The internet: is it changing the way we think? | Technology | The Observer Every 50 years or so, American magazine the Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the world wide web. Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". "Over the past few years," Carr wrote, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. The title of the essay is misleading, because Carr's target was not really the world's leading search engine, but the impact that ubiquitous, always-on networking is having on our cognitive processes.
Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational | Wired Science To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. “Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study. “It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. Psychologists say human reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought: one that’s systematic, analytical and cognition-intensive, and another that’s fast, unconscious and emotionally charged. 'Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language?' Click to Open Overlay Gallery Go Back to Top.
Seeking Academic Edge, Teenagers Abuse Stimulants The boy exhaled. Before opening the car door, he recalled recently, he twisted open a capsule of orange powder and arranged it in a neat line on the armrest. He leaned over, closed one nostril and snorted it. Throughout the parking lot, he said, eight of his friends did the same thing. The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an prescribed for that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. “Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said. At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. Observed Gary Boggs, a special agent for the , “We’re seeing it all across the United States.” Paul L. Keeping Everyone Happy
The Benefits of Daydreaming A new study suggests that a daydreaming is an indicator of a well-equipped brain Does your mind wander? During a class or meeting, do you find yourself staring out the window and thinking about what you’ll do tomorrow or next week? As a child, were you constantly reminded by teachers to stop daydreaming? Well, psychological research is beginning to reveal that daydreaming is a strong indicator of an active and well-equipped brain. A new study, published in Psychological Science by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, suggests that a wandering mind correlates with higher degrees of what is referred to as working memory. For example, imagine that, when leaving a friend ‘s house, you promise to call when you get home safely. In the study, the researchers sought to examine the relationship between people’s working memory capacity and their tendency to daydream. Why might this be the case?
Teens Taking ADHD Drugs to Get Good Grades: How Big a Problem Is It? There’s an epidemic afoot in the country’s selective high schools: ambitious students under pressure to succeed are increasingly abusing stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall, which they consider as essential as SAT tutors for getting into an Ivy League college. At least that’s the case according to a most-emailed front page story in Sunday’s New York Times. But the data on stimulant use from national surveys tells a very different story. The Times‘ Alan Schwarz writes: At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. The story contends that an estimated 15% to 40% of students at high-achieving high schools use prescription stimulants to get ahead; these drugs, designed to ease symptoms of ADHD, can sharpen focus and enhance performance in people without the disorder.
Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions Meanwhile, a similar story was unfolding oceans away. During World War II, under constant threat of bombings, the British had a great need to distinguish incoming aircraft quickly and accurately. Which aircraft were British planes coming home and which were German planes coming to bomb? Several airplane enthusiasts had proved to be excellent “spotters,” so the military eagerly employed their services. These spotters were so valuable that the government quickly tried to enlist more spotters—but they turned out to be rare and difficult to find. It was a grim attempt. With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. The Knowledge GapThere can be a large gap between knowledge and awareness. Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. Of course, it’s not just sexers and spotters and amnesiacs who enjoy unconscious learning.
Prozac Campus: the Next Generation - The Chronicle Review By Katherine Sharpe In an accelerated culture, 15 years is a long time. And last spring, when a stiff, cream-colored envelope arrived in the mail to announce preparations for my 10th college reunion, I realized that it had been nearly that long since my experience with antidepressants began. When the envelope came, I was at work on a book about my generation's relationship to psychiatric drugs. The book opened with a memory from the fall of 1997, when I was a dumped, homesick, anxious, and tearful freshman. I sought guidance in my school's health and counseling center, where I was quickly treated to a remedy that seemed exotic—a diagnosis of depression and a prescription for a pill known as an SSRI, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. For those of us who were teenagers in the 1990s, this feeling of surprise was fundamental to our experience of psychiatric drugs. But people born in the late 80s and early 90s were raised in a very different world. Well, you might ask, so what?
Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped. McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago. Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date. Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. "This is real," he says. Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. "We are trying to find out, but we haven't hit 'bingo' yet," says McGaugh. His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong -- or at least incomplete. But she did. "Do you know where he died?"