Saved by Jonathan Simcoe
The Ability to Concentrate Is Increasing?!
“If you check e-mail while you talk to someone you lose forty IQ points,” he says. “People can’t multitask. It’s not possible. I think attention is a big, big issue. People are addicted to their Crackberries. You’ve got to make the systems so that they help people pay attention to the world in front of them.”
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
Another recent study shows that when students are allowed to use their smartphones in class, their performance suffers, even months later, when they are tested on the specific content of that day’s class.27 For optimal learning, the brain must avoid any distraction.
Stanislas Dehaene • How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now
[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our “n... See more
Nicholas Carr • The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
But there’s one counterargument to that. You might ask: What if there are countervailing trends, happening at the same time, which make our attention better?
Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
The study found that “technological distraction”—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be bette
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