiness to “hide from… laziness and fear of failure”
Javier E

Opinion | There Should Be More Rituals! - The New York Times - 1 views

  • So great is our hunger for rituals that when we come upon one of the few remaining ones — weddings, bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras — we tend to overload them and turn them into expensive bloated versions of themselves.
  • Between these lavish exceptions, daily life goes unstructured, a passing flow of moments. This means we don’t do transitions well
  • Rituals often mark doorway moments, when we pass from one stage of life to another. They acknowledge that these passages are not just external changes but involve internal transformation.
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  • ceremony honors what has taken place. But ritual is a sequence of actions that symbolically walk you through the inner change the new stage of life will require.
  • Rituals also comfort because they concretize spiritual experiences.
  • There should be a ritual for that moment, often around age 27 or 28, when the young adult leaves the wandering post-school phase and begins to get a sense for the shape and direction of his or her life
  • Rituals encourage you to be more intentional about life. People can understand their lives’ meaning only if they step out of their immediate moment and see what came before them and what they will leave behind when they are gone.
  • over 60 percent of Judaism’s 613 commandments involve physical ritual: lighting candles, ritual baths, etc. These deeds are a kind of language, a way of expressing things that are too deep for words.
  • naming your limitations, befriending your inner life, realigning your central focus. For example, young adults might create a life map of where they’ve been and hope to go, and present it to their peers
  • Maybe neighborhoods and towns could come together to make town compacts. They would vow to be a community together and lay out the specific projects
  • It could be an occasion to tell a new version of the town story; a community is a group of people who share a common story
  • Most of all, it would be an occasion for people to make promises toward one another — specific ways they are going to use their gifts to solve the common challenge
  • we’ve shed old rituals without coming up with new ones. We’ve unwittingly robbed ourselves of a social architecture that marks and defines life’s phases
  • Why do we willingly throw away chances to throw fun parties about important things?
pier-paolo

How ADHD Affects Working Memory | HealthyPlace - 0 views

  • Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects working memory as well as short- and long-term memory
  • People with ADHD struggle with "working memory," a term that used to be interchangeable with "short-term memory."
  • Long-term memory is essentially a storage bank of information that exists thanks to short-term and working memory.
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  • It makes it hard to follow directions and instructions because they require holding multiple steps in mind. It can lead to losing important items and missing deadlines
  • We have a hard time prioritizing, and having a “good” memory involves paying attention to what is important. One study required children to remember specific words from a list. These were the “important” or priority words. Those with ADHD remembered the same number of words as those without the condition, but they were less likely to recall the important words.1
  • working memory is the ability to manipulate that information
  • People with ADHD sometimes interrupt others because they are afraid of forgetting what they want to say
  • Attention and memory are connected.
  • ADHD makes it hard to control one’s attention. Experts note that having problems with “source discrimination3" and “selective attention” lead to being “overwhelmed by unimportant stimuli.4"
  • In other words, we experience an information overload and do not know what to remember. It goes back to the test with the ADHD children who recalled the same number of words as their peers but not the “right” words.
  • On average, it was low, but when looked at individually, it showed that each ADHD child alternately processed problems quickly and slowly, though often as accurately as the other children.5
mshilling1

Why we believe fake news - BBC Future - 0 views

  • Less commonplace is the acknowledgement that human judgements also rely upon secondary information that doesn’t come from any external source – and that offers one of the most powerful tools we possess for dealing with the deluge itself. This source is social information. Or, in other words: what we think other people are thinking.
  • Your senses inform you that other people are moving frantically. But it’s the social interpretation you put on this information that tells you what you most need to know: these people believe that something bad is happening, and this means you should probably be trying to escape too.
  • Assuming they have no first-hand knowledge of the claim, it’s theoretically possible for them to look it up elsewhere – a process of laborious verification that involves trawling through countless claims and counter-claims. They also, however, possess a far simpler method of evaluation, which is to ask what other people seem to think.
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  • As Hendricks and Hansen put it, “when you don’t possess sufficient information to solve a given problem, or if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof”
  • When we either know very little about something, or the information surrounding it is overwhelming, it makes excellent sense to look to others’ apparent beliefs as an indication of what is going on. In fact, this is often the most reasonable response, so long as we have good reason to believe that others have access to accurate information; and that what they seem to think and what they actually believe are the same.
  • Networks where members are, for example, randomly exposed to a range of views are less likely to experience cascades of unchallenged belief
  • And the more we understand the chain of events that led someone towards a particular perspective, the more we understand what it might mean to arrive at other views – or, equally importantly, to sow the seeds of sceptical engagement.
huffem4

Accommodating Children's Anxiety Can Do More Harm Than Good | Psychology Today - 1 views

  • Parents face great challenges raising kids in our increasingly complex, frightening and uncertain world. The CDC reports that anxiety is on the rise among children, affecting 7.1 percent of children 6 to 17 years of age, about 4.4 million U.S. kids. The majority are untreated.
  • Children face myriad challenges—bullying, developmental trauma, information overload, global political upheavals and conflict, climate change, high rates of family breakup, and so on.
  • Learning to ride out anxiety and negotiate firm-but-flexible boundaries is a language much harder to learn in adulthood.
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  • Parental consistency can help protect children from emotional problems. Children can and do become caught in the middle between parents who aren’t getting along. Such "triangulation" distracts children from addressing their own needs. Compassion buffers empathy, allowing parents to tolerate their children's distress without getting overwhelmed, numbing out, or becoming enraged. Parents are encouraged to engage their curiosity when they feel the urge to accommodate or try to overpower children.
  • Perception was important for mothers. Mothers who reported that their children showed more severe symptoms were more likely to use accommodation, but maternal accommodation was unrelated to the mothers' own reported distress and emotional state. It may be that mothers wish to spare their children anticipated distress, and that this desire is different from overall distress. Including measures of empathy and parental distress due specifically to child's distress could tease this apart in future studies.
  • Accommodation increases anxiety because youngsters never have a chance to fail and persist. This can stunt self-efficacy, preventing “fear extinction” and “habituation” to anxiety-provoking situations. It's a vicious cycle, increasing the chance of giving up too easily with future challenges, though innate resilience, related to child temperament, can mitigate the effects of problematic environmental factors.
  • Higher child distress and emotional dysregulation, as measured by parents, was associated with increased parental accommodation. Parental accommodation was not correlated with child-reported distress and emotional dysregulation.
  • maternal accommodation was correlated with child anxiety and externalizing behaviors (in which emotions are directed outward, typically in aggressive or destructive ways, rather than processed in healthy ways or bottled up)
  • Accommodation fixes problems short-term—for instance when a parent "gives in" to a child's tantrums to get them to stop screaming, or bribes a child to do something rather than building intrinsic motivation with a longer-term process of rewarding effort and building an inner sense of confidence
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